As picture sites have evolved over the last five years to integrate commerce and meet social needs, social shopping has progressed from a fad to a legitimate way of buying online. Marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and mainstream retailer sites are where we go when we know we want to buy. But when shopping for pleasure or browsing, rather than spending a day walking around a mall many people now spend hours on the hottest new visually pleasing product sites, which are great for wishlisting.
The Wordless Web of Pretty Pictures and Social Reassurance
Social shopping sites integrate social aspects such as product sharing into the shopping experience. It sounds straightforward, but it's not. Five years ago social shopping meant a brand had a Facebook page, Twitter handle, and sharing buttons on their retail website. Now it's much more.
An extension of Web 2.0 social media, social shopping fills a fundamental desire for social interaction and decision reassurance. Social shopping specifically helps you mitigate the isolation inherent to most online activities. Shopping from a screen just isn't as rewarding as walking into a store and making a purchase. Social shopping thus aims to recreate the social aspects of in-store shopping, making it feel more like a collective activity.
When shopping at a regular online retailer site, you browse through the same products everyone sees and are forced to decide what to buy on your own—an isolated buying experience. But at a social shopping site you browse through product feeds curated specifically for you that are filled with products posted or made popular by other users. This helps to reaffirm and guide your purchase decisions; a seemingly collaborative buying experience.
E-commerce sites are constantly launching, all trying to be the next big thing in social shopping. The most successful ones don't actually make social buying aspects prominent, but focus on making shopping seem fun and buying and sharing seem natural. Shopping sites fall into informal categories based on their product offerings, including one-stops-shops such as Fab.com or fashion-based stores such as Polyvore. Certain social shopping sites create unique ways of combining social buying aspects with online shopping but do not fall into any specific category, such as Outgrow.me or Ownza.com. Here's our list of the top ten social shopping sites.
1. Wanelo.com
An abbreviation for the phrase "Want, Need, Love," social shopping site Wanelo is an online community-based e-commerce site that brings together products from a vast array of stores into one pinboard-style platform. You can browse, save, and buy items, post new products from around the web, and follow members, stores, or product collections. Catering to both brands and shoppers, members create collections—similar to Pinterest boards—from items onsite or external links. One clever social aspect enables you to tag Wanelo and Facebook friends to specific products. The San Francisco-based company is increasingly the talk of the town on the social shopping scene, earning $11 million in VC funding in March 2013 and gaining traction with younger online audiences as a useful social shopping alternative to Pinterest.
2. Fancy.com
Curated product site and app The Fancy is best known for offering trendy products ranging from fashion items to useful gadgets and novelty gifts. Fancy broke users out of the generic 'like' or 'want' product saving method with a branded 'Fancy' button used to show interest in an item. Like many shopping sites, the Fancy button can be added to your bookmark bar to 'fancy' an item anywhere across the web. You can add products by entering a product URL, uploading a product, or emailing a product to Fancy. Products can be fancied, or saved, marked as wanted or owned, featured on your profile, commented on, and added to custom lists. Fancy provides 'Featured,' 'Following,' 'Recommended,' and 'Everything' personalized shopping streams in your dashboard, search capabilities, and on-site payments. One of the fastest growing social shopping sites, Fancy raised $53 million this summer with investors including Will Smith and American Express. It is currently valued at $600 million.
3. Fab.com
Resembling the Target.com of social shopping, Fab provides product offerings in department store categories, many at discounted prices. Next to each product a small heart icon with a number count displays how many times an item has been 'favorited' by other members. You can shop on a traditional retail site dashboard or switch to a pin-board style layout where product pictures are displayed along with expiration date, price, and number of favorites. The Fab calendar displays upcoming sales organized by date, product category, and sale theme. Focused on providing the best prices on unique items, Fab has a Best Price Match policy offering price matching for lower prices on products discovered up to 14 days after your purchase. The company has received over $30 million in funding from investors including The Washington Post and Ashton Kutcher.
4. Svpply.com
EBay-owned Svpply takes social graphing to a new level by customizing products to your shopping feed based on your Facebook and Twitter friends' activity. Svpply organizes products on your dashboard by current popularity, all time most popular, and recently found items, or you can search by keyword such as a product color or style—'red hipster' for example. You can buy, 'want,' collect, or mark products as owned and share them with your social networks. Svpply offers product lists in a microblogging-style format which allow you to create a title and themed header image, and add contributors to your private or public product collections. Individual collections can be cloned, shared to Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter, and commented on by other members.
