Social shopping is widely used after the launch of Groupon. Many people frequently use this service for the reason why they can buy items cheap. So it makes people to buy items not by their needs but their competitive prices.
For example, some people are busy to drop by shops and restaurants every weekends for using the coupon they’ve already bought at week days. Because of popularity, the service concept of social shopping is popularly adopted by other Internet companies and those companies are fiercely competing.
And there is a new wave of social shopping such as ‘Boutiques.com’ and ‘Fascism.com’. Especially ‘Boutiques.com’ is launched by Google. It has more meaning than starting a new business. And other web service called ‘Fashism.com’ is providing an interesting fashion experience. As you know the name of the web site, it has a discussion concept which enables people to put opinions when someone asks the question with the photo about fashion style. Those questions are like : “how about this shoes?”, “which shirts do these pants go with?”.
This kind of service does not focus buying items but making a preference database. They are differentiated from newly boomed social shopping service. Most of all they don’t need to worry about conventional issues such as distribution, inventory and sales. They just try to make people to participate on their service which can gather the customers’ preferences and needs. If they get the connection between sellers and buyers, it means a great business opportunity like an advertisement business.
Now is beginning of new age of social commerce or mobile commerce. So it needs time for these new business models to prosper. But the environment is well set up by the distribution of smartphones and initiation of mobile payment. Maybe time comes soon.
