Social shopping
Encyclopedia
Social Shopping is a method of e-commerce where shoppers' friends become involved in the shopping experience. Social shopping attempts to use technology to mimic the social interactions found in physical malls and stores.
s, but also by sharing information about their users with retailers. Some sites concentrate on the user interactions that pass on information and recommendations that are hard to acquire from sales personnel.
There are various ways for stores to use social shopping features. Some websites offer a combination of comparison shopping with social features. Others combines physical stores and social features, for example, allowing customers to share finds and deals from physical retailers through the phone and website and interact with users that have similar shopping interests.
Some websites use established online social networks and tools rather than trying to build their own. by implementing applications like Facebook Connect which allows users to ask their Facebook friends' opinions on purchases directly on the social shopping site. Others implement the Twitter
API, allowing their users to share content through tweets.
Five categories of social shopping
Social shopping spans a wide range of definitions but can largely be divided into five categories: Group shopping sites, Shopping communities, Recommendation engines, Shopping Marketplaces, and Shared Shopping.-
- Group shopping sites include companies like Half Off DepotHalf Off Depot-About the Company:Borne of necessity, Half Off Depot understands the challenges associated with running a small business & provide a cost effective-solution to acquire new customers for merchants that turn into loyal repeat customers...
, Plum districtPlum districtPlum District is a group buying website that focuses on mothers and their buying power. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and offers deals in North America as a 'Everywhere Deal' and in local markets including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle.In March 2011, the...
, GrouponGrouponGroupon is a deal-of-the-day website that features discounted gift certificates usable at local or national companies. Groupon was launched in November 2008, the first market for Groupon was Chicago, followed soon thereafter by Boston, New York City, and Toronto...
, KactoosKactoosKactoos is a social network service and group buying site created by Kactoos Group and headquartered in Miami, Florida. Its slogan is "Shop together and save". Kactoos is available in Spanish, English and Portuguese....
, LivingSocialLivingSocial-Business model:LivingSocial offers a new deal each day to its members who subscribe via email. Once a deal has been purchased, members are e-mailed their redemption vouchers the following business day, around 5 a.m. local time...
, and BuyWithMeBuyWithMeBuyWithMe is a group buying website allowing consumers to leverage group buying power to get discounts with local merchants. The company is headquartered in New York City. Funding was obtained via a group of angel investors. BuyWithMe's first market was Boston, where restaurants including UFood...
.
- These sites encourage groups of people to buy together at wholesale prices, essentially a CostcoCostcoCostco Wholesale Corporation is the largest membership warehouse club chain in the United States. it is the third largest retailer in the United States, where it originated, and the ninth largest in the world...
-like model for the online world.
- Shopping communities bring like-minded people together to discuss, share, and shop.
- Using the wisdom of crowdsThe Wisdom of CrowdsThe Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better...
, users communicate and aggregate information about products, prices, and deals. Many sites allow users to create custom shopping lists and share them with friends. To date, fashion communities have largely dominated this space. Yet, shopping communities are not limited exclusively to fashion. Other shopping communities include Listia, an online community for free stuff. Activity-based clubs (such as travel or adventure-sports clubs) are the in-person analogy for this category of social shopping.
- Recommendation engines allow shoppers to provide advice to fellow shoppers.
- The in-store analogy for this category of social shopping is asking a fellow shopper for advice. Traditional online product review companies such as AmazonAmazon.comAmazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
have helped many consumers to date but currently emphasize obtaining and giving advice to strangers. Up and coming social shopping startups such as ShopSociallyShopSociallyFounded in 2009, ShopSocially is a free social shopping website operated from Sunnyvale, California. ShopSocially became available for public beta testing in May 2010 and was officially launched in October 2010. In April 2011, ShopSocially launched a Consumer-to-consumer marketing platform for...
, ShopowShopowShopow.com is an online social shopping website and shopping search engine. In 2009 Mike Harty and Kevin Flood founded Shopow, meaning "shopper power", which was meant as a place where users could "share deals, reviews and trends with friends"...
, BlippyBlippyBlippy is a social media sharing site operated from Palo Alto, California by a company of the same name, for users to post and follow each other's updates about their purchases of goods and services. It has been described as the "Twitter of personal finance", and is often compared with Twitter...
, Left of Trend and SwipelySwipelySwipely is an online service and social network where members can share purchases with friends. Users post and recommend purchases, see where their friends are spending and what their friends are buying...
encourage conversations around purchases with a user's friends or acquaintances.
- Social Shopping Marketplaces which bring sellers and buyers together to connect and transact
- The offline analogy for this category is a farmers market or bazar. The marketplace brings together independent sellers and creates a forum for them to display and sell their wares to buyers. The marketplace affords buyers and sellers methods to connect and communicate whilst also performing the role of ecommerce facilitator for sellers and discovery engine for buyers.
- Shared Shopping mechanisms for catalog-based ecommerce sites, which allow shoppers to form ad-hoc collaborative shopping groups in which one person can drive an online shopping experience for one or more other people, using real-time communication among themselves and with the retailer.
- Examples of this are DecisionStep’s Shop Together software; Quorus Discuss;United Cloud’s Shared Shopping; and IBM Websphere Coshopping.
- Group shopping sites include companies like Half Off Depot
Benefits of social shopping for retailers
Social shopping sites may generate revenue not only from advertising and click throughClick-through rate
Clickthrough rate is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. The clickthrough rate of an advertisement is defined as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown , expressed as a percentage. For example, if a banner ad is delivered 100...
s, but also by sharing information about their users with retailers. Some sites concentrate on the user interactions that pass on information and recommendations that are hard to acquire from sales personnel.
Benefits of social shopping for customers
Social shopping sites motivate their users to participate in various ways. Many sites offer nothing of specific value in return, relying on the user's intrinsic sense of social reward to share information with the community. Other sites offer tangible rewards for sharing information. Other sites offer incentives in the form of reputations points that can be redeemed for gifts.Extensions of social shopping
Social shopping can also exist in the real-world beyond the obvious swapping of consumer stories with people one knows. For example, when you walk into a dressing room, the mirror reflects your image, but you also see images of the apparel item and celebrities wearing it on an interactive display. A webcam also projects an image of the consumer wearing the item on the website for everyone to see. This creates an interaction between the consumers inside the store and their social network outside the store. The technology behind this system uses RFID.There are various ways for stores to use social shopping features. Some websites offer a combination of comparison shopping with social features. Others combines physical stores and social features, for example, allowing customers to share finds and deals from physical retailers through the phone and website and interact with users that have similar shopping interests.
Some websites use established online social networks and tools rather than trying to build their own. by implementing applications like Facebook Connect which allows users to ask their Facebook friends' opinions on purchases directly on the social shopping site. Others implement the Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
API, allowing their users to share content through tweets.
See also
- social networks
- web 2.0Web 2.0The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
- social commerceSocial commerceSocial commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services....
- electronic commerceElectronic commerceElectronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, eCommerce or e-comm, refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. However, the term may refer to more than just buying and selling products online...
- communal shoppingCommunal shoppingCommunal shopping is a method of shopping where the shopper enlists others to participate in the purchase decision. This added participation empowers the shopper by giving additional points of view...
Further reading
- http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3719726
- http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=19&entry_id=11274
- http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-11-23-social-shopping_x.htm
- http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/computers/story/0,,1816571,00.html
- Adweek: 2007 Social Shopping Study by PowerReviews and E-Tail Group
- http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9bc1724c-de90-11dc-9de3-0000779fd2ac.html
- The Power of Social Shopping
- Social Shopping 101, a Practitioners Prime