Ideas

What do you mean by
will assist in qualifying customers for an item in order to make online?
I have no clue.
I don't know how you're going to make money eitehr
Tommy

Am skeptical myself..
Do you work with INNOgenius or its your hatched idea and actually owns it now?
http://www.innogenius.com/innogenius/

Anyway...the idea is good and definitely be needed specially for small business and people as well.

Hope this one would not be stamped as SPAM -stares-

eZeitgeist, yes the seemingly unrelated "INNOgenius" portion of the name is pretty confusing to me. So Leonna this is an idea you've posted to both sites?

It sounds like a service offered to clients by an online merchant, with the merchant paying IVSS to supply the communication infrastructure between customer and... the merchant's own employees. ("Companies pay their employees to learn, why not get paid for teaching or informing your customers.")

So in the end it sounds like a communications feature a merchant might add to their site, but I don't see how this goes beyond a live webcam feed to a salesperson. Aside from the ability to select the race of the person you're talking to.

I don't think there is any un-met demand for customer-salesperson communication tools for online merchants.

Um...Future SHop had a thing like this already.
They actually pulled it as people found it so annoying and offensive.

I thought it was kind of funny, myself.

Look up the term "expert system". These things exist, so it would be a question of coming up with a better algorithm than anyone else and then marketing it well - do you think you can do that?

Thank you all for your comments.

Below are my answer to you'll questions.

simransuper@yahoo.com

bkartincubator@yahoo.com

*********

Vanhees: There are certain questions as a sale person you ask to qualify a person for a sale to actually know what that customer is looking for and what would be the best item for that customer.

you would make money by charging the retailer a commission on all sale that the customer uses the I.V.S.S for.

eEeitgeist: INNOgenius is my company, a INNOvative consulting Firm which I hope to start when I graduate. So all my ideas are name after my company INNOgenius or as INNO.

GordonMcDowell: This is my Idea, INNOgenius is my company name. When people shop online sometime they are confused and don't know what model or brand to buy so why not has a sales assistant assist you when you shop online. To help make your purchase easier and to educate you on the products.

Blue: When the customer go to the site they have a choses whether they want a Virtual sales shopper to assist them or not.

Philiph: I will look that up, but from my research there's is nothing out there like this. There are half body avatar that speaks on some website main page but they don't assist the consumer etc...

Thank you
Leonna

Disregard the e-mail above, in my comment copy and paste error.

noted on the wrong post...lolz

I like the idea!

Benefits, users want benefits not features.

Dunno.
is there anybody out here who would like such an assistant? I'm honestly interested in the persons who are. To now the reasons.
Tommy

One problem I have with people "helping" me shop is that they are usually trying to push some item that they get a higher commission for instead of what I actually want or need.

Go into Radio Shack sometime and act confused and wander around asking what you need to buy. I bet money you will be offered a cell phone and some batteries.....

I could certainly use this sometimes. For instance, I will soon need a new battery for my powerbook. There are many different sources out there. I could use some advice on what the best on to purchase might be - based on how I use my computer. Although I normally fully research my purchases, I still like to get the advice of several people before I buy.

So, what is the plan? I don't understand.

is this done by people? or by a computer program?

I've seen this type of consultant offered as live chat sessions on shopping sites. In general, they have three big problems.

1. they're implemented as a "pull" where the user has to ask for help. In this case, the people who really need help (someone who doesn't know that HDs have sizes) don't know to ask, don't find the link or manage to avoid the system some other way. Many people who make these mistakes in shopping do so because they don't even realize they don't know what they need to know to choose, so they don't ask for help.

2. they're implemented as a "push" so the consultant will interrupt you and ask if you need help. This is incredibly invasive from a usability standpoint. It's bad enough in a real store when the salesman won't leave you alone, but that kind of pestering breaks the convention of websites and annoys users. While it might manage to solicit the occasionally useful question from the people described above, it annoys many many more and ultimately hurts business.

3. the consultants don't have the necessary expertise. Given point #1 above that the people with simple questions won't know to ask, your real audience is power users. I've used this kind of feature maybe six times on websites and every time (not once, not most, but EVERY TIME) the chat consultant was unable to answer my question because it was a very specific technical issue about the product and they didn't have a convenient way to escalate to someone qualified to comment on more than size and color. This is mostly an economic constraint; you can't afford to staff your service with really qualified people.

None of these mean the idea is fundamentally bad. It just means you need to really plan both the usability and the technical backend to make the service useful.