A few years ago, major retailer Target announced it was going to part ways with Amazon and roll out its own e-commerce platform. Not only did this move represent a shift from collaborating with the great behemoth of online retail to competing against it, the transition also presented other major problems, even for a Fortune 50 company and a global retail leader. Target needed to quickly create more than 50,000 unique product descriptions with copy that was engaging and consistent with the brand, a task that would take more than six man-years.

In order to ensure its products could be found by Internet browsing shoppers, Target needed to make sure its inventory ranked highly in search engines, and some of the traditional short cuts couldn't be applied.  Simply importing manufacturers' product descriptions is bad for SEO and would result in Target's product pages being buried in Google search results. Other options such as ramping up in-house or freelance writing staff would require too many resources to hire, train and oversee the effort; and offshoring the work was also impossible due to the specific cultural knowledge required to get the descriptions just right.

Instead Target turned to a form of crowdsourcing, and the project was completed in just three months and at a fraction of the cost of completing the required tasks in-house.

Crowdsourcing’s adoption as a model for sourcing work is gaining ground within the large enterprise segment. Our recent Crowdsourcing Industry Report shows its strongest prevalence lies within the Internet Services (29%), Media and Entertainment (20%) and Technology (18%) sectors.

However, while retail in general only accounts for a much smaller slice of the market (6%) for large e-retailers like Target, crowdsourcing is now a stock solution for meeting business demands in the highly competitive online retail sector where the number of eyeballs, time spent window-shopping and the number of shopping cart check-outs means either high profits or failure online.

On Thursday June 21, 2012, Crowdsourcing.org will be co-hosting a webinar on how Crowdsourcing is changing the way that smart retailers operate.  Also hosting the session is Serv.io, the crowdsourcing firm that worked with Target to deliver all those product descriptions at a 60 percent savings over using an in-house or freelance team, and demanding just a few hours of time overall from Target content staff.

During the webinar, we'll hear from Carl Esposti of Crowdsourcing.org and massolution about the growth of the enterprise crowdsourcing market and its potential for the retail and e-commerce segment, and Sue Ellen Speight of Servio will explain how the company taps its crowd to help clients like Target, eBay and others.

The webinar "eCommerce and the Crowd: How CrowdSourcing is Changing the Way Smart Retailers Operate" with Servio's Sue Ellen Speight and Carl Esposti, founder of Crowdsourcing.org and massolution is set for Thursday June 21, 2012 from 11am - 11:45am PDT.

You can register now by visiting this link, and spend 45 minutes on June 21 learning how niche crowds with skilled workers can support ecommerce goals of ever-increasing complexity.