I’m a huge fan of Widgets and Gadgets.  Not because I use them so much, but because of the possibilities.

There’s a lot out there, but much of it is pretty amateur.  Still the ideas are good and illustrates plenty of opportunities for retailers to connect with their customers and interact with them in a way that the customer finds convenient for them.

comScore estimates that 625 million people worldwide viewed or engaged with a widget in June of 2008. According to Forrester Research, 59 percent of adult social networking site users and 64 percent of youth social networking users use widgets, and almost one-third of all U.S. online youth use widgets.

A few months ago I came across some Google gadgets (seen below), such as GameStop’s Just Arrived and Coming Soon gadgets.  They’re relatively simple and bland but do the trick if you’re interested in keeping up with the latest games.  Some of the more interesting ones are the ‘Shop in-one-tiny-box’ that let you configure the categories and merchandise that you’re interested in.  Below are some examples that let me flip through the latest styles quickly from a single few of my favorite retailers (problem is these aren’t actually my favorite retailers, but the selection right now is limited).  DealCatcher shows me the latest on-line coupons.  There are plenty of Deal of the Day widgets.  One of my favorites that I can’t find right now is a BestBuy widget that allows you to configure the widget to specific products and store locations that you want to watch the inventory of.  This would have been great 2 years ago when I was trying to find a Wii … if you were like me, you know that inventory lasted anywhere between 2 minutes and 2 hours after arrival.

The thing about these gadgets are they are relatively easy to create.  I even created one with a free on-line tool I found from Sprout that allows you to build, publish and manage widgets, mini-sites, mashups, banners, etc.  No kidding, it’s really easy.  It took me 30 minutes to figure out how to use the tool and create a gadget that I published to both my Google home page and Facebook page. 

So the bad thing about these are that like I said, even non-technical people like me can create and publish these things … and they are.  So that’s why I can’t find the BestBuy gadget anymore, there are just too many to sift through.  Also, many of the ones I downloaded a few months ago are wonky and/or don’t work at all any more.  In case it wasn’t clear, it doesn’t look like any of the gadgets I’ve been playing with are created by the retailers themselves, but rather just by some consumer and posted to the growing repository.

There are also plenty of examples of retailers producing advertising gadgets.  There are some nice examples below but for the most part they’re just advertising.  The JC Penney gadget allows you to upload a picture of your friend and add Mr. Potato Head like pieces, but again other than entertainment I’m not sure what it gives the consumer.  I don’t really want them on my Google desktop, nor am I inclined to share them in any manner.  I’m not sure I even understand the retail value that the Mr. Potato Head gadget brings back to JC Penney.

So I was ‘delighted’ to see some really innovative examples out there that provided value to both the retailer and consumer.

Internet Retailer recently featured an article on selling Widgets where Zazzle.com was highlighted. 

Zazzle created a widget that enables customers to download the widget, select their own merchandise and create a product gallery enabling them to launch a mini version of the Zazzle e-commerce store on their MySpace pages.  Zazzle handles the payment and order fulfillment.

Btw, Zazzle has a really interesting model and it’s worth checking out their site.  It’s an on-demand retail platform offering one of a kind products.  Through the site, consumers can design and purchase products and/or sell their designs to other consumers including a referral program allowing consumers to earn royalties. 

Tailgate Technologies, one of the pioneers in Transactional Marketing has developed a new type of video widget in which shoppers can directly buy the products they are viewing:

You can see a demo of the above widget that allows a consumer to find and purchase tickets from a gadget on their Facebook page.  I personally wouldn’t be purchasing enough tickets to have a widget on my Facebook page, but if I could browse and purchase from all my favorite shoe stores in a single view or application, I’d be all over that.

So like I said, there’s a lot of opportunity out there to create some really great retail gadgets or widgets.  Much like RSS readers, the idea of going out to all your favorite web sites to find the latest information or products is time consuming and quickly becoming dated. Why not aggregate information from your favorite or regular sites and have it delivered to you to easily access and browse?

P.S. If you want to understand the different types of Widgets & Gadgets out there?  Here’s a good article … http://shoplocalblog.com/2008/11/19/understanding-the-many-different-types-of-widgets-gadgets/