ASOS, IE8 and Ecommerce

My Retail Week email alerts have notified me of a new tool ASOS.com have created which allows customers to interact with the site without having to be on the actual ASOS website. It's new because it uses functionality which lives within Internet Explorer 8 - Microsoft's latest web browser - which comes as standard with Windows 7.

Here is the description of the ASOS app which i have taken from Retail Week:

Asos enterprise architect Simon Hamblin explained that customers who upgrade to IE8 will be able to subscribe to a "web slice" on its product pages. This function adds that product page to the customer's favourites bar in IE8 so they can keep track of it.

When new information becomes available on the page, for instance if the price of a product changes, the web slice becomes highlighted on the favourites bar. When consumers click on the web slice, it will then preview relevant information. Clicking on the preview takes the customer directly to the site.

Note the mention of "web slices" - i think this is going to be a big word for online retailers in the coming year. Think of these as an a ingenious combination of RSS feed, gadget, reminder/notification emails and a Page Watch function.

Here’s how it works – you can mark out any part of your page using special names of CSS style classes (yes it’s that easy). IE8 recognises and highlights these (in green) when your cursor passes over them.

If you click on the green slice button, it then adds the slice to your menu bar, like this:



This will allow ASOS customers to keep track if a price changes, or it comes into stock etc without actually having to be on the site. The technology within IE8 monitors that page and alerts you every time that slice is updated – you just click the menu to take a quick look at just the slice you were interested in.

Overall, this has the potential to vastly increase the opportunities for making a site sticky, unlike RSS you can brand the slice as strongly as you want and unlike gadgets can be deployed from any website and viewed anywhere (not just on a host site).

The possibilities are endless:

• Push stock levels for items you want to buy directly to the browser
• Slice a competition entry, so your slice tells you when/if you’ve won.
• Push the latest offers available from a client site directly to the browser
• Push which of a users friends are on/offline in a social site
• Push breaking news (or even video)

The crucial thing to remember with web slices is that in a lot of ways, slices occupy a lot of the same ground as gadgets (but as far less technically challenging to set up since they are essentially just ordinary web pages) . And remember – in a few months a *lot* more people will be using IE8 than have ever used iGoogle, or added a Facebook application or any other gadget host: slices have the potential to be huge…

Finlay