Social Shopping

2
Social shopping has manifested itself
historically in two distinct but related ways.
The first is commercially driven social online
shopping tied to a user behavior during and
after transacting (both on and offline). The
second is the more traditional word-of-mouth,
just people discussing shopping with other
people. In either form, the rise of the social
Web and the shift in how consumers share
and consume information has changed the
way people make their purchasing decisions,
develop brand loyalties and ultimately
become brand advocates.
The first case of social shopping is all about
leveraging social media, and increasingly
mobile platforms, by both consumers
and retailers. Consumers can take full
advantage of social media “hooks” in either
a proprietary brand retailer’s website or via
a third-party mobile application or website
to share their ratings, reviews, desires and
opinions on products, goods and services they
engage with or encounter on virtual shelves
or in the aisles of real-world retailers. These
user-generated “likes” and content bytes are
socialized throughout shoppers’ personalized
social graphs and beyond to create interesting
dynamics for promoting and influencing
consumer behavior beyond what is possible
with simply paid traditional media promotion.
The question is who will control the process
and use it to their benefit? It’s necessarily
true that the relationship between customer
and retailer depends primarily on the latter,
so how retailers manage the tools of social
media will, to an as yet unknown extent,
either make their customers their “friends”
or their ex-customers and antagonists.
That said, the goal of any retailer is to let
the product and its customers market the
product.
The other kind of social shopping is the
simple non-commercial act of friends telling
friends, relatives, acquaintances, co-workers
and even selected strangers what they
bought, where they bought it, how much they
paid and how much they liked the experience
and the product. This kind of trusted word-
of-mouth has long been an essential element
of successful marketing and traditional
shopping, and indeed trust between strangers
is one of the foundations of capitalism. But
Introduction: Trust Me, Shop Here

3
the phrase “social shopping” as a kind of
matured Internet meme now references the
growing ubiquity and falling prices of both
Web access and mobile platforms for such
access. Word-of-mouth now also means the
deliberate use of social media to leverage
word-of-mouth into their marketing as
retailers try to incorporate their customers’
and potential customers’ online social
identities with their own online marketing and
product-development strategies.
Ultimately, the issue of social shopping/
marketing comes down to trust: how it can be
earned, protected and exploited. This defines
the basic difference between “traditional”
eCommerce and its newest manifestation. In
the former, trust is a straightforward matter
between strangers doing business either
between themselves via a known entity, or
between themselves and that entity itself. By
contrast, social shopping incorporates input
from individuals who may not be partaking
in any given transaction at all, but who may
merely be active and interested observers.
How many degrees of separation is their trust
good for?
Brands are learning how to harness the power
of social shopping by actively participating
in the conversation and incorporating social
tools into their branded site. They trust
that the benefits far exceed the risk. By
encouraging active sharing of the shopping
experience, brands are providing a platform
for their consumers to communicate on the
brands’ behalf and engage their social graph.

4
Social shopping is not a new concept.
From the beginning of eCommerce, the
interconnected world of the Internet inherently
provided the means to extend word-of-mouth
beyond its offline origins.
Although Netscape’s debut in 1995 marked a
kind of foundational “Big Bang” in web-based
commerce, and the launching that year of SSL
(Secure Sockets Layer) encryption-protocol
lent the perception that Web-based buying and
selling could be safe, secure and user friendly,
services such as Prodigy, America Online,
and CompuServe had long been introducing
the Internet to millions. In parallel with this,
direct selling of PCs to the public (pioneered
by Michael Dell) had already begun to lower
computer prices. Thus, 1995 was a good year
for the two biggest successes of eCommerce
itself: eBay and Amazon.com. Two factors
made them both unique at the time: first, they
were online; and second, trust was recognized
as uniquely integral to their respective
success and was fostered from the outset
– specifically trust among strangers who
would almost certainly never see each other
in person, and perhaps ever deal with each
other again even after a mutually successful
transaction. Initially, both enterprises were
protected by their relative exclusiveness.
The key to the long-term success of both
eBay and Amazon.com was not just customer
feedback, but customer feedback in a
worldwide arena with increasingly affordable
access and popularity. It was understood that
enough user attention to past transactions
would necessarily increase and promote
high levels of trust. It worked, and the first
platforms of what came to be called social
shopping began to make its way up into
popular culture. By the time recommendation
engines and price engines made mass
collaborative filtering feasible in the late
1990s, broadband, smartphones, and Wi-
Fi began finding acceptance as well. Trust,
ubiquity, mobility, portability and economy
reinforced the interests of all, and a new
hybrid commercial/ social foundation was
laid. A profoundly innovative marketing tool
and customer experience was on the horizon,
and businesses began to realize that the rules
of successful retailing were about to change,
once again, in a radical way.
Social Shopping’s Pre-History:
Shop online and, by the way, what do you think?
Illustration by: Oliver Widder ›

