science

Social shopping

Social shopping is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Social shopping rather than just read about it. In short: Social shopping is a method of e-commerce where shoppers' friends become involved in the shopping experience. Social shopping attempts to use technology to mimic the social interactions found in physical malls and stores.

Key takeaways

Social shopping belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Social shopping to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Social shopping from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Social shopping is a method of e-commerce where shoppers' friends become involved in the shopping experience. Social shopping attempts to use technology to mimic the social interactions found in physical malls and stores. With the rise of mobile devices, social shopping is now extending beyond the online world and into the offline world of shopping.

Five categories Social shopping spans a wide range of definitions but can largely be divided into five categories: Group shopping sites, Shopping communities, Recommendation engines, Shopping Marketplaces, and Shared Shopping.

Group shopping sites include companies like Groupon and LivingSocial. These sites encourage groups of people to buy together at wholesale prices, essentially a Costco-like model for the online world. Shopping communities bring like-minded people together to discuss, share, and shop. Using the wisdom of crowds, users communicate and aggregate information about products, prices, and deals. Many sites allow users to create custom shopping lists and share them with friends. To date, fashion communities have largely dominated this space. Yet, shopping communities are not limited exclusively to fashion. Some platforms like Zwibe are across all categories and actually pay the influencer if they make a sale in their group. Other shopping communities include Listia, an online community for free stuff. Activity-based clubs (such as travel or adventure-sports clubs) are the in-person analogy for this category of social shopping. Recommendation engines allow shoppers to provide advice to fellow shoppers. The in-store analogy for this category of social shopping is asking a fellow shopper for advice. Traditional online product review companies such as Amazon have helped many consumers to date but currently emphasize obtaining and giving advice to strangers. Up and coming social shopping startups encourage conversations about purchases with a user's friends or acquaintance. Social Shopping Marketplaces which bring sellers and buyers together to connect and transact like Shopcade, Polyvore, Storenvy, Etsy, SavelGo, and Impulse. The offline analogy for this category is a farmers market or bazaar. The marketplace brings together independent sellers and creates a forum for them to display and sell their wares to buyers. The marketplace affords buyers and sellers methods to connect and communicate whilst also performing the role of e-commerce facilitator for sellers and discovery engine for buyers. Shared Shopping mechanisms for catalog-based e-commerce sites. These allow shoppers to form ad hoc collaborative shopping groups in which one person can drive an online shopping experience for one or more other people, using real-time communication among themselves and with the retailer.

Benefits for retailers Social shopping sites may generate revenue not only from affiliate marketing, advertising and click throughs, but also by sharing information about their users with retailers. Some sites concentrate on the user interactions that pass on information and recommendations that are hard to acquire from sales personnel.

Benefits for customers Social shopping sites motivate their users to participate in ways. Many sites offer nothing of specific value in return, relying on the user's intrinsic sense of social reward to share information with the community. Other sites offer tangible rewards for sharing information. Other sites offer incentives in the form of reputations points that can be redeemed for gifts.

Extensions Social shopping can also exist in the real-world beyond the obvious swapping of consumer stories with people one knows. For example, when you walk into a dressing room, the mirror reflects your image, but you also see images of the apparel item and celebrities wearing it on an interactive display. A webcam also projects an image of the consumer wearing the item on the website for everyone to see. This creates an interaction between the consumers inside the store and their social network outside the store. The technology behind this system uses RFID. There are various ways for stores to use social shopping features. Some websites offer a combination of comparison shopping with social features. Others combine physical stores and social features, for example, allowing customers to share finds and deals from physical retailers through the phone and website and interact with users that have similar shopping interests. Some websites use established online social networks and tools rather than trying to build their own. By implementing applications like Facebook Connect which allow users to ask their Facebook friends' opinions on purchases directly on the social shopping site. Others implement the Twitter API, allowing their users to share content through tweets. Similarly, there are also social shopping applications that utilize existing networks to integrate users' social networks with shopping that aggregates sales offers from Instagram using the API.

See also Communal shopping Shopow, online social shopping website Social commerce Web 2.0

References

Further reading Next big trend: Social shopping? Survey: Social-network sites could also lure shoppers Early adopter Adweek: 2007 Social Shopping Study by PowerReviews and E-Tail Group The Power of Social Shopping Social Shopping 101, a Practitioners Prime 7 Species of Social Commerce

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Social shopping

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Social shopping claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Social shopping before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Social shopping ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Social shopping

In research: Social shopping appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Social shopping in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Social shopping is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics E-commerce, Non-store retailing, Retail processes and techniques, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Social shopping outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Social shopping in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Social shopping means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Social shopping out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Social shopping in simple terms?

Why does Social shopping matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Social shopping?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Social shopping.