For MultichannelMerchant (@mcmerchant), George Eberstadt (@georgeeberstadt), founder of social commerce company TurnTo (@TurnTo), writes that “Amazon now offers true social Q&A on most of their product pages.” This is one more step Amazon is taking to try to capture the one retail element online shopping misses: in-store conversational engagement with product experts.
They have built a powerful engine for ensuring that questions reliably get answered by past buyers....
The key to making social Q&A work for eCommerce is speed, and Amazon has done all the right things to make their model fast:
* The question appears immediately on the page when you submit. In the age of Facebook, this is what people expect from a social experience. Not a message that says “We’ll alert you if we decide to accept your question. It may take hours or days...”
* The question is immediately emailed to a large selection of people who actually bought the product.
* The answers get sent immediately back to the asker. That provides fast reminders about the purchase the shopper was considering – while the shopper is still in the buying moment – and a smooth path back to the product detail page complete it. And the answers appear immediately on the site for future shoppers to use and for the asker to view.
* Askers can easily submit follow-up questions, or even just send thanks, back to the answerers. That, too, is email enabled, so that it’s easy to have rapid, back-and-forth dialog about products that one knows about the other needs to learn about.
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