77
If 1995 was eCommerce’s breakout year,
then social shopping’s counterpart was
2005-2006, first with the debut of YouTube,
followed in 2006 by Twitter and, later that
same year, the opening up of Facebook to
anyone 13 years of age or older. In the space
of a year, communication had, once again,
been suddenly and thoroughly revolutionized
by extreme democratization. Social shopping,
long taken for granted in its analog word-of-
mouth format, would now embark on its self-
consciously digital and mobile phase. It has
developed quickly and not at all predictably. A
2006 article in The New York Times specifically
about social shopping makes no mentionof
Facebook, instead citing Kaboodle, Wist
and StyleHive as sites hoping to ride the
MySpace wave. Today, of those three hopeful
sites, none merit their own Wikipedia article.
MySpace was overtaken by Facebook in
2008 and has since been restructured and
redesigned, without immediately apparent
success. Playing in the background of these
developments was the evolution of a perceived
“Web 2.0” capability, indicative of the growing
interactive, participatory nature of websites,
and of a greater receptivity to user-generated
content vs. the more passive viewer paradigm
of “Web 1.0.”
There are a number of different categories
of social shopping sites. There are “house”
social-shopping sites that are part of an
established retailer (like Sears) and monitored
by management; and there are those that
are strictly product-based, like Woot. There
are shopping-themed blogs that aren’t
monitored. There are sites that require
established online identities (specifically
a Facebook or Twitter identity), and sites
that permit pseudonyms that may be a bit
harder to trust. The constellation of sites
is indicative of the pervasiveness of social
shopping and has spawned numerous new
companies and names that probably deserve
their own linguistic study. Suffice it to say,
due to their late arrival on the Web, creativity
is needed (and, of course, desired) in the
naming of social media sites. The following is
a modest sample: appsavvy, Blippy, BrightKite,
BuyBooBuy, Cinematch, Chictopia, Chompon,
Flashmob, Flightpath, Foursquare, Gilt,
Gowalla, Groupon, ideeli, iLike, Justboughtit,
Klout, LivingSocial, Loopt , Moblog, Pearltrees,
PeerIndex, Pinterest, Polyvore, Pricegrabber,
ProductPulse, Shopow, ShopSocialy,
StumbleUpon, StyleFeeder, Svpply, Swipely
ThisNext, Tippr, Tumblr, TweetLevel, Wanelo,
Woot, Yammer, Yelp and Zibaba.
The Present: Is ever changing
‹ Graphic by: Yelp

9
Whatever their names, the essential social-
shopping user experience associated with
most of them is to find a retailing website;
create a public profile; follow fellow shoppers
(friends, strangers and their Twitter feeds);
see ratings and reviews of products and
services; check in at a physical location with
a smartphone; get a special discount as a
result; get invited to a flash sale; scan a
barcode and tweet the result; register to buy a
group-based coupon (as in Groupon) and hope
enough others do the same; tweet that hope;
recommend that same coupon to a friend; and
finally share all these experiences with others
who in their turn will do (or are already doing)
the same thing at other places of interest to
those within a given social graph. The leading
social-shopping-enabling platforms are
presently Facebook and Twitter because you
often can log onto and register on any given
company’s website through your Facebook or
Twitter account. Companies simply integrate
their own website-specific logon through
the Facebook or Twitter tool embedded on
their homepage, thus greatly simplifying the
process of becoming a registered member.
Now, to illustrate the dynamic nature of social
shopping and the need to understand the
current marketplace, let’s move on to several
of the current key principle players (from
Facebook to the Blogosphere) and trends
(Private Flash Sales to Mobile Commerce) of
the social shopping universe. Obviously the
landscape is constantly shifting and brands
need to be fully aware of what is happening
today while keeping an eye on what will
emerge tomorrow. This is nothing if not a
truncated list.
‹ Photo by: Groupon

