Click till you drop
Beckie Tran doesn’t have kids, which means she usually has no clue what presents to buy her friends’ children. Fortunately she gets advice from a separate group of buddies, including people she’s never met. Tran gets those gift ideas, and tips on dozens of other kinds of products, from her network of friends on Kaboodle.com, a Web site devoted to the fast-growing Internet category of “social shopping.”
Social shopping sites such 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.
Many users find it utterly addicting, logging on at least daily to see products that other people are looking for or have discovered. These members say the shopping lists their fellow users post are often funky, personal elements of self-expression, as much as that may sound like an overly exalted way of describing what is, after all, consumption.
Shopping on the Internet is overwhelming, so people are driven to the big box stores’ Web sites 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.”
The market research firm Hitwise says social shopping is still a small corner of the Internet, accounting for less than 1 percent 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 affiliate retailers to which they send buyers — 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.
Kaboodle founder and CEO Manish Chandra sees an obvious tie to Hearst’s traditional print world. Perusing the site to see all the things people want, have bought or are discussing is “almost like browsing through 10, 20, 30 different catalogs,” he said. “In a way Kaboodle is a like a suite of shopping magazines edited by the people.”
Users say the difference in social shopping sites is their focus on both buying things and the quest for them. That includes things people think are funny or interesting but would never actually buy — like yachts and $1,000 boxes of steaks, both of which Tran has on a Kaboodle list just as a topic of conversation.
Some social shopping sites go beyond product lists and appoint celebrities or mavens in certain categories, from shoes to gadgets, to offer more specific tips. That raises the question of whether retailers will try to co-opt social shopping sites by paying people to place subtle plugs for their products in forums that supposedly contain only unbiased advice from “real people.”
Sites do try to block such attempts, hunting for people who post only positive comments. Those postings can be deleted, or the user might be prevented from adding links to certain retail sites.
Still, Kaboodle’s Chandra acknowledges that marketing plants surely “fly under our radar all the time.” But like other social shopping creators, Chandra doubts that attempts to game the system can gain much influence over users who are alert to comments and wish lists that lack authenticity.
That will have to be true for social shopping to maintain the power-to-the-consumer ethos driving it.
“We want to create a million mini Oprah Winfreys,” said ThisNext CEO Gordon Gould. “Why is she powerful? Because people think she’s genuine, she’s authentic. She’s giving recommendations from the heart. We’re (doing that and) scaling that across every product category across the Web.”