Implementation of Interactive Real Time Online Co-shopping Using Push AJAX

Online shopping has witnessed explosive growth: there are hundreds of millions of online shoppers that are part of an online retail industry worth of hundreds of billions of dollars. While online shopping has its own advantages (such as convenience, product reviews, price and selection range), recent focus has been in using technology to mimic the social interactions found in physical shopping malls and stores in what is called as “social shopping”. Put simply, in social shopping shoppers' friends become involved in the shopping experience. An important aspect of social shopping is “co-shopping” where ad-hoc collaborative shopping groups are formed in which one person can drive an online shopping experience for one or more other people. This requires a mechanism that provisions multiple users to conduct real time online shopping collaboratively from multiple locations. For example, family members at remote locations can view the product online simultaneously as if they are shopping together in real time. To this end we have designed a special collaborative browsing window in which all the co-shoppers need to login. One user becomes the leader and invites others from his friends' list for shopping. Other users need to accept this invitation and join the shopping. The leader upon liking a product initiates the co-shopping by clicking on “Share this product with selected friends” button. On clicking this button an AJAX request, which contains URL of the product and list of IDs of selected friends, goes to the server. The server receives the URL of the product and list of IDs of friends and pushes this URL to all the selected friends in an asynchronous manner using PUSH AJAX technology. This URL gets loaded into an HTML iFrame on every client's browsing window. Shoppers can communicate with each other using a simple chat window.