Twitter. As with Facebook, customers and
website visitors of a company’s proprietary
site can register on that site through the
Twitter icon, a powerful marketing tool
connecting the two entities. Users then tweet
their own comments and see their friends’
Twitter feeds about that company (or anything
else). Registered users can automatically
follow their friends’ Twitter feeds, and tweets
can be linked to videos. Businesses now
routinely invite their customers to “follow
us on Twitter,” a textbook example of how
established enterprises quickly make use of
behaviors previously attractive to subcultures.
1111
YouTube. The marketing opportunities of
quick and easy uploading of personal and
professional videos to a potential audience
of millions is too obvious for extended
discussion. However, one does not typically
log onto a company website through YouTube,
and, although mobile devices can take and
transmit pictures and video, they are (at
present) less likely to be used for the kind of
communication that social shopping currently
favors: tweets, text messaging and blog
postings. As with anything on the Web, this will
almost certainly change in the near future as
technology and cost permit. The development
of visual equivalent tweets is no doubt already
in the making, potentially opening the door to
a host of hybrid apps.
The Players
Facebook. Friends are obviously what
Facebook is all about, and the site offers
the ability to friend someone – or some
business. When you do this, you become a
member of that person’s or business’ social
circle. In the latter case, you become a friend
by purchasing a product or service or when
you “Like” it with the click of the thumbs-up
button. For some businesses, large and small
alike, Facebook now plays a leading role in
customer outreach and service-branding,
although not everyone is sold on its potential
(see “The Future,” below). As already noted,
companies are now inviting their customers
(and potential customers) and their friends
to log on at their official websites through
Facebook’s tool. They can then find friends
who have also registered and read their
comments and see whether or what they have
purchased. Within Facebook itself, companies
establish their own branding and information
sites known as pages (some of which are
starting to offer fully transactional shopping
and have rich interactive applications), and
each site has a “Wall” feature that acts as
a blog.
‹ Graphic by: Ibraheem Youssef

Groupon and LivingSocial are currently
the leading group buying sites, although
serious competition is on the horizon. Google
has Google Offers, Facebook has Deals, Yahoo
has Local Offers and eBay has Kuponan.
Additionally, by August of 2010 there were a
reported 500 other group-buying sites, some
of them offering local-only discounts. Group
buying, sometimes characterized as “deal of
the day” offers, provide discounts based on
a variable, such as how many buyers chose to
participate. A certain number of members are
required to purchase the discounted service
within a certain time period, thus encouraging
members to contact their friends about a
specific deal.
13
Expert bloggers. The blogging universe
is by now virtually an infinite one, expanding
daily. Inevitably and rightly, some bloggers
will garner much more attention than others
(who may garner none at all), and this is also
the case with their impact on social shopping.
Particular bloggers may be sponsored, or
meld their identities within a larger blogging
site, or simply go it alone. Sites of the
moment would include myfashionlife.com,
Iamvintagelover.com, 5inch andup.blogspot.com,
culturejunkie.co.uk, gluttonforgrandeur.com
and FashionableMaven, each targeting their
own particular niche, large or small. Basically,
their purpose is to drive consumers either to
or from a website, product or service.
‹ Photo by: LivingSocial

1414
Trends
Private, invitation-only “flash” sales.
The kinds of private, invitation-only sales
found on the Web are usually open to virtually
anyone with a credit card. How private the sale
is will, as a practical matter, depend on the
merchandise and the price – the higher the
price, the more “private” it will necessarily be.
Registration is simple and sometimes can be
done through a website’s “Facebook Connect”
icon. Users are encouraged to invite friends,
either through Facebook or by submitting their
email addresses. Sales are for limited periods,
and may offer substantial discounts, thus, there
is pressure on the customer to decide quickly
to purchase or risk losing the opportunity.
The incentive for retailers is to create a buzz
around an item or brand, and these sales may
also give users a first chance look at certain
products before they are introduced into wider
circulation, thus, lending a sense of exclusivity
to the experience. But flash sales aren’t only
for customers seeking high-fashion deals.
More and more travel offerings are promoted
in the private-sale format. Current examples
catering to the luxury crowd are Jetsetter,
Spire, SniqueAway, Tablet Hotels, TripAlertz,
Vacationist, and Voyage Prive, while Vacations,
Trippo and Yuupon aim for the mass market.
Social CRM. Customer Relationship
Management has always been important
for business. Before the advent of the
Web, managing customers was (relatively)
straightforward, although never easily
perfected. But with the advent of social
shopping, the challenges businesses confront
have gotten much more complex. User ratings,
website feedback, Twitter feeds, Facebook
comments and YouTube videos are venues
for both positive and negative input from
prospective and former customers. CRM
is increasingly a matter of managing those
sources, and that focus may be termed
social CRM. The field is a new one, and both
prospective entrepreneurs and established
firms struggle to find their way through the
maze. Ultimately, the best control of social
media in the field of business is the same
as it ever was before the Web: offer the best
service and products at the best price. Thus,
social CRM is and will be about using social
media to achieve that goal – assuming such a
goal is in fact achievable at all.
Photo by: Vacationist ›

