Visa Launches New Social Shopping Service: Inspiration for Financial Services?

Visa have officially launched Rightcliq, a new social commerce service that allows US shoppers to get second opinions from their Facebook and email contacts on potential purchases – and then buy them.

Rightcliq is essentially a social bookmarking service – like Best Buy’s universal wishlist Giftag service with an image/price grabber to facilitate comparison shopping combined with an autofill credit card payment feature – from card details stored with Rightcliq (not necessarily Visa).

The web-browser plugin-powered service from Visa is also partnering online retailers (1-800 flowers, Barnes & Noble, Avis…) to offer users of Rightcliq special discounts, and offers tracking services for online purchases.

Check out the screenshots and the video below – but in a nutshell what Rightcliq does is create a browser bookmarklet that saves selected items to a private online “wishpace” that can be shared with friends to get feedback on shopping ideas, and from where members can compare and buy bookmarked items.

In other words, Rightcliq is a social version of PayPal.

Whilst the Rightcliq site design and navigation are well, different, and the plugin heavy-handedly brands your browser with Visa – Rightcliq is an interesting, and potentially useful service.  It’s also a concept that other financial service providers could, and we think, should build on – but perhaps in a less intrusive way.  A useful build for Visa would be to offer members Visa payment card protection services (which require registering all your cards anyway), and perhaps add in a price comparison engine.

Should all retail banks and card providers be looking to offer similar social shopping services on their secure websites to drive transactions and loyalty?

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9 Responses to “Visa Launches New Social Shopping Service: Inspiration for Financial Services?”

  1. Melany Gallant July 30, 2010 at 12:38 #

    Hi Paul,

    Love that Visa got Commoncraft to create the "What is Rightcliq" video. ;)

    For me, the value to using this service is the opportunity to apply discounts to my wish list items from participating retailers. I wonder if retailers will care whether shoppers use the wish list service via Rightcliq instead of wishlist functionality they offer on their own sites. Maybe it doesn't matter.

    It will be interesting to see the uptake on this service. Will friends really click to the site to give advice? Maybe it depends on how helpful your friends are ;)

    The video doesn't mention a mobile version of the service, but I could see that being useful for a) capturing friends attention while they're out and about, and b) helping me make a decision about this camera or that camera when I'm at the point of sale.

  2. Alvin Tan July 31, 2010 at 02:20 #

    I was really intrigued and wanted to watch the video, but the video seems to have been taken down…

    • Paul Marsden August 1, 2010 at 11:40 #

      Hi Alvin – Visa promise the video will be back up in the next day or so.

  3. Paul Marsden August 2, 2010 at 12:46 #

    Visa have reposted the Commoncraft video explaining Rightcliq – post updated

  4. Arturas August 2, 2010 at 10:23 #

    This looks very interesting, the evolution of wishlists :)

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