Social Shopping: Combining Your Favorite Online Pastimes into One

You are checking your Facebook profile, scanning pictures of your closest friends’ latest excursions, when you come across a picture of a friend in a shirt that you would love to have. What if you could? That may soon be the case. A new kind of e-commerce called “social shopping” is putting a new twist on things. Social shopping combines online shopping with online social networking.

The idea of “social shopping” is a way for companies to manage the billions of dollars generated annually in online sales. Features of the system include product ratings, reviews, "best of" lists, and other people's recommendations. An example of such a program is Pick Lists from Yahoo. It lets users create personalized pages listing their favorite products with reviews or descriptions of each product. Others can make comments, and integration with the Yahoo 360 social networking service allows members to see whether the author of a Pick List is connected to them. You would be able to buy the shirt your friend was wearing in her Facebook picture without having to spend countless hours searching aimlessly for it online."We're taking e-commerce and making it user-centric," said Chris Saito, senior director of product for Yahoo Shopping. "Finding a great review written by a friend you trust is a powerful combination." Companies can combine what they know of consumer spending habits online with what they know about social networking to increase profits.

Social shopping provides further opportunity for the realm of affiliate marketing. Merchants may begin compensating individuals for the sales they are helping to drive. A person would receive a payment from a merchant when someone clicks on the comment on their site to the product for sale on the merchant’s site. There is also the availability to gain revenue from advertising by allowing merchants to place ads on the individual’s site. It is unclear for certain how large of an increase in sales companies will experience from this exposure, but they know that exposure drives sales, and sales increase profits.

The outcome of the new commerce would be to increase consumer spending and consequently foster growth of the economy. In recent years, social communities like Facebook and MySpace have been providing new outlets for companies and individuals to get exposure to the masses. As the New York Times comments, “These sites are hoping to ride the MySpace wave by gathering people in one place to swap shopping ideas. And like MySpace, the sites are designed for both browsing and blogging.” Companies have links to their products beyond their base website. They receive the wanted attention they desire and are able to compete with companies who have a much larger marketing budget.