Collaborative gift registry in multi-channel retail commerce

Today's Internet-era shoppers expect product information, promotions, order entries, and services fully integrated across customer touch points and sales channels. A multi-channel strategy by retailers allows shoppers to leverage different channels, such as Web, in-store and catalog/call center, for superior shopping experiences and ultimately increased store sales. This paper takes a further step in answering shoppers' needs for collaboration/coordination amongst shoppers in a multi-channel shopping environment. There are commerce paradigms beyond the basic "shop at the Web" and "pickup at a store", where people need to interact with one another, while each is working with a different channel and in different stores. In this paper, we choose multi-channel gift registry as such a commerce paradigm, and use gift list creation, management and shopping as case study processes to illustrate issues of collaborative shopping in a multi-channel environment. The architecture of an actual implementation is also described for discussions.