Social Shopping Roundup for Online Retailers
Posted May 25, 2007 by Linda Bustos /
What is social shopping? It’s essentially a mashup that resembles social bookmarking, social networking and comparison shopping in a blender. A bunch of flavors of social shopping websites have popped up as of late, creating a great opportunity for online retailers to engage in some low-cost word-of-mouth marketing.
We’ve hunted down a number of different sites that you can submit your retail products to, and provided a brief summary of each site’s features. Since you never know where a sale is going to come from, it’s worth it to get into as many of these sites as you can and track which bring success and which are just a hassle.
Social Shopping Bookmarking Sites (or “Social Wishlists”)
These sites allow you to bookmark, tag, share and even blog products you like. Some allow you to join groups or even earn revenue from your picks.
Here’s a tip: if you’re going to submit your own products – tag with reckless abandon. Browse popular tags for ideas (as they will be surfed often) and also more targeted, specific terms, to maximize your likelihood of being found using search boxes.
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Join groups, create wishlists, email products to friends, add product lists to your blog or MySpace, and easily submit products here. |
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Add a bookmarklet to your browser and off you go. Search for products by category and user lists, add friends, join groups and comment on products and people. Kaboodle auto-creates product descriptions when you bookmark items. |
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Wists (weblists - get it?) gives users a way to keep all their wishlists in one place, rather than in each individual e-store. The description copy and paste may seem tedious but gives you more control than Kaboodle’s autogenerated description. And if you want to encourage bookmarking, Wists’ got a chicklet. See Wists in action. |
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In addition to the typical bookmark / add comments / join groups / add friends options, you can also “follow” your friends or random stranger style mavens a la Twitter. And they’ve included a social media 1.0 feature: a forum. |
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Yet another bee-branded social shopping site … WhatsBuzzing is the Stumbleupon of social shopping. Users browse storefronts, rather than individual items to discover e-stores and get ideas before going comparison shopping. Tag storefronts, add to favorite list and add friends. You can’t submit your store, if you’re buzzworthy they’ll find you. |
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Bookmark products, email to friends, and subscribe to RSS feeds of other users’ picks. Doesn’t look like you can add friends — yet. There’s 2 ways you can add your product: enter the name, URL, or UPC code of the item or add a browser icon and bookmark a product from it’s product page. And you can “Shopcast” by adding a badge or feed of your list to your blog. Kudos to the designers, the |
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Lacks the social features like adding a community, but you can tag your items. Unfortunately it’s attracting a lot of irrelevant spam that appears at the top of all product listings (with no images) and the design is nothing compared to other sites, nevertheless a site to submit products to. |
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Pick products from MyPickList’s merchant network, earn commissions from a number of stores and share a slideshow of your pick list with a widget supported by a number of blogs and social networks. Add friends and message users. If you’re listed in Amazon, Buy.com or other participating merchants, you can get in on the action and recommend your own products. |
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Social by virtue of being a wiki, add a product, subscribe to RSS feeds, tap items as “love it,” “want it” and “have it.” |
Social Deals and Coupons Sites
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Find deals on specific items, browse posted coupon codes and special offers from Dealplumber’s database, or post your product or affiliate product coupons. “Free Stuff” and “Free Shipping” categories, too. Pipe your products here. |
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Free listings for merchants, woot-woot! Add a button to your bookmarks toolbar or submit your deals here one by one. Join groups, tag, browse, and keep your peeps updated with Twitter tweets. |
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Submit deals, rate, surf, repeat. You can also earn revenue when people click on AdSense around your posted deals. (Sounds like an invitation for click fraud…) This site is really in its infancy, with not many deals, categories or members, but a one to watch. |
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Social dealmarking with community voting — best deals rise to the top. Deals come from sites like Dealnews, BensBargains, Woot and from registered users. |
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Just like Dealcritic, but with much better organization/categories, and options to subscribe to RSS feeds for hot deals, all deals and freebies. Plus Dealspl.us runs giveaway contests. An added incentive to invite friends, if they win a prize, you win too. |
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Like a deal search engine. Users submit deals and then vote on them, but the site lacks tags and categorization. Users must browse the “popular” list or use the search box and hope for the best. Posting a deal is easy. |
Social Comparison Engines
Now for some gray-area social shopping sites. The following are comparison engines which have either social shopping features, or a free way of submitting your own products to them, and thus being worthy of honorable mention here for etailers looking to cast a broad net over sites that we believe are going to take off.
