Social Shopping - Part 1: Review of the Sites

Spread it!

Email This

As many retailers look for ways to harness social media sites like MySpace and YouTube, there are now sites that are devoted to the social act of shopping. Internet Retailer ran an article in their June issue about these sites. Our interest here at Email Yogi was piqued, so we decided to delve deeper.

First, how it works. The overall concept is that a user goes out to these sites, and lists items from various sites that they have purchased in the past, or want to purchase in the future. They can write a brief review of the item, tell what they think of it, why they want to buy etc.

Next, we asked our resident fashion expert Ebony to review the sites for us. Among the ones reviewed were Kaboodle, StyleFeeder, ShopWiki, ThisNext, StyleHive, and CrowdStorm.

Her over all thoughts?

Kaboodle - User friendly, easy to learn. I signed up last week and already have 11 "friends"!

ThisNext - Not as user-friendly as Kaboodle. It's not very easy to navigate through and you can't see how to make "friends" as quickly as I would like. The plus is that it allows you to post to your own blog or MySpace page from the website, giving a true integrated feel.

StyleHive - A little overwhelming, with lots of items and things to go through

ShopWiki - Very utilitarian, but seems to work well.

CrowdStorm - coming out of some sort of beta test, so hard to tell what's what.

StyleFeeder - Apparently you get feeds for a variety of websites. Not as user friendly as some of the other sites, but does have a celebrity endorsement aspect that is appealing.

I'll vouch for Kaboodle as being user friendly; I've already made a wish list from a number of sites.

But how can online retailers use these sites? Are they worth your time? Tomorrow, we'll look at how you can leverage these sites to your advantage.