Social Shopping now or never
social shopping - The internet dramatically changed the way we do stuff. Until recently, the internet made our lives easier in a lot of ways except shopping. Recently shoppers learnt the internet to be a great place to shop, find best bargins and get the lastest updates on their favourite brands. Similarly, more retailers are using social media to selltheir products on the internet. Stores want to make a online experience, which is comparable to a conventional shopping happening, by allowing social communication and feedbacks from friends and family members. This is a new kind of e-commerce called social shopping.
Social shopping may involve shopping communities, crowd shopping or shopping marketplaces. In shopping communities, several people can join in a chat room and chat together, sharing different deals and recommendations of products they have bought, or think of buying. These kinds of sites make social shopping more efficient, since it creates confidence for consumers about which products or deals are worth trying, and which are not. In a shopping marketplace, buyers join with with other buyers, as well as sellers, to discuss deals and products. This is a beneficial way of recommending new products and getting to hear of their features straight from the producers. In a group shopping, services offer discounts to shoppers who shop in bulk. Here, shoppers can take groups of friends along on a shopping spree to profit from discounted prices.
Social shopping now or never. Social shopping is how we shop in the age of the internet and, thus, more buyers join the hype of social commerce to discover the products they want. User find the latest reviews, promotions or learn about new fashion trends. Similarly, consumers can also use communities like group gifting or donating towards a cause. In a group gifting, friends gather on the internet, through the service, to discover a present another friends anniversary. Donation sites work by volunteer groups advertising on social shopping sites, motivating people and asking to donate a small amount. Donators are then informed via email on when and how the donation was gifted.
A couple of sites stand out. The top three websites would be Storenvy, Shelf9 and The Fancy.
Social shopping site Storeenvy is a community where people can interact with other shoppersand with retailers, known as the Ebay model. Joining the community is free for retailers. All stores of all retailers are then structured into an internet experience. Shoppers have the option to save favorite items for later visits, be updated with the latest infomation of stores or post discovered products and promotions on social networks. Shelf9 is social shopping community with around 19,000,000 items available from more than 500 stores world wide. People can log in using Facebook or Twitter account, find friends in the community and see their likes/dislikes, including their personal advise for products. Kaboodle is a social shopping site where users connect with each other and join groups to share tips, provide feedbacks and suggest products to shoppers.
The list of social shopping services is certainly not complete, a plethora of other websites exist. So we see that social shopping became a key ingredient in successful e-commerce, and makes shopping a social experience again.