I recently read an article at businessweek.com, about crowdsourcing. The article explains how current E-commerce sites is crowdsourcing design of their products. A great example is Threadless, a T-shirt store where users can submit their designs for voting, and when a certain amount of votes are reached, the designer receives 2000$, and the design is up for sale on the website. This gives Threadless not only a new design, but also a good idea that the new design will sell, since a lot of users voted for it.

I was thinking about examples of crowdsourcing in the software business, and UserVoice.com is a good example of crowdsourcing feature idea generation, and at the same time finding out how needed a feature is. Just like Threadless does with their visitors voting up designs, visitors are voting up feature requests on UserVoice.com.

Another similar, and maybe a bit more sophisticated example is GetSatisfaction. Not only is this crowdsourcing feature generation, but also crowdsourcing bug-hunting and support.

Brands like Adidas and Nike is also crowdsourcing design, by letting their customers customize shoes and football boots, and later making their designs publicly available, letting other users get inspired.

Has E-commerce already been crowdsourced?

I think that one of the most common things that are crowdsourced in E-commerce is implicitly the generation of credibility through public customer reviews and feedback. Amazon does an amazing job of this on their product pages where you can find several customer reviews.

What about lead generation? You’ve probably seen loads of ‘Send to a friend’ buttons on E-commerce sites. Also add to del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and all those online bookmarking services. This will eventually result in link building.

If you’re about to start a new company, website, E-commerce site or something else where you’ll need to design logo, website and etc., those tasks can easily be crowdsourced. Using services like 99Designsyou can make your design tasks a public contest where hundreds of thousands designers can submit their suggestions. You put a prize up for grabs, and designers will start competing for your money. A great way to milk as many ideas as possible.

I really think, that when it comes to creative tasks, crowdsourcing is more preferable than outsourcing – simply because you want to see lots of different ideas, and not just a couple of ideas your regular supplier of creativity will give you.