I forget where I first read about it, but Stanford recently hosted the first Virtual Good Summit. My initial reaction to this news went something like “How farcical yet fascinating!”
The Virtual Goods Summit is a one day conference focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. Once restricted to the world of online gaming, virtual goods and currencies are beginning to influence the development of social networks, community sites, and many other new and exciting markets.
Why not? I haven’t actually bought stuff in Facebook or World of Warcraft but it’s probably only a matter of time. After all, Capulet regularly buys bits from services like Blinksale, Campaign Monitor and Harvest. The Facebook gift flower or ninja is as much a service as online time tracking, isn’t it?
The Chinese farmers value their time much less than American players. This isn’t a moral statement, it’s just one of economic fact. While it might take both players 60 hours to progress a character up to level 40, the opportunity cost for the American player could be $900 (60 hours * $15/hr,) whereas the opportunity cost for the Chinese player could be $30 (60 hours * $.50/hr). The American player is willing to pay up to $900 for a level 40 character, creating profit opportunities for the Chinese player.
Joey Seiler took remarkably legible notes from a bunch of the sessions, which I’ve enjoyed reading. The best way to find them all is probably via this Google search.
This project has been in the works for a while, and we had lots of fun doing it, so I’m pleased to talk about it.
Capulet devised a series of videos for Elastic Path, a Vancouver software company that makes an eCommerce platform (and employs the illustrious Dave Olson).
They ask the question “what if all shopping was like shopping online?” They poke fun at online shopping frustrations–lousy search engines, irritating cross-selling and so on–by recasting them in the real world. Here’s an example:
You can check them out by visiting this page on Elastic Path’s blog. We’ve done our best to make ecommerce funny (a tall order, I think). There’s a nifty jingle, and the second video prominently features a turnip.
We shot them all in a day, casting an outgoing VP from Elastic Path and Mercedes, an actor friend of ours. I have some minor roles as a search engine and a home page.
We’ve released three of the videos thus far, and there’s some more to come. We’ll keep releasing them until we run out of the funny, which I’m thinking will happen around video #7.
The Inevitable Contest
We’ve got a bunch of these videos, and we want people to watch them all. So, we’re running the inevitable contest. We’re giving away two US $100 Amazon gift certificates. There are two ways to enter to win the draw:
“Buy Now” may be a stronger call to action than “Add to Cart”, but may subtly suggest the user is finished shopping or is making a commitment to purchase without time to review the order. The beauty of “Add to Cart” is that it is non-committal and assumes the user is still looking around.
As I observed on the associated Digg page, it’s interesting that so many of the buttons refer to shopping carts, and so few refer to baskets. After all, I’d imagine most online transactions are for one to three items that would fit in a basket. Plus, of course, people who shop with baskets are cool urbanites, while shopping carts suggest suburban normality. I know why they went with ’shopping cart’–it’s a more common metaphor–but it’s still noteworthy.
Two other notes: I pity the poor bastard who laid that page out. And for the uninitiated, this post’s title refers to a venerable meme.
