Making shopping a virtual social experience
Beckie Tran doesn't have kids. That means she usually has no clue what presents to buy for her friends' children. Fortunately she gets advice from a separate group of buddies -- including people she's never even met.
Tran gets those gift ideas, and tips on dozens of other kinds of products, from her network of friends on Kaboodle.com, a website devoted to the fast-growing Internet category of "social shopping."
Social shopping sites with such names as Kaboodle, ThisNext, Wishpot and StyleHive combine two of the Web's most prominent activities: engaging in commerce and chatting with like-minded folks. The sites don't directly sell things, but they encourage users to share links to good bargains, obscure finds, products that work and ones that don't.
The results look much like colorful social-networking Web pages on such sites as Facebook and MySpace, complete with personal information and lists of friends who share particular interests. But on social shopping sites, the photos and discussions revolve around products.
Many users find it utterly addicting, logging on at least once daily to see products that other people are looking for or have discovered. These members say the shopping lists that their fellow users post are often funky elements of self-expression.
Shopping on the vast Internet is overwhelming, so people are driven to the big-box stores' websites because it's easy, said Tran, 30, who designs custom wedding invitations and stationery in Santa Clara, Calif.
On Kaboodle, "you've got hundreds of people shopping together, and it's a lot of fun to see what people are finding," she said. "I found a lot of things I wouldn't have found."
For example, beyond children's gifts, Tran has come across high-quality, artisanal wrapping paper on Kaboodle, plus a $200 Crosley Traveler Stack-O-Matic record player that reminded her of ones she had as a child.
Market research firm Hitwise says social shopping is still a small corner of the Internet, accounting for far fewer than 1% of all U.S. Web visits. But visits to social shopping sites took an eightfold leap in 2007.
That attention -- and the money these sites can make from ads and from sharing revenue with affiliated retailers -- captured the attention of Hearst Corp. The publisher recently spent an undisclosed sum to acquire Kaboodle, which is the most widely used social shopping site.
