Social shopping: what it is and how you can use it

There’s been a lot of talk recently about growth in social media in Australia and elsewhere, and the potential this holds for businesses to harness their customers’ networks for greater sales.

Social shopping made the list of PayPal vice president Osama Bedier’s biggest payment trends for 2011, with Mr Bedier claiming it will become increasingly popular and influential in online purchase decisions.

Wikipedia currently describes social shopping as “a method of e-commerce where shoppers’ friends become involved in the shopping experience.” The phrase tends to be a bit flexible in what it’s used to describe, but generally  refers to any website or platform that allows for reviews, suggestions and recommendations, particularly from friends and family, whether that be through a focused site (such as LivingSocial) or through an all-purpose social media site, such as Facebook.

Once you made the decision to engage in e-commerce, you may want to think about how to incorporate “social elements” to the experience so that you can harness the power of personal recommendations. For example, websites such as Amazon can automatically provide birthday gift recommendations for your friends based on their profile preferences and purchase history. These kinds of features can make it more attractive for your customers to keep using your website, as the more they use it the more targeted the service you can provide.

There are a many different online business models that either involve or facilitate both e-commerce and social networking. These include:

• General social networks with additional social shopping features, such as Facebook and Myspace
• Time-limited social shopping sites such as LivingSocial;
• Group buying sites such as Spreets;
• Product-focused social networks such as Apple’s music-centric Ping; and
• Location-based social networks such as Foursquare;

A December 2010 blog post by digital agency Reading Room on “the rise and rise of social shopping” argues that social shopping is a good way for clever marketers to “connect more deeply with consumers in a noisy marketplace.”  From a customer’s perspective, social shopping lets you share the online purchasing experience with friends, and make and receive personal recommendations. While customers have always engaged in social shopping for themselves, the use of web-based tools allows some businesses to put those customer networks to work for them.

But what does this mean for your business? Ultimately, your success with social shopping is going to depend on how readily your customers engage with their friends using social media. If you already get good levels of traffic to your site, and your customers are light or heavy users of social media such as Facebook or Twitter, you may find that simply adding a ‘share’ button to each product page will bring results. A ‘share’ button (like the ones on the right hand side of this page) will allow users of your website to bring a product to the attention of their online friends and followers, which may lead to additional visits to your website. Depending on your content management system, You might also be able to enable user reviews on your products or allow customers to ‘like’ particular products.

There are many different social media sharing button plug-ins available, depending on the web content management system you are using. To investigate possible ways to add sharing buttons to your website, do a web search for the name of your current web content management system or online shopping cart and “social media sharing”.

Facebook has recently released statistics that suggest that social media promotion can increase sales; the social media website claims that one company saw a doubling in revenue after adding the Like button to their website. Of course there’s no guarantee that this will work the same for your business, and as always you will need to carefully consider your target market and any costs you may with integrating new features.

Alternatively, you could investigate getting your website’s products onto social shopping, group buying or online coupon sites. For details, visit their websites – I’ve listed some examples above. In exchange for promoting your website or business, these sites may require you to pay a fee, or offer a discount or special offer.

Has your business made use of social shopping? Share your experiences with a comment below! 

by Nick, DBCDE