IMshopping aims to bring a human touch to online shopping

IMshopping is a service that aims to bring a human touch to online shopping.  With the IMshopping social media site, CEO and Founder, Prashant Nedungadi, said the company has created a level of human assistance resulting in a deeper level of e-commerce satisfaction that doesn’t exist on the Internet today. The IMshopping service fills an information void in online shopping. Most shopping sites tend to focus on providing answers to technical-focused questions, not the general shopping and product questions that shoppers submit on the IMshopping Web site. The Web site offers responses and recommendations to more than 20,000 questions about shopping exactly. For each question asked, a human IMshopping guide or community member provides a brief summary and can also link to products he or she recommends. In short, IMshopping was developed to bring the same level of personalized assistance to online shoppers that consumers expect to find at brick-and-mortar stores.  Currently, retailers can join the IMshopping community and answer questions being asked by shoppers. A retailer could recommend their own products or recruit community members to answer questions on his or her behalf. Retailers can also capitalize on advertising opportunities by sponsoring IMshopping answers.  This works much the same as sponsored ads on search engines and other Web sites. As part of its merchant package, retailers are able to upload an entire catalog to IMshopping and display product images in sponsored answers and recommendations. IMshopping, which is currently in Beta, has just recently raised $4.7m from SK Telecom Ventures in funding, and expects to collect revenues when shoppers purchase recommended products through affiliate links.