E-commerce Insights: The Online Retail 2.0 Ideas Tour

The earliest drag-and-drop shopping demo I found is on Script.aculo.us, a JavaScript library. Web developers use libraries and frameworks to simplify Ajax programming. Besides Script.aculo.us, popular libraries and frameworks include Prototype, MochiKit, the Yahoo! UI Library and the Google Web Toolkit. Your programmers can use these established code bases to add rich, interactive effects to your site easily, and at no cost.

Easy Interface

Next up, Shopify.com. This platform offers a solid e-commerce platform with rich Ajax functionality as a hosted application. Pricing is 2 percent or 3 percent of monthly sales, depending on volume — no setup fees, no fixed costs, no servers to buy, no collocation fees, no database administrators and no programmers.

The Shopify interface is easy for shoppers and merchants, and the visual design is highly customizable. Check out the gallery of Shopify sites and you’ll find they look original, not like canned templates.

Large online retailers might turn their noses up at Shopify and similar sites as entry level options. At scale, major retailers need cheaper and more flexible solutions. But such platforms offer a cheap and fast way to test ideas for new brands, products and sites.

Here’s the low-risk, five-step recipe.
• Buy a good, permanent domain name—only $15 per year at Dotster.
• Hang a Shopify site off of it (zero fixed cost).
• Populate the new site with your great, new product ideas.
• Promote the new site.
• If the low-budget test site works, upgrade the underlying e-commerce platform to a custom site, if needed.

This approach offers catalogers a quick and inexpensive way to test new retail concepts online.

Rich, Visual Interaction

We finish our tour at Allurent.com. This new e-commerce platform offers a rich interactive experience. Users surf merchandise visually rather than reading and clicking text links. Product details pop up over layouts. Cart and checkout screens glide in and out of the frame as needed. Checkout is smooth. Assigning products to ship-to addresses is handled by drag-and-drop.