Several years back, NextStage worked with a GenY etailer and made a suggestion that was revolutionary at the time: create a social shopping cart.
A social shopping cart?
People will spend more money when they are together than when they are shopping alone. Our suggestion was to create directed chatrooms where visitor A could open chat sessions with online friends, drawing them into the shopping experience. The client could brand the chat session and use it as an advertising vector. Visitor A originally "owned" the session, and visitors invited to the chat session could only respond to what Visitor A was considering. Later, the chat session became more open so that it more closely emulated a physical shopping experience, including the ability to invite a sales associate to take part, to create multiple shopping charts for a single chat session, etc.
Sales skyrocketed. This same metaphor has been successfully extended into virtual worlds such as Second Life. This methodology also works for both genders (I was shocked at its success rate among males, to be honest).
Summary
There is more to this research and how we've been applying it around the globe than there is room to describe here. We've seen these concepts successfully applied in North and South America, Europe, Australia, China and Japan. Each socio-cultural demographic makes use of different elements -- what are called ability-distribution, differential-dropout and participation-rate hypotheses. The rules supplied above are, again, demonstrations of the theory and are intended to create social networks -- gatherings of individuals on a single site, be it a traditional "social site" or ecommerce site. Use the theory to determine applications wisely.
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