Thursday 5 September 2013

The future of shopping

The future of shopping


eBay Guarantee logoCan you imagine the improvements that we have attained so far in terms of shopping? Twenty years before, for buying anything we have to be going from shop to shop and we were getting the products. For Instance, if one wants to get a clothing items, shoes, bags, utensils, groceries and pastries they have to be getting to different shops for getting each item listed above. Situations changed ten years from then. Shopping malls and Hypermarkets started sprouting up all parts of the cities and we had the one stop shops. We were able to get all the listed items in a single place with much more convenience. But over the past few years, the shopping has reached the next generation in our country. Online shopping is gaining much attention and we could get almost anything delivered to our doorstep at our convenience. Though many fear shopping online, the guarantee offered by the online shopping giants are much more appealing than the conventional stores. These online shopping sites even recommend the items to us based on our previous orders! We can’t deny the fact that we are saving up a lot of money because of these online shops. We can visit all the shops, read the description, compare the prices between different shops and choose the one that pleases us the most. So if we look at the changes over the past few decades in shopping, it makes us wonder what will be the next.


Before we start wondering about the future, let us see a feature that is in present and it is amazing! I am talking about the eBay Check extension for Google Chrome. It just makes your online purchase more convenient and simple. Once you add this extension, it will monitor your online activity and continuously looks for the items that you are searching in internet. If you are looking at an item in any online shopping site or even if you are reading about it in a blog or Wikipedia, the eBay Check extension searches about that item in eBay,in and provides you the best price options through a drop-down list. An icon is added for this extension to the right of the omnibox using which you can search the eBay.in directly. I like Chrome, but I am a Firefox fan. So I expect a Firefox add-on very soon. 

So what can we expect in the future? I guess artificial intelligence will come into play. I don’t think we will be using the conventional keyboard or any kind of typing in next two decades. I would love a tool / app that suggests me the item that I need just by looking at me. I believe that face is index of mind and this holds true until we act and change our facial expression willingly. And we won’t be lying to our computers or phones and when we are using them we will let out the true feeling in our face; and for input if we are speaking to the devices, they should be able to figure out the mood of ours. If the device combine the data that it receives from camera that looks at our face and mic that hears our voice, it should be able to figure our mood to a certain extent. So the shopping app should be able to suggest the items depending upon our mentality. For example, I've heard that girls shop for shoes when they feel blue. So the app should recognize her mood and suggest the shoes for her according to her taste. For me, I change the genre of music that I’m listening depending on my mood. So I would be happy if the app purchases and downloads the music depending upon my mood and plays it for me. Right now I guess I want to listen to Blue grass, but I guess I have to wait for a long time to get such an app. But we hope to get such apps by 2030.

Related links:
The Official eBay India Google Chrome Extension: http://deals.ebay.in/chrome/




This post is especially written for "The future of shopping" contest conducted by eBay.in and IndiBlogger.


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