Social shopping: A new twist on e-commerce
Brian Carroll, E-business Editor -- Furniture Today, January 20, 2008
During a premarket about 15 years ago, I remember puzzling over how a male-dominated industry could really get a bead on what female consumers wanted in home furnishings. I'd just asked Irwin Lowenstein, CEO of now-defunct Rhodes, who had just left Bob Spilman's Bassett showroom, about what he would be buying for the Rhodes chain that fall.
Although I have the utmost respect for both men, having so much product in U.S. furniture stores chosen by older men just didn't strike me as terribly efficient.
Today, it's my guess that one of the trends in retail the industry might be slow to accept, much less capitalize on, is something called social shopping. For most men, the concept of shopping for fun, shopping for the sheer pleasure of shopping, makes absolutely no sense. Social shopping takes this foreign concept and squares it with the power of Internet-enabled social networking.
According to Wikipedia, which itself is the product of networked intelligence, social shopping is an e-commerce method that leverages "the wisdom of the crowds," or users aggregating and sharing information about products and pricing.
Social shopping represents a new twist on e-commerce, which for over a decade has been primarily about maximizing efficiency. Think of e-commerce's well-known advantages: sophisticated searches, one-click buying, specification-driven virtual catalogs, recommendations based on past behavior. They are about individual shoppers maximizing their time and quickly finding what they want.
Social shopping, on the other hand, has much more to do with collaborating and sharing, often spontaneously.
The hunter, the goal-oriented shopper archetype that most males would associate with, has a need and a limited amount of time to find the prey and take it. By contrast, for social shoppers, the ultimate purchase, if there is one, is secondary to such social goals as networking, interacting and expressing yourself.
Online marketers are waking up to social shopping and beginning to tap into it for their own benefit. Nike, American Express and Apple — the usual suspects — are among those that targeted social shoppers during the recent holidays. Sites such as Kaboodle, StyleFeeder and ThisNext facilitate social shopping by combining Web 2.0 social networking with e-commerce.
Are you leaving money on the table? Furniture retailers and furniture makers, male and female, should be thinking about how to accommodate social shopping before competitors do.
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