Project Use - Impact

Life today is characterized by long working hours, work competition, and stress, and a therewith increasing demand for a high leisure time quality. Shopping, formerly regarded as fun and relaxation, nowadays leads to additional overload and is regarded as a chore. Opening hours have to be met, shopping malls with an enormous and overwhelming offer lead to an increase in time spent on finding and choosing products, and the overall shopping situation is regarded as time-consuming and stressing. Many customers therefore switch to online portals – a process that in the long term leads to societal changes in communication and also homemade leverage. The bereaved in this process are not only families and the working society but also the elderly population, who already encounters difficulties in an increasingly high-tech world. Not being grown into electronic media and the internet, many services and applications seem inapplicable to them. They are often doomed to buy what is offered next door without having the chance to compare prices or qualities. ShoppingMate will serve many different aspects to support these user needs for communication, freedom of choice, support, service, and increasing enjoyable leisure time.

The truly user-centric approach enables customized systems and applications for any age and requirement. With ShoppingMate elderly citizens are enabled to compare prizes and quality of everyday things, including medication. Criteria important to them serve as shopping and choice support. One focus of ShoppingMate is clearly on usability and joy of use, two main preconditions for user acceptance. The identification of user requirements regarding usability and usefulness will foster the design of a truly needed and applicable system, leading to increased technology usage and fostering the reduction of reservations towards technology especially for elderly users. Joy of use will enhanced sales appeal, facilitate the usage of ShoppingMate, and make it a successor on the market.

Another idea behind the ShoppingMate is to handle social challenges in current and future cities. Today’s neighborhoods do already differ a lot from the neighborhoods in the past. Social challenges like demographic change and social segregation made urban districts more anonymously and put the local economy at risks. The fast spread of shopping malls outside the cities has answered the demand of the customers for one place to buy everything but often prices are too high and the service personnel is only little skilled in one's trade. Furthermore, the increasing number of malls has a direct and negative effect on the development of cities and the urban districts. Small shops which are responsible for the local supply cannot compete with the increasing competition. Moreover, the coupled urban districts which leverage besides buyers also cultural, social and political activities are constantly weakened by the development of suburban shopping malls. In addition shopping malls have only little connection to local transportation systems and are usually visited by car. The ecological aspects of such a development are obvious, but especially senior citizens are in most cases not able to use a car for shopping daily goods, and are therewith endangered to get cut off local supplies.

On the other hand the customer might find a better price or service at a local dealer but the process of comparing prices and finding the right store offering the desired product is often time consuming. With the help of the ShoppingMate the customer will receive recommendations based on his personal preferences about desired and similar products and shops which offer them. The ShoppingMate “uplinks” local shops to a versatile network of shops having the same advantages like shopping malls (e.g., integrated customer experience) but without their disadvantages.

Supplementary the ShoppingMate is intended to fill the gap between the generations and cultures. Motivated by the idea of leveraging social assets in urban district, the ShoppingMate allows social networking and support several different types of direct communication. Moreover, the ShoppingMate promotes a way to tackle theme-based (e.g., products, shops, neighborhood) group communication in an urban district. The strong community idea of ShoppingMate will serve as mediator among users, facilitating information exchange within and between user groups and even fill generation gaps via knowledge flow.

ShoppingMate has a direct impact on the environment as it forces shop owners to turn their focus to electronic means of advertisement and promotion of their products rather than using traditional methods such as leaflets or posters. It also minimizes consumer transportation making it more targeted and efficient and results in reduced pollution, traffic jam, and noise; all major problem especially in the areas that targets, i.e., city centers.

