We Found at Least 20 Stupid Uses of Technology in Shopping | One More List a Day

At this point, all I can say is: ??????

E-commerce has stirred retail into muddy water, and everyone is (happily) eager to talk about its many possible futures. But not every new idea for shaping the future of retail is a good one.

We have listed some shopping experiences that, for now, don't look very friendly. We can't be sure what the future of retail looks like, but we'd rather it didn't look like this.

A virtual mall is still only a few floors tall

A 360° mall map

When you're walking through a mall, squinting at a blurry "street-view" map on your phone is worse than looking up at the huge signs over the counters.

In Australia, meanwhile, someone has built a fully virtual online mall, 360 Mall. It hasn't officially opened yet, but the preview shows it will imitate everything about a physical mall, including the layout of the counters, the product displays and the background noise.

the 360 Mall

It looks like a scene from The Sims, and it offers an illusion: the mall you could never wander through in pajamas and bed hair is now open to you 24 hours a day.

I chose to open an e-commerce app and look at the shops I had bookmarked instead. What makes this idea silly is that people don't go to malls to experience the building. They go for what happens inside it and, more importantly, for the goods. Incidentally, Zhihu once took up the question of how big Tmall would be if it were a physical store, which offers one way of setting things straight.

Small ads every few steps. Can it please stop?

Macy's iBeacon device

You walk into a mall on Saturday, and your phone (and perhaps your smartwatch) starts buzzing every few seconds. Each counter has a greeting or a promotion waiting for you.

This is the future that dozens of startups and big malls such as Joy City, Intime and Wanda have in store for you. They want to install beacon sensors throughout the mall, so that as long as your Bluetooth is on, each shop pushes its promotions to you as you walk past.

All I want to say is: heavens, leave me alone. I just want to walk past you in peace!

There is good news. Google, the biggest advertiser of them all, has just cut this feature from a new product. Ads that pop up when you reach a certain spot can harass users, and they don't make shopping any more fun.

Experience stores: look, touch, then buy on your phone

Plenty of brands, such as Bestseller Group, are trying to link their stores with e-commerce

Have you ever tried on clothes in a store, noted the item number and size, and then looked for them online at home? With employee-discount resellers or the official online store's discounts, it usually comes out about 20 percent cheaper than buying in the store. Many brands now run offline experience stores: customers order online and the nearest store delivers. Nothing wrong with that. The brands that have you try things on in the store and then order on your phone are less friendly.

Vero Moda, a Bestseller Group brand, prints QR codes on its price tags. Scan one and you land on a WeChat purchase page, where you can also check the size, fabric and styling suggestions. The sales assistants will urge you to buy on WeChat after you try something on.

The American menswear brand Bonobos has opened a Guideshop. You leave the store with nothing in your hands and go home to wait for the delivery. Their usual reasoning: customers no longer have to lug bags around while they shop!

It sounds reasonable, and perhaps some people really have longed for this. But carrying your haul home is part of the satisfaction of a shopping spree, and trying things on for ages only to walk out empty-handed sounds a little cruel. More importantly, these brands pay heavy rent and staff costs for their stores only to turn them into fitting rooms and warehouses for their online shops. Think about it and you can't help feeling sorry for them.

Want some fruit? Come back tomorrow

Fruit on the shelf, for looking only

Xuxian, a fruit e-commerce company, has pickup points in areas packed with office buildings. But although neat rows of fruit sit on the shelves, customers can't just hand over money and walk off with it.

You first have to download an app, choose what you want, place an order and come back the next day to collect it. The company claims it picks whatever you want fresh from the branch for you: "We don't grow fruit; we just carry it." By the afternoon, only a few boxes are usually left on the shelves, and passersby are often left wondering: are you selling fruit or not?

Luckily they don't sell eggs. Otherwise you might have to wait for the chicks to hatch.

Scan to pay for a cup of soy milk, and automatically follow a string of WeChat official accounts

Scan a QR code to pay: they want more than your money

QR-code payment may have rescued every day you happened to leave your wallet at home. But every time you pay a bill with your phone, you may automatically follow one or even two official accounts, one for the merchant and one for a third-party service provider. Either way, they all believe that if you paid me, you're my follower.

When will this world stop being so rude?

A 1.5-inch watch screen with its heart set on cramming in a 5.5-inch display

Viewing product details on a watch

What shopping on a watch feels like

On the 42 mm face of the Apple Watch, Amazon wants you to search for products by voice, view product details on less than one-sixth of a phone screen and, while you're at it, place an order.

You have to strain your eyes to read the product description (and may still fail), but one-click buying is rather convenient, since the whole screen holds just that one huge button. If you need to log in to your account or cancel an order, sorry, please go back to your phone.