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A visual search engine that lets you zoom in on a detail of a product and see similar items based on colour, shape, pattern, price etc. Categories include watches, shoes, handbags, jewellery, clothing. Etailers can add individual products, or email to submit a feed or link. Helps if you have an affiliate program, you may pay per click or per sale, Like.com supports both models. |
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This ain’t your Grandma’s online craft fair. Modern Etsy exlusively lists hand made products, with a whack of Web 2.0 goodies that makes Etsy so sticky — including the Geolocator and Shop by Color. Users can create their own lists in the Treasury. Merchants get a free username.etsy.com account for free, and can list products for $0.20 per quantity, with a 3.5% of sales fee. Listings live for 4 months. |
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Crowdstorm is like MySpace, Digg and Shopping.com in a blender. You can build your social network, “Recommend” products (Digg-style voting system) and search and browse products like any comparison shopping engine. It’s easy to submit products, but here’s the catch — users will be directed to Amazon or Ebay to make a purchase. So this works best if you’re an etailer already using these channels. |
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Sound like a place to unload your Redwings Bobblehead collection? Think again. Hawkee is a social network for tech afficianados where you’ll find user-posted coupons and deals, product reviews and code snippets in addition to comparison shopping. Hawkee uses feeds direct from retailers, not from other shopping engines so drop them a line for more info on getting listed. |
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Fivelimes is an eco-friendly shopping community where you can find sustainable products and services. Browse by categories (no tags), shop locally or browse reviews. Submit a product URL you know about, or join the Vendor Program which works on a cost-per-click basis. |
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Crawls the web picking up products from etailers on its own. Unfortunately some products are outdated. Really cool color search feature. Doesn’t accept merchant product feeds but you can add your e-store URL here. Or read more about getting listed. |
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The social sister of comparison engine Buy.com, at Yub (Buy in reverse) you can shop for over 6 million products, receive cash-back discounts, and shop with your friends. Write reviews and earn commissions when users buy through you. The Meet People feature is tres MySpace. Another reason to get listed in the Buy.com marketplace. |
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Yahoo! Answers approach to the purchase decision. (Run by Yahoo! Shopping, guess where product results come from). Hint: if you spot a “powwow” (thread) related to your e-store’s products, you can drop a link in there. Sell individual items Craigslist-style by starting a new pow-wow and uploading an image from Photobucket. |
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Like Yub, offers members discounts, splitting their affiliate commissions with the buyer 50/50. Advertisers are ranked my how much discount they offer buyers. Works on a “Cost per Sale” model so advertisers can keep a fixed return on ad spend. Send Jellyfish and email to join the merchant program. And did I mention Smack Shopping - Jellyfish’s Deal or No Deal-style online Dutch auction? (Just check out the link for a great video explanation &/or listen to Smack Talk about Transparent Shopping - Get Elastic #30 from eTail West) |
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Site looks great, but not the most intuitive site to figure out (what’s the “Download” for?). You can earn 25-50% affiliate commission on products “suggested” from the Usuggest merchant database. Tagline is “Shoppers Helping Shoppers” but may end up more like “affiliates selling to affiliates”…and we know affiliates will always buy from themselves. Needs a widget to post to blog to market outside of the community. Unfortunately no information on how to add your products to their network. |
Definitely are interesting space to watch and we are all curious about how the social shoposphere will evolve, however more awareness among the general public is needed. So go sign up and tell ten friends!
Did we miss your favorite site? Something you want someone to build? What missing from social commerce site? What’s the real value? Drop us a comment to share your experiences with social shopping.
UPDATED AUGUST 6, 2007:
What about canada’s own redflagdeals.com? I’ve used that one a few times to pick out a good deal posted by other site users
Hi Drew,
Thanks for the tip on RedFlagDeals. It will be reviewed in an upcoming piece on Canadian shopping engines :)
Linda
Great write-up. I think it’s clear from all these companies that no-one has really defined the Social Shopping space yet as to what it actually is and which one gets it “right”
I really like your take on social shopping i also saw you mentioned dealplumber which i have been actively using for some time now. I have posted numerous deal and managed to rake in a steady and decent income from these deals. Being an avid shopper, i have also found the deals posted are some of the best i could have found.
I’d like to thank you for posting this list. As the owner of a small business, I had been hunting for a comprehensive one for a while in order to help promote our business. You have made it easy to find and evaluate them in order to know where to focus my time and attention. Kudos!
Thanks, J :-)
Come back and let us know which ones worked out the best for you!
