Servicing and/or providing spontaneous collaboration between a shopper and consultants concerning a shopping goal includes deriving information about the shopper's physical or logical proximity to a particular product category, combined with the current contents of his or her shopping cart is used to determine one or more shopping goals; as well as information about each potential consultant, including physical proximity, willingness to consult, areas of expertise and recent experience is used to rank each consultant in terms of relevance to one or more shopping goal.