So why the watch at all?

Picking up parcels from a locker doesn't mean you want to shop there

Not every place you collect parcels is a place to shop

Smart parcel lockers have rescued compound guards, office receptionists and every shopkeeper downstairs. But a locker you open a few times a month to collect a package is not an ideal gateway for neighborhood e-commerce.

Shanghai Quanritong, which installs parcel lockers in residential compounds, treats the locker doors residents open every day as a gateway, hoping couriers already on their delivery rounds will bring along goods from nearby shops. But if the goods are no different from what you can buy elsewhere, why install yet another app just to have them delivered to a parcel locker?

A virtual supermarket on a subway billboard, with two words written large: pointless detour

Yihaodian once put a virtual supermarket in a subway ad

Virtual supermarkets on walls were all the rage for a while. Tesco, Yihaodian and others printed life-size photos of supermarket shelves in subway ads. Shoppers scanned a QR code with their phones to open the retailer's app and order the matching products.

Anyone who hoped this would bring in heaps of revenue can go home. If waiting for the train is really that boring, why browse a "wall supermarket" of a hundred-odd products when you could simply open the shopping app? The one sensible thing about it is that it gets products seen, which makes it outdoor advertising in its plainest form.

Waiting in a bookstore for a freshly printed book is worse than buying one online

A book ATM

This is the Espresso Book Machine, a printer installed in bookstores. Readers can spend 30 pounds and wait five minutes for it to print a book of about 300 pages.

If you've made the rare effort to walk into a bookstore, why poke at a screen searching for available titles? Some say it might rescue out-of-print or rare books, but the printed copy has no binding to speak of anyway. Wouldn't it be easier to turn those out-of-print and rare books into good-looking e-books?

All right, those of you who would rather die than give up paper books, I hear your cries. Enjoy spending your 30 pounds.

Ads tucked inside books go stale much faster than the books

An ad printed in a book in the 1970s

Well, this one isn't happening now. But it's hard to say it won't happen again.

In the 1972 science fiction novel Quest for the Future, Kent cigarettes ran several pages of full-color ads. That novel was no exception: in the 1960s and 1970s, quite a few books carried cigarette ads.

The reason was that in 1965 the US Congress passed the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, which banned cigarette ads on television and radio outright. Turning to books was a move of necessity. But looking back many years later, the novels are still readable, while the ads probably interest only historians of the period.

Before the ads start in the cinema, watch an ad on your phone... about the ad?

How Shazam keeps you company through the ads

The music-recognition app Shazam has partnered with US cinemas to make pre-film ads interactive.

When you're sitting in the cinema and the Shazam logo and a prompt appear on the screen, you can take out your phone, unlock it and open Shazam. Let it listen to a few seconds of the ad, and the system identifies which ad is playing and jumps to an interactive link.

A perfect idea, except for one huge flaw: an audience clutching popcorn and relaxing needs a moment to react, and by then the ad is over and they still haven't got their phones out. Does it work? Ask them next time they see a movie.

Carmakers let you shop from the dashboard, but take no responsibility for your safety

GM AtYourService

More and more in-car systems come preloaded with e-commerce apps, hoping to turn the dashboard into a place to shop. That way, even if you happen to leave your phone, cash and credit cards at home, you can order food delivery from the car and won't starve on the road.

It is probably one of the stupidest ideas in the world. Only slightly less stupid is putting an entertainment system on the dashboard so the front passenger doesn't get bored.

Even if some people don't think it's that stupid (you fool, who is confident enough to shop while driving!), well, carmakers can't guarantee that the shopping is secure either. Take credit card payment: once the car is online, hackers don't need your card number or password. All they need is the token data from when you logged in to your account.

Even traditional carmakers can't patch security holes in their systems in real time. To keep exactly this from happening, Visa suspended its own service and in the end chose to store user data on the phone.

Merchants once thought check-ins would lead them to you

Check-in apps such as Foursquare and Jiepang once tried to build social networks on location data. But Foursquare's shift to local services has not gone well, and Jiepang shut down its servers in the first half of this year.

Today location data is just one of the inputs review apps use to recommend restaurants, and you no longer need a dedicated app to tell merchants "where I am."

Say hi to the vending machine: juice again today?

A Weiguo Buluo juice vending machine

Even vending machines want to use community to hold on to customers.

Weiguo Buluo's fresh orange juice vending machines carry an internet-connected display. During the 45 seconds you wait for your juice to be squeezed, the screen shows the profile pictures of 20 Weiguo Buluo members. You can pick one of them to see their life updates, or follow them.

