People want to have a more personalized shopping experience, but they are sensitive on how you go about doing it. If you are putting together this big brother, they are wary, but if you do it in a way that supports them, it is a way to get through the maze of online offers to what you are really interested in. Harvey says that to create lasting relationship with the customer, retailers must have very stringent and open privacy policies in place. It is important that the customer can control and dictate what information they want to provide, and once you have it, to maintain it in the strictest of confidence. Trust is betrayed when you share information without getting authorization from the user, and it is important not to betray that.
Customers review coupons online.
Once they find one of interest, they can print it out and take it to a retail store for redemption. Each coupon has a customized bar code that provides information about where the coupon came from. We can tell a retail chain where their coupons are being redeemed and how far the customers live from the store they are redeeming them in. Our targeting engines can vary the offer based on the consumer distance from the store. A Virtual Salesperson OnLink has developed Surveyor, an application that engages cybershoppers much the way a salesperson would in the real world.