5. Polyvore
Polyvore is a community site for visual collection creation, product discovery, and purchasing. Members organize products into interactive visual 'sets' or slideshow-capable 'collections' you can shop from and follow. Themed 'sets' contain a variety of items you hover over for individual product details, and can be clicked on to go to the Polyvore product page. Member-crafted product 'collections' contain themed products and can be liked, viewed as a slideshow, and shared on your blog. On the product page, price, description, and related items are shown along with a link to buy the product offsite, as well as the option to receive Polyvore alerts when the item goes on sale. The company has generated over $22 million in funding since launching as one of the first social shopping sites in 2007.
6. Luvocracy
Luvocracy offers rewards for using their service and acts as a third party price negotiator for product purchases. The site positions itself as a recommendation-based shopping go-to where members—defined as bloggers, editors, and stylists—'recommend' products they 'Luv' from anywhere on the Web. Adding more product 'Luvs' with your recommendations for a product increases how many 'trusts' you get from other members. You earn 2% rewards every time their posted products are purchased by another member, 1% rewards if a product you posted is re-recommended, and 0.5% rewards for a 're-re-recommendation'. If you develop a wide audience you can apply to be a Tastemaker, which increases your reward percentage up to 10%. Posted products must be currently available for purchase which helps ensure site content is not outdated. Luvocracy raised $11 million in funding this March from investors including Google Ventures and Yahoo!'s Marissa Mayer.
7. Opensky.com
Opensky is a recommendation-based social shopping site with over three million members and a gamified shopping twist. The site features mainstream products organized by popularity, stores, and categories, and tagged with retailer holidays such as 'Back-to-School,' 'Free Shipping,' 'Insider Pick,' 'Exclusive,' and 'Clearance'. From the dashboard you can save products as 'Loves' for later purchase with the click of a large heart icon that appears as you hover over a product image. Product pages contain basic product specs, product comments, and an impressive amount of product detail such as allergy and kosher information for edibles, or number and type of batteries required for electronics. You can follow individual sellers who each have a storefront page similar to the layout of a Facebook fan page, with a list of followers, activity, and a large cover photo. Points are achieved via your friends' engagement with the site. Earn 1,000 points for inviting friends to join, 2,500 points when friends you invite join with Facebook Connect, and 10,000 points each time an invitee makes a purchase. Points help you advance through levels which start at Aqua, reached at 2,500 points, through to Sapphire, reached at 60,000 points. Each level grants you shopping rewards such as free shipping or monetary credits for future purchases.
8. Outgrow.Me
Outgrow.me is an online marketplace made possible by earlier activity on crowdfunding sites. It is the first online marketplace to only feature successfully crowdfunded products available for purchase from sites such as indiegogo and Kickstarter. The homepage features a pinboard layout with product pictures that offer a short product bio upon mouseover. Product pages include the percentage of project funded (which can be over 100%), amount pledged, funding date, and a link to the original project page. Completed projects can be purchased directly on the site; if a product is in the making you can set an alert to be notified when it's available.
9. Etsy
Etsy is the online shopping mecca of handmade products. The craft-fair style e-commerce site gives users an online storefront for listing goods—including edibles, for a fee of 20 cents per post and 3.5% commission of sales. The site bridges a gap between offline retailers and shoppers. You can connect with sellers you may not otherwise have found to ask product questions and request custom orders. To save items you can create custom lists, and 'favorite' stores or individual products. The more you shop and favorite, the more Etsy can personalize a product feed based on your preferences. Etsy does not have any distinctive competitors, with the closest being Ebay or Amazon, and has raised close to $100 million; investors include the founders of Delicious and Flickr.
10. Ownza.com
Ownza gives you cash back percentages for products you purchase. The site encourages members to use the Ownza browser plugin when shopping at over 2,000 partner stores to post their products back to Ownza. Once posted, some product purchases are eligible for a cash back reward that is stored in your Ownza account and redeemable through PayPal. Cash back amounts are displayed on the product page and vary from 1-10% of the product price, depending on the product and store.
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