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User behavior thoughts on showing purchase price in Pinterest & Fab.com

Fab.com doesn’t show prices on the homepage… they show elegant/cool stuff that YOU WANT. If you want it, you’ll click through, then you’ll see the price and decide to buy or not.

Pinterest seems the same, except they will banner over an image with a price if the user feels inclined to put the price in their description of the item. If the price is really cheap, the user likely puts it in their description because of that, or if really expensive, the user probably puts it in due to the monstrosity of the price.

But if this were a full-blown e-commerce site, my gut feeling is that when a price is bannered over an image, it mentally blocks me [most times] from clicking through to see the full image. If the thing costs a ton of money, then I wont even click through.. even though I may have wanted to because the product was interesting.   Flip side, if it was super cheap, I would still click through.    

But why show any price at all that could potentially deter the user from clicking through in the first place? Get them to click through, where then they might repin/comment/like. Which is what Fab.com does, because it is an e-commerce site based on browsing.

Pinterest is similar to opening a GQ or Women’s Day magazine, you have no intent, you’re in idea/bored/inspiration mode. Whereas Amazon.com is a site you go to based on an intent for something and then you might drift-off into all sorts of things, but you aren’t going to go to Amazon.com without some sort of intent.

Question: Why use foursquare?

justonpayne:

If you prefer learning about social services from an anthropomorphic, gyrating Mexican food item, this should tickle your noodle:

Some Thoughts On My Own Video Viewing Habits (clearly not a mainstream viewer)

Video is trying to take away my time from the computer, or TV. There are a few shows I watch on TV (good wife, parenthood, happy endings — SO FUNNY, modern family, new girl, dexter, breaking bad).  Online, I don’t watch much video — I watch business panels, talks, chats.  

I am a huge music guy, but don’t watch music videos really. Video requires my full attention. Audio music lets me multi-task. Turntable.fm lets me listen to music, show off music to people and hopefully be a trendsetter (see this quote from mark hendrickson’s plancast post-mortem), and socialize/chat/make friends.  When I watch a movie or TV show offline, it’s not intrinsically social. In the middle of plays in a sports game, I socialize with friends about what just happened. After a show, I socialize with my wife or friends about what we just saw… but not really during it.

Like I read twitter, facebook, instagram, and foursquare to keep up with what my friends are doing… I’d love to know more about what they are watching… I THINK.  Some of my friend’s music tastes overlap with mine, but it’s a fraction of all of them.  I imagine video would overlap more with entire population, so what are those videos? Some friends post things to Facebook, but sometimes I don’t have 10 mins to watch… nor do I want to watch for 3mins here, etc. It takes a lot for me to click play on a 4min video while looking at Facebook.

I guess what I’m saying is I wish I had a queued up list of popular stuff that friends liked, commented on, and obviously shared. Personally I’d watch it while I’m on the elliptical. But so far, I don’t have a comfortable method of watching online video with the wife…. I suppose I need a boxee or something.

Would kind of be neat if there was a TV show, or a queue, that was the 30 best [or most popular] minutes of video online.  Or 20 minutes.  Something that everyone in the world should be watching, and is the start of a conversation amongst people.  When I see friends, TV shows get mentioned and we comment on “yeah, wasn’t it so funny when in Big Bang Theory this past week they were making highschool jokes about Settlers of Catan — ‘wood’”, etc. If there was 20 minutes of must-see video each day that the social pressures of peers talking about all the time, basically made it required viewing for me, then I’d be watching. Til then, I’ll catch the ‘double rainbow’ or ‘sexy sax man’ videos when I hear enough people talking about them or a friend skype’s me a link to it and I’m able to invest a few minutes to watch it (and tell my friend they are crazy, or tell all my friends they must see this video too).