ShoppingGarden - improving the customer experience with on-line catalogues

Shopping on-line can be frustrating. This stems from the failure of current on-line shopping sites to create a more pleasurable 'browsing' shopping experience. Asking shoppers to use text-based search, or requiring them to find the right category and subcategory for the item they want, removes the possibility of browsing and impulse purchases. People who do not understand, or concur with, the categories into which the on-line shop is organised will often fail to find an item to buy even when they have a good idea of what they are after in advance. This is further compounded when the shopper does not have a clear idea ahead of time, but wishes to move towards a decision to purchase based on experience of what the shop has to offer. ShoppingGarden shows shoppers random items from the shop's catalogue and allows the shopper to 'reward' or 'punish' the items they are shown. On the basis of these interactions the random presentation of items is biased so that the shopper is shown more of what they like as time goes by. This mode of navigation returns the 'browsing' to the shopping experience. The shopper helps 'steer' the browsing process without recourse to explicit search strings or categories.