Social Networks and Online Shopping Collide to Create “Social Shopping”
I work in e-commerce, and recently I’ve been fascinated to watch the industry scramble to react to a new phenomenon: the collision of social networks and online shopping, which has opened up a new frontier of social shopping. This post explores the past, present, and future of social shopping.
The Past: Online Shopping Develops Independently of Social Networks
In the last few years, companies have pioneered new ways of selling products that their physical counterparts haven’t done: they allowed customers to contribute to the dialog. They started by allowing customers to rate products (like 3 our of 5 stars), but then they opened it up even more by allowing customers to individually voice what they think about a particular product by writing personal review–both good and bad. Still, customers had to seek out the e-commerce store, navigate to a particular product page, and scroll down to discover what others thought.
Next, e-commerce sites, led by Amazon, added the ability for customers to point peer customers to other products by stating things they recommended in addition to or instead of the current product. Then some sites started to allowed customers to associate metadata to images and products through tags. For the first time, customers were carving out navigation paths for future shoppers–a job up until recently that has been meticulously controlled by information architects and designers. Users now had an exponentially greater number of paths through the site than an information architect could even design or maintain.
But even at this stage, the e-commerce site still had some ability to manage user-generated content. The experience design and technology teams were building the forms that customers used to rate and review products, and they controlled how the content was displayed. Up until now, e-commerce sites had some control, but that was all about to change.
The Present: Social Networks Start to Form Around Online Shopping
Recently the e-commerce scene has been flipped on its head, and there are now sites springing up that are driven by end users and help people navigate to individual products that are sold at any number of other e-commerce sites. Instead of going to an e-commerce store, customers find products through recommendations and then later find out where to buy that product.
In this new world, the e-commerce companies have no say in what types of data customers create and how that content is displayed and used; that control is now in the hands of the community or the independent site that collects customer feedback. The boundaries of social networks and internet shopping have blurred to give us a new world of social shopping.
Here are some examples of social shopping sites:
Buzzillions: Their tagline is “Find the right product for you … guided by actual buyers!” Buzzillions lets people start shopping by picking the type of product they are interested in, independent of brand. The site then asks you to specify the different criteria you are looking for and matches that up with what customers have said about different products.
Kaboodle: Kaboodle helps you create shopping lists and share lists and other recommendations with friends and the entire community. Users create profile pages and images of featured shoppers appear on the homepage.
ShopWiki:
This advanced search engine crawls the web for new products and then lets visitors add information about the millions of products (241,811,937 to be exact at the time I’m writing this).
Stylehive:
This site allows customers to create interconnected “hives” of their favorite finds. There’s also a blog to help people stay up to date with what’s hot and what celebraties are buying.
ThisNext: Instead of looking at other products by the type of thing I’m looking for, I now get to browse by theme. Let’s say I click on a picture of girafe wallpaper (http://www.thisnext.com/item/8E4B312C/wallpaper-menagerie). From there it asks me if I like it, and if so, what do I like about it: the fact that it’s a giraffe or that it’s yellow or that it’s wallpaper? From there it can hone in on my tastes and find other things I might like.
Wists: This site has been described as the Billboard charts of shopping. It allows people to create all sorts of lists (favorites, wish lists, etc) and share those lists. It aggregates the data and comes up with a top 10 list for all sorts of products.
The Short-Term Future: Social Shopping Revolutionizes They Way We Find and Buy Online
Currently, social shoppers are a niche market. The entire idea is in its early stages and has several hurdles to overcome before it can hit the mainstream. The savvy folks who read this blog might be down with tag clouds, but the casual online shopper doesn’t know (or care) what a blog is. There are 3 key factors need to increase this break out to happen:
#1: Familiarity
As with any new technology, as more people get used to seeing these new features and using them to make purchase decisions, more people will be inclined to chime in and add their own tags and comments.
#2: Personal Benefit
Even though only a small percentage of online users are driving these social networks, many people are already benefiting from the content this minority generates. When people start using peer-generate content in their personal shopping decisions, they will feel more inclined to reciprocate.
#3: Ease of Use
We need to keep raising the bar of usability as we introduce new features. Those of us who are web designers need to make sure we build user assistance into the interface every time we add elements your users might not readily understand.
Example: One feature we added as part of the recent redesign of the Barnes & Noble website is a search cloud on the homepage that displays the day’s most popular search terms. A recent user test revealed that most customers understood why the terms were grouped that way. They referenced that they had seen tag clouds and search clouds on other sites. But to our surprise, an overwhelming majority of those participants (even college students who knew all about blogs and other Web 2.0 elements) did not make the connection that larger words were search terms that appeared more frequently. Instead, the participants stated that sites use the differing font sizes for aesthetic reasons. In response, we added a bit of on-screen guidance explaining that “The Larger the Words, the More Popular”. This simple example shows that even after new elements are adopted, they are not always understood by users.
This remarkable shift toward social shopping is causing e-commerce sites to rethink how they can play in this new space. Because the information spaces are beyond their control, the trick is to find ways to get customers to be ambassadors for your products. Over the next few years, we’ll see companies create more and more widgets and plug-ins that allow customers to sell products on behalf of e-commerce sites directly from their Facebook profile or to promote products from their blogs.
The Long-Term Future
So what should we expect to see from social shopping a few years out? Will we see things like product placement on YouTube clips? You betcha! Beyond that horizon, social shopping will no doubt morph in to a new type of online environment that is beyond our wildest comprehension today. I can’t wait to see what we come up with!
*Special thanks to my colleague Baron Lane who introduced me to several of these new sites. You can check out his country music blog at http://www.twangnation.com
Related posts:
Did you enjoy this post? subscribe now to get all of the posts Comments (1)