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As a result of the increasing importance of the digital world, the retail industry must adjust its marketing and distribution measures to meet the challenge. The number of consumers who buy goods on the Internet has rapidly increased in the past few years. The main questions remaining are how to reach the well informed, digitally networked consumers and how to win them over.
A retailer's online success depends on several factors. Some important ones are:
The term "crowdsourcing" is a word combination that comes from crowd and outsourcing. Tasks and projects are delegated to the work force and intelligence of a "crowd" of Internet users. Internet users who do "paid crowdsourcing" are paid for their work.
The crowd consists of Internet users over 18 years of age with varied interests, skills, expertise, consumer behavior, cultural and social backgrounds. They are therefore consumers like you and me. Consumers who are potential retail trade customers and who know what interests appeal to them better than anyone else. Who or what could be better suited to generate relevant content for retail trade websites than the crowd?
For the most part, crowdsourcing providers have a network comprised of thousands of clickworkers, freelancers registered with the provider. They process orders and individual customer requests. The orders are completed by means of the microjob principle. Large orders are broken down into self-contained microjobs and offered to qualified clickworkers for processing on the online platform. This means that a number of microjobs are processed simultaneously, and the orders are completed in a short time. After completion, the microjobs are subjected to stringent quality and plagiarism checks and then reassembled as a whole.
The uses of the crowdsourcing platforms are almost unlimited. Any retailer can consider how the benefits of crowdsourcing can be used to meet their own demands and realize their ideas. For instance, in search assignments for the retail industry, the clickworker searches for manufacturing data and information about competitors, as well as address data for distribution online.
image: James Cridland via Flickr cc (some rights reserved)
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