Afterwards, you can interact with the people you follow in a phone app, or post updates about your own life. Yes, there are many lonely people in this world, but surely none of them is foolish enough to make friends through a juicer?

On the toilet, scan a code and get 10 yuan off toilet paper

A joint marketing campaign by Amazon and P&G

This is a campaign called "Sit, Shop, Save". Amazon and P&G put ads with barcodes in public restrooms. Open the Amazon app on your phone, scan the barcode to buy toilet paper and the like, and you get a discount.

An interesting idea. If you happen to want to stock up on a few rolls for home while using a public toilet, we have only one friendly wish for you: may the signal in your restroom be good.

Your phone may already have an NFC chip, but have you ever actually paid with it?

NFC payment requires a dedicated POS terminal

For you to pay with a tap of your phone, every POS terminal maker and every phone maker has to cooperate. Clearly, that isn't simple. Although Apple, Google and even Samsung have each launched their own near-field communication (NFC) payments, competition in mobile payment may already have moved quickly away from depending on hardware.

The question is, now that you can pay by scanning a QR code, why would merchants pay for new POS terminals to support NFC?

What you see is what you get: that future is still a long way off

Zalando

E-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Taobao let you search for products by photo, and quite a few startups, such as Yi+ and Zalando, try to let users take or upload a photo, automatically identify the clothes in it and steer them toward a purchase.

But "what you see is what you get" asks a great deal of image recognition, so much that few companies do it well. Buying whatever you photograph is not a bad idea, as long as the search finds the right thing.

A perfect virtual model tries on clothes for you, and the zipper that won't close still won't close

Uniqlo's 4D virtual fitting room

The same garment looks completely different on a model nine heads tall and on you at six heads tall, and swapping in your face doesn't help. Don't trust any "model with a figure like yours."

O2bra, a phone app that recommends lingerie, hopes that "girls can take a photo of themselves, then line up the bra image in the picture with their chest to see how it would look on." Isn't the point of trying on lingerie to check whether it's comfortable? What good is placing it over your chest? To see whether it goes with your jacket?

As for Taobao's feature that lets you try on makeup online before you buy, I'll say no more. Just look at the picture (the image below may be disturbing; scroll down with caution).

Taobao's makeup try-on magic mirror

I wouldn't dare wear makeup for a week.

Want product information? Open the package first

The QR code with product information is printed inside the bottle cap

Evergrande Spring and Alibaba teamed up on a "one bottle, one code" campaign. To find out a bottle of water's ID number, production batch, specifications and so on, you have to scan the QR code inside the cap with Mobile Taobao.

Oh, and if you don't have Mobile Taobao, you'll have to install it on the spot before you can scan.

You rarely get into a fitting room. Why stare at a simulation on a screen once you're there?

eBay put an interactive screen in Rebecca Minkoff's fitting rooms

eBay installed a set of "magic mirrors" in the fitting rooms of a Rebecca Minkoff store in San Francisco to show shoppers how different outfits would go together.

Shoppers can see handbags the system recommends on the screen and check how they go with the outfit. They can also touch the screen to browse a virtual shelf, or pick items they like from a high-fashion runway show playing in front of them and enter their phone number. When the clothes are ready and brought to the fitting room, the shopper gets a text message.

We understand how hard e-commerce is working to promote offline experiences. But isn't the reason people walk into physical stores precisely the in-person experience that e-commerce can't replace? Whoever designed the magic mirror may never have understood the mindset of "just browsing, nothing in particular I want to buy."

However good the heroine looks, don't make me hunt for the plot among purchase links

"Watch and buy," a collaboration between the TV drama My Sunshine and Tmall

As soon as many dramas air, the internet fills with threads hunting down the heroine's clothes and handbags. But the fact that fans bought Cheon Song-yi's lipstick shade until it sold out worldwide doesn't mean they're happy to scan on-screen QR codes for the same shirt, wig and floor lamp while the leads are whispering sweet nothings.

While My Sunshine was on air, it launched a "watch and buy" shopping campaign for items seen in the show with Tmall and Dragon TV. As the show played, QR codes for the related products appeared on screen. The result: most of the official tie-in products sold fewer than 10 units, even though Taobao searches already turned up as many as 21,600 knockoff versions.

Hitching a ride is not that easy. Beyond basic QR-code scanning, a whole range of apps and technologies want to keep you company while you watch TV (and buy, buy, buy). WeChat's "shake" feature during the Spring Festival Gala is perhaps the example closest to home, while TVSMILES, a startup from Berlin, recognizes the sound of a TV ad and immediately pops up a purchase page in its app.

Can't people just watch TV in peace, huh?

Cover image from Confessions of a Shopaholic