The advent of consumer-generated content focused specifically on shopping has driven a significant amount of user reviews on a variety of blogs, retail sites, and comparison shopping engines. With the exception of some blogs, the majority of the reviewers lack a personality for the reader to identify with, and instead many sites rely upon the ability to rate how useful the reader found the review. For many categories, the reader review system can work well, particularly for commodity-type products that are easy to research and compare the overall experience (e.g. consumer electronics and computers). A new(ish) group of websites being dubbed ‘Social Shopping‘ has emerged that center around the users creating customized wish lists to share with friends or people with similar tastes, rather than aggregating content around the product or retailer. Social shopping is a interesting concept, because the content is less about price comparison and instead centers around an individual’s own taste and style.
The Social Shopping category is still small, receiving less than 1% of the total market share of US visits, but there has been significant growth. Traffic to the custom category of Social Shopping sites was up 447% for the week ending Dec. 15, 2007 over the previous year. Among the social shopping sites, the leader is currently Kaboodle, with a 68% market share of total US visits to the category and traffic has increased 210% over the same week last year.


Despite the small size of the audience, Social Shopping sites are worth exploring as an acquisition tool because of the qualified audience interacting with the sites. Social shopping sites should be of particular interest to department stores and specialty retailers selling within the apparel and house & garden categories, where the sites perform the strongest in delivering visitors due to their more fashion-oriented nature.

The social nature of these sites also lends a natural relationship with broader social networking sites. For example, Kaboodle, ThisNext, and StyleFeeder all offer applications to add to Facebook profiles, while Buzzillions and StyleHive each have discussion groups available on Facebook.