Apparel & accessory specialty retailer Wet Seal recently launched the Shop With Me application from Sesh, Inc., a real-time, interactive social shopping application on www.wetseal.com. Sesh’s technology platform is designed to break down one of the biggest barriers for online retailing, the inability for shoppers to easily and quickly get opinions from friends and family on potential purchases.

While online shopping has proved to be the bright spot in retail in Q4 2009, it’s traditional a solitary activity.  “The Web made shopping convenient, but the face-to-face mall experience was lost,” said Jarrod Rogers, CEO, Sesh, Inc. “For The Wet Seal’s demographic, young women, shopping is social. Their friends’ opinions matter most. They want those opinions now.”

Designed to cater to consumers’ tendency to trust a friend’s recommendation over all others, the Shop With Me platform is designed to enable customers to instantly send an invitation via chat to their friends on Facebook, AIM, Bebo and ICQ to shop together on wetseal.com.  Friends browse together with an unobstructed same view, while they scroll, navigate and mark up the pages in a synchronized shopping experience.

Sesh aims to provide an environment that supports consumers as they shop with friends live and obtain immediate purchase validation without ever leaving the retailer’s site. The solution is designed to help online retailers benefit by leveraging social service traffic and driving more customers to their site, while providing an interactive shopping experience.