Very comprehensive list, good job and thank.
Many of them do indeed seem just to copy digg model and just give it a shopping flavor. That alone in my opinion is not enough.
http://www.salegrab.com has a different approach. Biggest difference probably is that instead of focusing on items it focuses on sales and deals. At this moment it does not accept user submitted deals and sales. The reason is that to have a working, accurate data in this area you need lots of information. You simply can not expect or ask people to have or be willing to manually enter or that info on every submittion. We are working on a very simplified user interface that will enable visitors to submit shopping deals without even logging in just feeling few lines of forms. Some data will be analyzed by the backend, the rest polished by the editors. Row user submissions just can not be accurate, it is too complicated. Examples: A sale can have start/end date or one of the those, or none. It can be related to a location or multiple locations or be an online only sale or none of the above. It might have a multiple dimensions like being a sale, coupon, free shipping … one of them or none…! the list is endless and this is why we are very careful what kind of user interface we will adopt.
Great round up. Thanks for putting it together.
If you have time, I’d love for you to check out www.pronto.com. We are a Social Shopping site built on top of a comprehensive Comparison Shopping Engine. We are a subsidiary of IAC/InterActiveCorp, have grown over 1700% in less than a year, and have over 4.5mm users already. Would love to know what you think of our Social Media experience…
Thanks :)
The social bargain sharing scene has very well evolved in US but there is not much to see in countries like Australia where the only ecommerce is still eBay. Hope to see some US sites starting to cater for Australian online consumers.
Thanks
Hi Linda,
Simple yet brilliant article! Both the approach to the article & likewise its outcome boats clarity & freshness.
Am trying to seek more info on e-commerece in readymade apparel segment, and enroute that have traversed sites like www.fastmatch.com, www.stylehive etc. Sites look in infancy & their offering does not stand clear, USP are rather complicated & diff for customer to actually grasp.
In case you come across some potential sites with good working modelling engines, pl post here.
Regards
All those sites are wonderful. I also like CouponAlbum site (http://www.couponalbum.com) for its stores like Sears, Circuit City, Overstock, Target…..
Hi,you guys
I think if you check out the site: http://www.beltal.com ,I promise you can find what you want to get on there.
www.dealce.com is a new social shopping bookmarks site provides add,share shopping links etc
Linda,
Once again, you have provided information that is of true value and usable. Keep up the good work.
I have recently started using www.combyo.com
Combyo aggregates deals from all my favorite deal sites in one place.
Linda - seen the www.priceFad.com project giving some historical perspective on deals?
Great, one more!
As good as
http://www.grokdotcom.com
A company called Decision Step has produced a product called Shop Together. A few companies like Net Shops and our company have set it up for our customers. It allows you to shop at a store with a friend and see what the other is looking at. It looks helpful from our point a view but it would be really helpful if it could be reviewed with a very critical eye. Thanks
Yeah, I’ve seen shop together on Net Shops although I haven’t played with it. I’d need to find an online shopping buddy first, LOL. Maybe another ecommerce blogger or online retailer wants to collaborate on this and do a joint review. Email me if you’re interested.
Nice list, I like Deal Critic.com quite a bit. And for online coupons I like http://www.rather-be-shopping.com
This is a great roundup of the social shopping space. Your use of “social bookmark/wishlist” sites and “social comparison engines” is an interesting way to describe the difference. We’ve also done some similar research in the last month, using a different framework. You can see the article here: http://www.shopatron.com/on/path/newsletter_03.php
Amazing list! Thank you.
A Facebook app called buyboobuy was launched recently. You can post the items you want to buy and ask people to vote. Pretty simple.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=8814001125
Anybody know of any shopping cart software or hosting companies that provide ready made websites/templates with social shopping features.
(did this post twice, after submitting, it kept hanging…)
Thanks,
Steve
Off the top of my head I don’t know of any companies that offer social shopping out of the box.
Magento is an open source ecommerce platform with an active community of users and developers, there might be modules that suit what you’re looking for.
I would like to share plaza101.com, a social community website offering lot of features.
free77.info - is a new social shopping bookmarks. Site - “a la DIGG. Probably quite new. You can write their proposals (coupons, discounts).
Hi everyone here,
I have started a new shopping portal - www.topestore.com where I have made my all endeavors to keep the prices highly competitive & a stores directory namely www.safeshoppe.com. Let me know what you think about it and anything I should add. I would thank the community here for their suggestion/advices. Please do not consider this is a spam.
Prashant