I observed my first Smack­Shop­ping live inter­net game show today. Build­ing on the last minute bid­ding fun of eBay, and the social networking/buying power of a large group of com­mit­ted pur­chasers, Jelly­Fish offers an intriguing experience.

As a semi-standard demand con­sol­id­ator, Jelly­Fish has agree­ments with a wide range of nor­mal retail­ers who con­tract to provide X amount of dis­count for bulk orders facil­it­ated by Jelly­Fish. Pur­chases earn the dis­count with is split 50/50 with the Jelly­Fish buyer. So there is a buy­ing incent­ive through Jelly­Fish. But what makes this fun???

Well, for peri­ods through­out the day, there is a real time games how. ‘Play­ers’ (any Jelly­Fish user) vote on par­tic­u­lar products that they’d really like to buy. When the show starts, the product dis­count increases until the fixed num­ber of units are sold. The game involves try­ing to be the last buyer in and there­fore get the highest dis­count before the deal is done. The top play­ers are then ranked and points are awar­ded based on the top ten fin­ish­ers. In addi­tion, observ­ers can guess at what the final dis­cout will be and get a chance to spin a vir­tual roul­ette wheel to win an addi­tional prize.

In the game that I observed, buy­ers were after a Play­Sta­tion 2 game which in the end went at about a 45% dis­count. The closest guesser then spun the wheel and it landed on SmackShop’s choice. They gave him $50, but pos­sible prizes ranged from a Wii, to vari­ous other elec­tronic doodads in the $250–500 range.

Its pretty easy to see how this game can become addict­ive for those who crave a good deal. It also has a lot to say about the future of shop­ping. The idea of con­sol­id­at­ing demand and get­ting retail­ers to bid for your busi­ness has been explored using the net by a vari­ety of star­tups over the past few years. The inter­est­ing thing about Smack Shop­ping is that is that it puts the game right up front, and pin­points that which makes the eBay exper­i­ence excit­ing and fun. The other aggreg­at­ors made their inten­tion to deliver shop­ping value clear, but per­haps failed to note that the thrill of the deal is the sweet spot and if you can play it up, you can make a killing yourself.

Lucky for me, Cana­dians can only wtch Smack Show for now. They prom­ise to open it up to Canucks soon, but right now as many mer­chants will not ship to Canada they have a made a blanket rule. Cana­dians can use nor­mal Jelly Fish shop­ping, and determ­ine whether indi­vidual mer­chants will ship to Canada.