By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
3/10/2009
What is social shopping? Rather than propose a definition to you, I would really like to know the answer. The term is thrown around rather a lot lately, and actually has been over-used since the first days of "co-browsing." The technology is certainly better today than it was in say, 2001. However, what social shopping means - and what it could mean - still feels an awful lot like the Wild West. And it is still subject to the "gut test": I don't know how to define it, but I'll know it when I see it.
Here are a couple of examples of what I mean. Witness RetailFans.com. This company presents a very old-school, kind of traditional "social shopping" site. Users post items they like, others rate them, and retailfans.com becomes something of an aggregation site for the intersection between "friends" and the products they like. Kind of like digg, but for shopping. Is this social shopping? My first take is no. This is a social site focused on shopping, but if I sign up for this site, I won't know any of the people there. And my taste may not align with the majority votes that surface top products either. Is there a possibility of finding products I might not have been aware of, and that I might like? Yes. But unless I'm sure that the other people voting are "like me," the odds of my finding that really cool item in the long tail of what gets posted are about as a good as finding that mythic needle in a haystack. And while I could make new friends through interactions on this site, it doesn't really do much to connect me more closely with the people I already know.
What about WujWuj, a "group buying" platform? Retailers install a widget from WujWuj on their site, and set pricing tiers and a time frame. Consumers sign up for the product they want to buy, and the more people that also buy the product, the bigger the discount they all get. When the time is up, their credit card is charged directly by the retailer, who ships the consumers the product. As the company says on its website, "Our solutions are to help retailers increase their sales through the social web." Is this social shopping? It's definitely more interesting, from the perspective that the model is based off of leveraging the people you already know, even while potentially benefiting from a network effect that involves people you don't know. But it still requires the retailer as the enabler - you couldn't really, for example, get a group together that expresses interest in a product and use that interest to negotiate a bulk rate with any willing retailer. In that regard, the social nature is only one-way, which isn't really all that social at all. And is this shopping or buying - the difference being that "buying" is but a subset of the overall "shopping" process?
Ok, so try PayParade (full disclosure: I'm on the company's advisory board). PayParade provides integration that lets retailers provide content and enable social sharing already in play on sites like MySpace and Facebook, all around products, with the consumer analytics to help identify a retailer's most influential (i.e. socially connected) customers. I think this is a really cool, timely offering for retailers trying to figure out how to tap into social networks in order to drive sales (but do please note my bias above). Like WujWuj, it has the benefit of tapping into the existing social networks of customers to drive sales. Unlike WujWuj, it has the added benefit of also tapping into social channels that consumers already use. It still requires the retailer to participate, but what I like about it is that this is tapping into a consumer trend already in play, rather than trying to shape consumers into playing how retailers want them to - so it's simply on the retailer to decide how they want to participate, or risk getting left in the dust.
Or how about co-browsing? To me, that seems the most "social" of social shopping types - just like you might go shopping with a friend at the mall or a store, you take your friend with you online. I went looking for an example of this, and found an article on Internet Retailer from 2000 on the topic. That did not bode well. A deeper reading showed that in 2000, most companies were looking at it as a way for a customer service rep in a call center to see what a consumer sees when they ask for help, rather than as a way to collaboratively shop. And of the three companies that were mentioned in the article body, none of them exist in the same incarnation we found them in 2000. IBM demo'd collaborative shopping at NRF, where two people in two completely different geographies could design a living room, for example. Is that social shopping? To me, it feels very close, but I don't know anyone who is doing that today.
I guess it comes down to this: as soon as eCommerce started taking off, retailers have tried very hard to make the online shopping experience closer to the "natural" shopping experience that happens in a store, and the term "social shopping" came about as a way to describe one aspect of that. But with the rise of social networks, "social" means something completely different - I don't know about you, but my "wide circle" of friends is wider than it's ever been, thanks to LinkedIn and Facebook. I'm the type of person that really only ever has a few close friends and some acquaintances. But thanks to social networks, I have quite a lot more acquaintances - and "closer" relationships - than I've ever had before. In that situation, social shopping can mean a lot more than any one of the examples I've highlighted here - can, in fact, mean more than all of these examples together.
Is retail ready to redefine what "social shopping" means? I don't think so. We still talk and think in terms of making the store like online and making online like the store. But we're entering a phase of technology adoption where we're taking these technologies beyond capabilities that we're used to - we're moving out of copying what we know and creating new ways of interacting that we haven't seen before. In terms of keeping up with the shopping process, there is still an awful lot of evolution ahead of us.
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