All entries for Monday 01 February 2010

Social Shopping Site – new trend or new power

Writing about web page http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/01/thisnext-stylehive-curatemedia/

I noticed since last year that social shopping sites are arising as the new trendy thing. The idea is that consumers shop in a social networking environment. The key of such shopping is the usage of so called "wisdom of crowds", users communicate and aggregate information about products, prices, and deals.

Many sites allow users to create custom shopping lists and share them with friends. Others concentrate on the user interactions that pass on information and recommendations that are hard to acquire from sales personnel. Some services even allow users to shop together online to complete the social environment.

Although the business model is still to be proven, there are several sites already in the fame, such as the one in the techcrunch news.

A interesting thought, is social shopping a new trend, or is it about new power. I would treat it as new power. Reasons:

1. Word-of-Mouth marketing. It would be so easy to spread the good/bad comments on a certain product: unlike other site, people would treat the review from their friends as word-of-mouth story rather than ads.

2. Price comparison. It's not difficult nowadays to integrate price comparison into a social networking site. With all the friends' comment, and a price comparison, you need not Google "moneysupermarket" any more, ever hotukdeals.

3. Something more powerful: Group Buy. That would be the new thing from my poing of view. If friends are going to purchase the same products, even virtual friends, they will be able to make an Group Buy (Bulk Purchasing), so the price can be knocked down even more.

So there will not only be trustworthy reviews, price comparison and hot deals, on top of that, more discount from bulk buying, will make social shopping site successful. On the contrary, traditional e-commerce sites need to watch out!

Xiao Ma : 01 Feb 2010 09:57 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem