Following Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two of the busiest shopping days of the year, today is Giving Tuesday. The idea of Giving Tuesday is for consumers to calm down from their weekend’s frenzy of buying and to give more considered gifts, including supporting charities.
eBay have opened the ultimate ‘do good, feel good’ shop (93 Mortimer Street, London) to encourage consumers to give more thoughtfully this Christmas. If you can’t get to London you can also browse online at eBay.co.uk/giving.
Research carried out by eBay and Lightwave discovered that gift shopping is remarkably stressful with the average shopper burnt out (or hitting what eBay are terming ‘the wall of disenchantment’) after 32 minutes. eBay’s ‘do good, feel good’ shop aims to gather together 150 gift ideas, from both large and small eBay sellers, all of which come with a donation to charity.
At the shop in Mortimer Street you can find out which products you’re emotionally drawn to by visiting one of the shopping booths. A selection of 12 gifts will scroll on the screen in front of you and you’re encouraged to think of loved ones you’ll be buying for this Christmas. In partnership with Lightwave, cutting edge facial coding and ambient biometric sensors incorporated within the space will analyse reactions to identify and records which products provoke the strongest feelings of giving. You can flick through the products for as long as you like and then a report will be emailed to you detailing the products you emotionally connected with.
What we like about this activity is that it’s gathering attention in the press and will be driving traffic to eBay. While I was at Mortimer Street this morning, Mail Online were filming, Reuters were next in line and a load more publications were exploring the technology and interviewing eBay. This is good exposure for eBay, has a lighter nicer message after the stress of Black Friday and if it attracts buyers to eBay that has to be a good thing.
I took the chance to talk to eBay’s Retail Director Rhian Bartlett to tell us more:
7 Responses
ebay, the ultimate “cash in, make others feel sick” shop.
By now who isn’t aware of ebay? The issue for ebay is that in recent years it has focussed on selling the same stuff that can be purchased elsewhere and alienated those smaller sellers who formerly used paypal credits to buy on ebay. Fact is BIG sellers don’t buy on ebay and new buyers don’t want to deposit money in a paypal account to buy so use Amazon or others instead. ebay cannot afford to open up the online payment process to others else their whole money back culture will go awol so they are stuck with the handicap of only offering Paypal. This is now a major obstacle for sales growth.
So now ebay are into using the cameras in smart phones to gauge buyer reactions to products..doubtless there will be a metric to penalise Sellers if thier products don’t rate highly in the faceometer.
Electronic Brother After You….