1616
Trust your friends. The now existing
abundance of online user reviews has spun
off a new, more differentiated wave of online
advice: that of your friends. Product advice
seeking users want two things: 1) insights
from someone who knows what’s important
to them, from someone they actually know,
and 2) validation from their friends that they
are buying, or simply thinking about buying,
a great product. There are an increasing
number of sites that serve up advice from
users with similar interests and similar
backgrounds (e.g. sex, age, family situation,
product usage scenario), like honk.com and
hunch.com, that get users closer to more
trustworthy advice. The site that currently
gets closest to personal, trusted advice is
groopi.es, a pilot project recently launched
by Atmosphere Proximity. It is built entirely
on real friend connections and the products
these friends know and can recommend
to each other around the virtual equivalent
of a campfire. Other brands, like airbnb.
com (private vacation and room rentals),
rely on Facebook tie-ins to offer tips from
actual connections. And we will undoubtedly
soon see many more variations on making
social shopping more trusted, personal and
relevant to individuals needs.
Mobile Commerce. The use of
smartphones to search, browse, find, price,
rate and blog as a part of the new-normal
shopping experience first became significant
in 2010 and continues to grow in popularity. As
of that year, finding a store location was the
most popular activity; searching for specific
products was next in line; general product
browsing was third; and comparison pricing
came in fourth. Exchanging comments and
making recommendations was not yet a
priority. ShopSavvy, myShopanion, Scandit,
and Bar Code Hero are current representative
examples of mobile commerce apps. Mobile
tagging, a feature that lets users scan a
product barcode to read about it and its
ratings by purchasers, is also an integral part
of the experience. Users may soon be able
to see if their friends have purchased and
rated the product, and rate and post their own
purchases. Check-in deals are proliferating
as well. Using their smartphones, users
check into a physical location. The information
is essentially public, and, in exchange the
location (i.e. a restaurant, bar or hotel) may
offer a special discount. Foursquare and
Gowalla are currently leading providers of
check-in deals.
Photo by: Dan Saelinger ›

18
In its totality, the consumer value and
popularity of all these players and trends
have contributed greatly to a new shopping
paradigm that the CMOs and marketing
agencies of the world are catching on to now
– the disappearance of the linear purchase
funnel as we know it and the emergence of
an iterative, social circle-influenced purchase
decision process, as illustrated by McKinsey
& Co. and their Consumer Decision Journey.
In this paradigm, instead of following a
more or less linear process from awareness
to purchase, where consumers winnow
a broad basket of brands (and products)
down to a single choice and then stick with
it, they constantly add and remove brands
and products from their consideration set.
Instigated by family, friends, neighbors
and their preferred social media platforms,
they make their buying decision along a
circular purchase path where post-purchase
experience and advocacy of trusted fellow
shoppers define the brands and products
that will be included in the next purchase-
decision journey.
Thanks to the circular model, marketers can
look at purchase decisions using a new way
of thinking. The focus on the post-purchase
phase (the “enjoy,” “bond” and “advocate”
steps) is now the crucial driver of the
purchase decision. The post-purchase phase
is exactly where social shopping produces its
strongest impact. This new paradigm creates
a more loyal advocate who is more likely to
buy and to share their experience. Sharing
the joy of using a product with friends and
then advocating for the product to friends is
what drives purchase decisions now—and
has actually always driven purchase decision;
it’s only that the tools to share that joy and
advocacy haven’t had such a ubiquitous
reach as they have today. Marketers will be
increasingly able to use these tools, as well to
influence what happens after the purchase is
made and get a step ahead in the race for the
next purchase.
Has Social Shopping Changed
the Journey?

