by Elizabeth

Read the title of this post out loud 10 times.  :)  It's time for a 2-part Shiny Orb update to remind us where we've come from and discuss where we're going.  This week, I want to touch upon social shopping and community on Shiny Orb.

Though it's been less than 2 months since publicly launching the Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms, we've received a fair bit of attention from prominent tech journals for this concept, including the MIT Entrepreneurship Review and Social Commerce Today.  Just last week, I wrote a guest article on GigaOm explaining that I see e-commerce transforming into a more social experience.  The next wave of shopping sites will be hybrids between stores and communities.  

On Shiny Orb, the Dressing Room feature is just the first step to socializing the wedding apparel shopping experience and building a community.  Last week, we added Love It buttons and Facebook Connect features.  In the next few months, Jennifer and I will be refining and adding social features on Shiny Orb to build community and make shopping social and fun.  We strongly believe that wedding apparel shopping is inherently a social experience.  It's necessary to move that online, and we would love to hear your experience with our Shiny Orb Dressing Room (for a $20 Amazon gift card) and thoughts on this topic.  Drop me a line at elizabeth@shinyorb.com.

By Elizabeth

Jennifer and I are pleased to announce that Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms are now open to all. We're extremely appreciative of the awesome help we've received from our beta testers. They've provided us with ample feedback and support.  So after intensely developing, testing, and iterating side by side with these brides, we are confident Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms is a feature brides and their bridal parties are going to enjoy.

Honestly, we thought up Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms out of frustration. It was just so hard to shop together online for bridesmaid dresses for Elizabeth's wedding. So, we decided to make things right for Jennifer's wedding and built Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms. We knew there were so many more modern brides in the same boat with their web savvy bridal parties scattered about. As more and more women move around the world to pursue their dreams, passions, and careers, we know this is an ever-increasing trend. That's why at Shiny Orb, our goal is to create an enjoyable social shopping experience for bridesmaid dresses and wedding apparel.

Create your own Shiny Orb Dressing Room today and let us know what you think!

by Jennifer

1/31/2010 Update: Per user feedback, we've decided to temporarily take down the social features on Shiny Orb.  We're in the process of iterating them to provide you with the best user experience possible.

                   

Click here to download:

Co-shopping_for_bridesmaid_dre.zip (433 KB)

The driving force for creating Shiny Orb was a desire to provide an easy avenue for a bridal party to select bridesmaid dresses together while on different computers. To that end, we made it a priority on Shiny Orb to allow you to browse thousands of inexpensive bridesmaid dresses with your friends in real-time. We call this kind of shopping co-shopping. With our co-shopping tool developed by Parrotview, Inc., we wanted to help you save time, save money, and most of all, have fun while shopping. Remember what it's like to be social and shop with your friends at the mall? We're bringing that to you.

Let's get you started. Here's how it works.

1. On shinyorb.com, click the "shop with friends" button to start co-shopping.
2. You'll be taken to a new webpage, where the co-shopping tool will load in the bottom right corner of the page. To get started, log into your AOL, MSN, Google, or Yahoo chat account. 
3. Your buddy list will appear. Invite online friends to co-shop by selecting the checkboxes next to their usernames. 
4. Your selected friends will receive IM invitations in their respective chat accounts asking to join you to co-shop bridesmaid dresses.  
5. Once they click on the link in the IM invitation, they will be taken to the same webpage as you, and co-shopping begins. Each person in the co-shopping session has a small "window" at the bottom right corner of the webpage that shows what he/she is viewing in real time. There is also a chat window that allows the group to chat together.
6. Now, move to any bridesmaid dress webpage. The small "window" labeled with your username will have a picture of the dress you're currently viewing.
7. Your friend(s) in your co-shopping session will also see the dress you're viewing on his/her screen in the small "window" labeled with your username.  
8. Likewise, if your friend(s) goes to a different bridesmaid dress webpage, you'll also be able to see what he/she is viewing in real-time. So while you're both independently browsing bridesmaid dresses, you can see what everyone else in the co-shopping group is viewing in real-time and chat together.  
9. If you see a bridesmaid dress you like in your friend's small "window" and want to get a better look, you can click on his/her small window and be taken to the same bridesmaid dress webpage.
10. It's easy and fun to shop for bridesmaid dresses with friends on Shiny Orb.  No downloads, no new accounts, no hassle. Try it today!