Collaborative Cart — a fail or future?

Below is a spoof news article of 2028 on ShopTogether — an app for collaboration shopping. Before going ahead with an idea, we validated it and presented a news article on all aspects of it. Below the attached photos of the news article is a compilation of the whole process that I’vegone through in detail below.

My Learnings: If the idea chosen would have been something more futuristic and innovative such as Generative AI, brain chip, Metaverse, etc., we would probably have a more interesting analysis to present.

Process:

Shopping:

What is the future of shopping? Is it collaborative? Is it online? Let’s find out how shopping would be like 5 years in the future — 2028.

Shopping has gone collaborative!
Everything has got collaborative — hence I imagine an online collaborative shopping cart — where you can shop apparel, plan trips, book stays together, order groceries for your house and order meals. This solves 2 problems:

1. Users send links and screenshots back and forth with their friends/families when shopping apparel.
2. Users need to pass around the phone when ordering FMCG Products or Meals.

These are some important aspects:

• Users: Bachelors living together, 20–25 yrs old.
• Materials/Tech: Chrome Extension, Web Browser, App.
• Revenue Stream: Subscription — Freemium Model.
• Organizational Context: For Profit Company.
• Geographical and Political Context: India, mainly college dense localities such as Bangalore and Pune.

A product never stays in its true form — it’s used by other people, other places and other materials/tech. Hence, I decided to shift the perspectives. How would the product change when these aspects are shifted? For eg: If the users are changed, how would the product change — its interface, its features, its value offerings. This is simply because a product never stays in its true form

Before proceeding further, I conducted some research.

Research — Why this idea might not work:

• Most people prefer to shop apparel alone and only tag someone along to hangout.
• They rarely ask people for suggestions, and if they do, it's only when someone is physically there.
• Shopping isn’t frequent but a once in 6 months thing, hence use of the product is not in high frequency, especially when it's a onetime use product.
• Peeople prefer to not take the hassle of going through options and selecting something — they’d just tell whoever is ordering for it.

I shifted 3 perspectives:

1. Users: from Bachelors to Families

As you can see, priority won’t be apparel anymore but FMCG Products and any other products you go to a supermarket for. However, when expanded to apartment communities, it causes privacy concerns for others to know what you have been ordering.

As you can see in the top right, there is a rough interface to add multiple items in the same cart from different websites and even click place order. Others can keep adding to it, and you can also add comments on it.
There is also an option to see the shopping list for the items you want to be picked up from your favourite store. It can be categorised by the item you first see in each store too.

For Stays, you can shortlist stuff together, add comments, vote on stays, etc. Sounds pretty futuristic right?

2. Tech: From Web Extension to App

This isn’t that great of a perspective shift, which would have been true if I had changed the lens to something drastic — such as AI. For now, let’s go ahead to see how the product changes in the phone even with a small shift.

As you can see, it does not remain an extension anymore but forms into different offerings.

1. An API linked service — just like Google Maps — offered to multiple businesses such as Zomato, Swiggy, Dominoes, Zepto, etc. There is an option to upload your screenshot and it will add to cart automatically.
2. The other option is to select your product from the original brand’s app, screenshot/share link, open ShopTogether app and add it. There’s an option to comment on items, hide items from others and more.
3. Another way would be to directly start adding FMCG products in the app in a collaborated cart with everyone else and place an order automatically from different service providers. This would, however, require API Access of these different businesses, proving it risky as anyone can choose to pull out the API at any given time.

3. Revenue Model: Subscription to Commission

As explored above, the revenue model would be commission/fee from users — more like compensating for saved delivery charges due to bulk orders. The second option — having an API linked service for businesses to give users the option to add people to their cart, hoping to increase sales. Businesses would then pay ShopTogether a certain commission per cart collaborated for this service.

The app would also have a feature to split the order by everyone’s individual items, including tax, and people can pay by themselves rather than relying on one person and splitting it manually later.

The major problem with this is that its the easiest to replicate themselves in-house, offering no impactful service or data for businesses to pay ShopTogether. The problem with user commission is that if delivery is usually free on large orders, not much is to save. If you show extra fees are being charged, you will anger the users and if you don’t, you will cheat the user.

Speculative Fiction:

Once the idea is fleshed out, I located this in a speculative world where the Poona Pact wasn’t signed and castes had more dignity. A speculative world where decentralized delivery groups were gaining power as well as infrastructure and started offering services on their own. In this context, Gokul is the owner of the business.

The app is gamified, made entertaining and addictive. This shows how this business used Dark UI Patterns (design) to overcome the delivery partners’ unity.

Finally we proceeded to compile all these pointers into a news article above.