| mixes shopping with
socializing
By Bill Wolfe
bwolfe@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
Like to shop, but can't get to the stores until after hours?
Love the mall, but can't stand the traffic?
Louisville Web entrepreneur Mark Stein says he has a
solution: L et your digital persona do the walking in a 3-D
virtual mall.
Stein, a longtime professional mediator in Louisville, found
online success in 2002 when he launched
OurDivorceAgreement.com, a do-it-yourself system for working
through the complex issues of breaking up. Today that site
has customers throughout North America, Australia and Great
Britain, he said.
Now he hopes to strike gold with VirtualEShopping.com, which
takes users into a three-dimensional environment like those
they might see in games such as World of Warcraft or
Half-Life. But in Stein's online world, participants hunt
for bargains, not monsters, as they meet, mingle and chat
with other virtual shoppers.
The Web site depicts a typical mall where shoppers can adopt
an animated figure called a persona to represent them in the
digital world. Participants can then see and be seen by
other shoppers, providing a 3-D social networking
environment that is meant to appeal to the "Facebook
crowd" of young or tech-savvy computer users.
"We feel like it'll have a strong draw to women,
especially women with young kids," said Stein, who
began working on the concept about three years ago and
launched the site in April.
Many tell Stein "the only time that I get to shop is
when the kids have gone to bed, and (by then) the malls are
closed," he said. The virtual mall offers people
"some of the social aspects of going shopping with
friends: 'Meet me in the mall. Let's walk around, chat,
shop, window shop.'"
Men might go to the site as a convenient way to shop — or
as a way to meet female shoppers, Stein said.
Older shoppers are also part of the target audience, Stein
said. "There are a lot of seniors online. The mall is a
familiar environment for them. That's where they walk during
inclement weather."
So the digital mall will be a place "they'll be
familiar with and comfortable with." There are already
dozens of active VirtualEShopping sites, such as
VirtualeLouisville.com and VirtualeLexingtonKy.com, with
more being rolled out each week. There will be at least 275
individual malls, including some specialty sites targeted to
men, women, teenagers or other groups, he said.
The malls are free to shoppers. VirtualEShopping will make
its money by a pay-per-click fee that advertisers will pay
whenever a shopper clicks on their displays, and on
commissions paid when shoppers enter a store site and make a
purchase.
While the mall interiors all use 3-D imaging, shoppers who
enter an individual store site will actually open a browser
window to the store's regular Web site.
"We would not ask advertisers to immediately be in the
3-D realm," Stein said. "We wanted to catch them
where they are, and that's in the 2-D realm." He is
hopeful, however, that stores will adopt 3-D as the
technique becomes more popular.
"We are like where the Web was in the early to
mid-'90s," he said. With the growth of high-speed
Internet service, "the 3-D Web will grow dramatically
over the next five years, and that within five to 10 years,
anything that can be done in 3-D over the Web, will be done
in 3-D."
The virtual mall is "a convergence of multiple
technologies in a very unique and innovative manner,"
said Vik Chadha, director of technical commercialization for
Greater Louisville Inc., who has consulted with Stein.
"This is the future," Chadha said.
Stein said he got the idea for the mall while he was still
developing the divorce Web site. He considered an interface
that would use neighborhood images such as schools, law
offices and tax offices to link to related sections of the
divorce guide.
"I thought, you know, this could be a Starbucks on the
corner, too, and a Walgreens. And then the idea just kept
snowballing," he said. "From there, I realized
that this had the potential to be its own site."
He looked for financial backers, but "it was still on
the heels of the tech bust of 2000, 2001, and we had no
people who were willing to invest," so Stein paid for
development out of profits from the divorce site. The new
business has a staff of 15 full- and part-time workers.
He had hoped to launch the service in one year. Instead, it
took 2½ years. Still, "it ended up being just what we
envisioned it to be. We're happy with the product," he
said.
Reporter Bill Wolfe can be reached at (502) 582-4248.
Virtualeshopping.com
President/CEO: Mark Stein
On the Web: www.VirtualEShopping.com
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