19
Moving from...
To...
Awareness Familiarity Consideration Purchase
Evaluation
Buy
Enjoy
Engage
Bond/
Advocate
Credit: McKinsey & Co. and their Consumer Decision Journey

2121
In Web-time, “the future” is a highly relative
and debatable term (for example, it has
been the “Year of Mobile” for each of the past
eight years). It’s difficult to speculate too
much on a “future” further than one year
ahead of today’s calendar date, whatever that
date might be. MySpace fell from favor (for
now), and Facebook might also, for a while.
YouTube and Twitter will almost certainly face
challengers from technologies as yet unheard
of. Who knows?
At this particular moment, not everyone is
clear on the long-term potential of social
media and its attendant user-generated
content being a long-term (or even short-
term) driver of sales. Some think that
Facebook is more valuable for its user data
alone than for its use as an affiliate site
or branding portal. Expert bloggers may
help decide this particular issue, becoming
more important as affiliates themselves,
incentivized by the commissions they can
earn, or falling victim to media-burn as their
commercial perspective becomes more
apparent to a skeptical and ever-changing
readership. Certainly there is no reason to
believe that barriers to entry will grow higher.
Anyone can blog, make recommendations,
alert their friends and possibly earn a
commission, which is an outcome explicitly
promised on the website Zibaba.
We wait for a mobile app that will allow friends
to trade those commissions, convert them into
coupon futures, leverage them via eBay into
virtual currency, and then sell that currency
to an online gamer, who will then rate the
experience and, of course, tweet (or whatever
tweets will be in the future) about it. In each
stage of that imagined progression, trust is
maintained because there is an exchange of
money or the potential for a specific future
exchange of money, and a record of each
transaction is available. A needlessly negative
tweet would have consequences, just like a
needlessly negative review on eBay does. But
other aspects of social shopping are really
just based on talk, blogging, and texting – old
fashioned word-of-mouth gone digital and
mobile. And that requires trust to be effective.
As social shopping is conducted within the
environment of a social network, elements
of a virtual economy, such as virtual
money (already a big and growing factor in
online gaming), may increasingly become
determinants for the success of individuals
within those networks, as well the success
of the networks themselves. There are many
different kinds of virtual money in use around
the world and we can expect that this situation
will mirror the historical growth in the use
of money itself, with currencies gaining and
losing acceptance as representatives for
universally trusted gold and silver. In this case,
the virtual currencies would represent levels
of trust gained by participants in a social
network.
The Future is
Uncertain and Certain
‹ Photo by: Kiersten Essenpreis

22
Bly, Robert W. Blog, Schmog! The Truth About What Blogs Can (And Can’t) Do.
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007
Clapperton, Guy. This is Social Media: Tweet, Blog, Link and Post Your Way to Success.
Hoboken: John Wiley, 2009.
Dennis, Charles E. E-Retailing. Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 2004.
Fulcher, James. Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction. NY: Oxford University Press: 2004.
Guttman, Robert. Cybercash: The Coming Era of Electronic Money.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Hafner, Katie. Where Wizards Stay Up Late. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Bibliography

23
Leonard G. Kruger. Internet Domain Names: Background and Policy Issues.
Darby: Diane Publishing, 2010.
Moran, Albert. Cultural Adaption. United Kingdom: Taylor and Francis, 2009.
Postman, Joel. SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate. Berkeley: Peachpit Press, 2005.
Thomases, Hollis. Twitter Marketing: An Hour A Day. Hoboken: John Wiley, 2010
Treadaway, Chris. Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day. Hoboken: John Wiley, 2010.
Warschauer, Mark. Technology and Social Inclusion. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004

24
WWW.BBDO.COM
WWW.PROXIMITYWORLD.COM
WWW.DIGITALLABBLOG.COM
WRITTEN BY
DAVID BEAR
MIKE SZABO
EDITED BY
EDWIN PHILOGENE

Social Shopping

Recomendados

Recomendados

Mais conteúdo relacionado

Mais procurados

Mais procurados (20)

Semelhante a Social Shopping

Semelhante a Social Shopping (20)

Mais de BBDO

Mais de BBDO (20)

Último

Último (20)

Social Shopping