New York — For tele-viewers who do not wish to leave the comfort of their home, but still want to do shopping at 4 a.m., eBay, the online auction behemoth has the solution, and it is called “Couch Commerce.” International online auction site eBay, early this week announced that it is unveiling a new feature for its mobile applications today to help boost purchases from customers while they are on the couch watching TV.
eBay’s iPad app that will allow US consumers to browse products listed on eBay related to the TV shows and movies that they are watching — as the company pushes into the TV commerce space, thereby tapping into the so called ‘Couch Commerce’ market, Bloomberg News reported.
eBay unveils new era for shoppers as users logging in to the company’s iPad app will see a new “watch with eBay”. To activate the app, consumers will have to enter their zip code, cable provider and channel they are watching and confirm that the scheduled program is on.
Depending on your viewing experience, the app will then use show and event-specific keyword searches to provide relevant merchandise for the consumer watching the programming from the 200 million listings available on its site. (The company has created an amusing online video, “Feldman Discovers ‘Watch with eBay’,” explaining the whole process.
For example, if you see one of the characters on Supernatural referencing a monster database on his Samsung Galaxy tablet, eBay will pull up listings for all Samsung tablets as well as competitors.
As a matter of fact, eBay is striving to use its role as the largest online marketplace, with 200 million listings and 58 million mobile users, to make products seen on-screen available to consumers, but it will need to rely on cooperation from studios and networks to make the initiative a broader success, it said.
The essence of this unique feature, which appears as a tab on eBay’s app syncs with the shows people are watching on television to offer products that have the same appeal as the television programming they are watching (Justin Bieber on Rachael Ray, for instance).
Buoyed with loads of data (including some from its PayPal subsidiary), the online marketplace is anticipating a major shift in the way people will do their holiday shopping over the Thanksgiving weekend. As soon as the meal is done, consumers will head to their couches to shop with their smartphones and tablets as they digest their big meals.
“We know it is going to be an enormous holiday for mobile,” company representative Amanda Coffee tells Marketing Daily. eBay is hoping it will see $5 billion in mobile commerce in 2011, while PayPal will see more than $3.5 billion in mobile volume. “’Couch Commerce’ is all about not rushing to the mall.”
For people who only randomly watch television during the day, this could be a great way to do holiday shopping without having to struggle with the crowds at major retail chains. As for eBay, this new feature has plenty of potential to boost sales.
“eBay is uniquely positioned for television commerce,” Coffee says. “We are basically the only place where, if you see something on televisions, we are going to have it.”
To popularize this unique feature, eBay is setting up “Happy Holiday Hotspots” in New York City and San Francisco. The hot spots will feature trucks that deliver free food, free WiFi and free app downloads so consumers can experience eBay’s marketplace first-hand. “We are trying to get people used to the idea that they do not have to be in the mall to shop,” Coffee says of the two events.
While plenty of people are on a mobile device while watching television, many of them are not always in the shopping mood. The latest addition to the eBay app hopes to tap into this ‘couch commerce’ trend by synchronizing product recommendations based on what the user is watching on TV.
However, the company mentioned that it plans to make alliance with networks, cable providers and others to help identify those product placement spots that usually go unheeded within movies and TV shows.
Moreover, this latest update to the app appears just in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the unofficial starts to the holiday retail season that follow Thanksgiving in the USA, and is designed to tap into the rising trend of ‘couch commerce’ — a somewhat new term referring to the act of shopping online from the sofa using a mobile device often while watching TV.
The updated eBay iPad app can be downloaded at: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ebay-for-ipad/id364203371?mt=8.
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