Shopify – Changing How We Shop Online
It was recently announced that Shopify, a technology company the helps merchants sell to customers online, will be integrating its services with Facebook. What Shopify does is it connects users with merchant bots, allowing them to send messages and communicate with the bots to help them find items they would like to purchase. With the merging of Shopify’s product and Facebook, Facebook users will now be able to shop online through messenger.
This new technology heavily touches upon our lessons in Web Search. The article states that “people chatting with Shopify merchant bots can browse through store catalogs and pricing by tapping through suggested replies inside a Messenger conversation.” In order to determine which suggestions appear in front of a user, there must be some sorting or ranking algorithm that exists. Such an algorithm likely has its roots in the method discussed in class using hubs and authorities. Here, the hubs would represent the keywords/pages that point to the authorities which would be the products for sale.
Additionally, from a higher level perspective, we see that Shopify users act as nodes going upstream into the strongly connected component made up of various merchants and products. It is upstream because the users are able to connect into the SCC, but it is highly unlikely that any one product will have a link pointing back to the user’s profile or website.
It is exciting to see the advancements and innovative applications of web search that are being used today. Though it is always a challenge for online audiences to adopt new methods of performing common place actions, Shopify seems to be up for the challenge and is certainly shaking up the market.
Source:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/with-facebook-messenger-integration-shopify-lets-businesses?utm_term=.liQ8nwva1#.ppOXMnGmb