Brands direct to the customer - Alice.com
Alice.com is a shopping site with a difference. Not only does the site allow consumer packaged goods companies to sell products directly to the customer it provides a new shopping experience aimed at making the task of keeping up to date with your household good shopping a whole lot easier.
Users must create a free account to use the site
The site utilizes many features to create an experience that goes above and beyond other online and offline experiences. By creating a free online account users can keep track of their budget, utilize money saving coupons, set reminders to make sure they never run out of their household items and save their commonly used items to a personailised ’shelf’.
Users are provided with many options when adding items to their shelf
Your very own ’shelf’
By adding their favorite items to their ’shelf’ a user can purchase items simply by dragging and dropping what they need into their shopping basket. This metaphor creates an easy to understand mental map as users mimic the real life interaction.
The 'shelf' metaphor lets users easily purchase commonly bought items
Save with coupons
Coupons are integrated excellently into the experience of the site. No effort is needed on the users part to take advantage of the money saving offers. Coupons are automatically added when a user purchases an item, while the coupon offers are placed prominently when browsing available goods.
Coupon information is displayed clearly when users are searching for products
Never run out again
When an item is added to a ’shelf’ or from the advanced planning page a user can select how often they need to purchase the item. An item such as toothpaste they may wish to purchase every two weeks. Alice.com will then remind them before they run out allowing the user to re-order the item.
Allowing users to drag products between boxes provides an engaging and intuitive interaction
To sum up
Alice.com creates some interesting interactions. Using the visual metaphor of a ’shelf’ and allowing users to physically drag and drop their required items not only makes the repeat ordering of items quick and easy it also brings elements of fun and satisfaction. The site combines many features that help the shopping process, good quality photographs, detailed descriptions, customer reviews, price comparison tables. All these things combine to create not only a usable online experience but a useful and very interesting service.