What if you could have a more sociable experience while shopping? Going beyond mere ratings and reviews, Social Shopping is a way to share the shopping experience with a wider community or even your very own social network of friends and contacts. One can share, recommend, suggest and comment on products or services. Social shopping essentially relies on our nature as social animals – that individuals are influenced by others’ purchases and recommendations.
For a customer, social signals help one gauge interest in a particular product. Deep social cues facilitate deeper customer engagement with both the products and the platform. Even if you don’t directly know a person, to have your choice validated by someone else is comforting and helps one gain confidence in the purchase. This way of shopping tries to mirror the experience of going out shopping with friends, with that great sense of community and loads of fun. Social shopping is particularly apt for the clothing and decor categories.
In the US, social shopping as a phenomenon embraces a wide swathe of sites and apps. One of the most notable sites being Pinterest, where shoppers ‘pin’ vibrant images of products they love and wish to buy. These ‘pins’ go on to inspire that pinner’s followers and other users to visit the product page or pin the image themselves. Similar to Pinterest is Fancy, which is fully product-oriented. Kaboodle has a model of likes (hearts) and creating styleboards that as we will see, resonates across the Atlantic.
In India, it’s not just the immediate circle but a wider community engagement seems to be the aim. A prime example of social shopping or social commerce in India being Limeroad. Limeroad offers a variety of ways to connect to the products they sell. You can ‘like’ a product or ‘share’ a product on Facebook. You can see who’s last seen a product, and even what they’ve said about it. You can also create look books by combining pieces you like in ‘scrapbooks’. And if anyone buys a product via this scrapbook, you earn some nice store credit. You can also follow sellers and users who interest you.
Other Indian fashion sites like Myntra, Jabong, KOOVS, Fashos and Elitify encourage you to share their products over social media with prominent sharing options. Elitify goes a step further by displaying banners telling you that someone from x location just bought x product. Anyone would be tempted to look, right?
Fashion aggregation sites also integrate the social aspect strongly in their offerings. Ownnow, is somewhat similar to Limeroad, one can publicly ‘like’ and vote for a product and share product details easily over social media. Another such site allMemoirs adds curation to the mix of sharing and putting-together collections for oneself and others. BeStylish, is tightly integrated with Facebook. You can like, share and comment on a product all through your Facebook profile.
Then, there’s an interesting example of Sellmojo, which enables selling directly through a company’s Facebook page. This creates a store right within Facebook. Efforts to sell through Twitter and Facebook posts are ongoing. One such notable effort was to sell merchandize through Google Hangouts by Myntra in 2014, in association with the actor Hrithik Roshan.
Social shopping represents one of the next steps in Online Retail. It is clear that the consumer of today wants to engage more deeply with the products they buy through the community at large. It is definitely advantageous for shopping sites and apps to provide such experiences to their customers to create an ongoing connection with them.