The ShoppingMate is also expected to have an important impact on the competitiveness of the SMEs and the economic growth and employment. The evolving technologies of mobile location based services in combination with semantic searching creates the new arena for great opportunities to the whole value chain comprised of mobile operators, value added service providers, handset manufacturers and numerous others looking into the m-commerce business. With regards to the commerce environment, the evolution of mobile telecommunications and e-commerce on a convergence path is encouraging the use and development of new shopping methods. Due to the explosive growth of the mobile phone population combined with the development of wireless technologies, m-commerce is becoming increasingly important to many businesses nowadays. Wireless Internet via mobile devices is leading the world into another spectrum of communications and means of conducting day-to-day shopping activities. Clearly, it is critical for such businesses to be prepared for and take full advantage of any benefits offered by m-commerce. They dare not be left behind as the business world is transformed by the convergence of electronic and mobile commerce – the “digital divide” is all too real in many markets and is growing further. In addition, SME’s are in a very good position to adapt to new technology; as they may be able to adapt faster than larger companies that can be slowed by bureaucracy and stricter staffing hierarchies.

Against this background, ShoppingMate aims to accelerate the adoption and innovative use of mobile channel by SMEs, so that they can exploit its potentials to sharpen their competitiveness. More specifically:

• The involved SMEs will strengthen their position in the market by capturing greater portion of the market (traditional customers plus e-shoppers).
• The ShoppingMate is expected to enhance competition causing prices to decrease but at the same time it will result in an increase of sales, leading to the satisfaction of both the consumers and shop owners.
• The use of the tool will work as an extra incentive to make new offers to the customers and further expand business.
• The SMEs may attract customers across Europe, provided multi-lingual support, as they target consumer needs regardless of the country of origin.
• The ShoppingMate can work as the primary shopping portal for tourists who are short of time and lack of knowledge of marketing areas.
• The SMEs can more easily compete with larger companies by advertising directly to the customer and targeting specific areas of the market.

The extension of business for the SMEs will indirectly affect the economic growth and employment positively. Some key points of this improvement on the economy are:

• The whole economy is expected to be given a boost as new markets will open.
• The SMEs can extend their business activities and decrease the gap between them and larger companies (balance in the market).
• The SMEs will be also given the chance to form larger groups and increase their economic viability.
• New markets will certainly drive SMEs to increase the number of their employees.
• New employees will include from data entry workers to marketing specialists.
• By assuring that the SMEs remain alive in the fierce competition, unemployment percentages are expected to fall.

An important impact for the ShoppingMate is the satisfaction of certain Community societal objectives. Enhancement in quality of life, health, safety, working conditions, employment, environment, and contribution to standards is implemented by:

• Offering the customer the ability to save time from store to store while shopping.
• Having less traffic congestion because of less transportation needs between stores (e.g., not using a car for short distances or when the desired item is not available).
• Driving the prices down.
• Receiving information tailored to user needs.
• Informing the customers about good or bad products (e.g., dangerous flaws of electric appliances) through the user community service.
• Minimizing the time needed to have a concrete view of a market’s status and spending more time on real user needs.
• Offering new jobs due to the expansion of the business.
• Decreasing the number of leaflets that pollute and increasing the e-advertisement.
• Enforcing the Electronic Commerce Directive of the EC (2000/31/EC).

The ShoppingMate will foster transnational technological cooperation between the involved parties in many different phases of the project. During the design of the system, RTD Performers are expected to work closely for the specification of the requirements. This will further require an interaction with the SMEs in order to capture their “real” needs and a respective survey for the customers. This last information will vary among nations and it is considered quite important, as it will form the basic input for the design. Moreover, the implementation phase will make the cooperation between the partners more concrete as the technological limitations are expected to be dealt with. Research organizations will try to adapt the requirements to certain technologies available in every country, or introduce new technologies if necessary.

Finally, the integration of the system with the existing products of each SME and promotion into the market is expected to reveal other issues/problems to be handled jointly by the SMEs. The exchange of the technical know-how between them is critical for the final “touch” on the ShoppingMate in each case. This means that the SMEs will certainly have to share ideas and opinions either directly or indirectly relevant to the technological perspective of the ShoppingMate system, such as organization of the stock, marketing and selling techniques, etc.