The OTTO Store - The Future of Shopping?
A showcase of what's possible today using .NET 3.0 is the new OTTO Store that went live earlier this month. The OTTO Store is a next generation Smartclient client application jointly developed by SinnerSchrader Studios, Microsoft and OTTO using WPF, WCF and CardSpace. The application is deployed directly from the OTTO website to the users desktop using ClickOnce technology. (German only)
Despite the slick WPF user experience the site is also one of the first to utilize managed Infocards to support the provisioning experience. Otto customers can associate their account with a Otto managed card backed with the self issued card of their choice. (Nice graphical walkthough of the process available here) When shopping they then use this Otto card as you would utiliize your store card in a physical store.
Since the application is a self-contained application installed on the users machine the initial download and install takes longer than it would to open a website but once installed the subsequent experience is that much richer and quicker. To make up for the intitial loading of the application OTTO plays you a video that walks through the functionality while the rest of the application is downloaded in the background.
Seeing that OTTO is in the mail-order business this type of rich brochure like experience certainly fits their business model. I'm not sure if I'd want to install an application for every online store I frequent though.
I must admit before reading about the store I've never heard about OTTO but according to this post OTTO is quite big in Europe :
OTTO, for readers outside of Europe, is the no. 1 worldwide retailer in mail-order sales, and no. 2 behind Amazon in online sales. Maybe hard to believe, considering almost noone knows their name outside of Europe, but apparently it’s a fact.
Here's some more posts exploring in more detail the technical details of the site's implementation :