The Future of Shopping? 17 Social Shopping Sites
Increasingly web users are looking towards the recommendations of their peers over traditional media outlets. Can you blame them? After years of being bombarded with advertisements, people are looking to their social connections to help them make purchases.
While word of mouth recommendations have always helped sell products, social shopping sites now allow groups of people to connect with each other based on their personal interests. We take a look at 17 social shopping sites and look at the type of traffic and audience they attract.
Users of social shopping sites share information about products, deals and prices. Some allow you to create shopping lists that you can share with your friends. Recent data from Hitwise suggests that while social shopping only accounts for a small percentage of web activity, visitors to these sites increased by 477% over the course of a year. So just who make up the typical audience of these sites? From looking at the demographics, it seems that the audience covers a fairly wide spectrum.
The data in the table below was compiled from Compete, Quantcast and MSN Adlabs.
| Website | Age Demographics | Sex % | Monthly Traffic | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary | Secondary | Male | Female | ||
| Amazon | 35-44 | 45-54 | 47-55 | 45-53 | 51,300,537 |
| Buzzillions | 25-34 | 35-44 | 53 | 47 | 356,090 |
| Crowdstorm | 18-24 | 25-34 | 61 | 39 | 3,118 |
| Epinions | 25-34 | 35-44 | 47-54 | 46-53 | 3,380,748 |
| Etsy | 25-34 | 35-44 | 30-45 | 55-70 | 1,593,789 |
| Glimpse | 45-54 | 35-44 | 54-69 | 31-46 | 90,827 |
| Kaboodle | 25-34 | 35-44 | 46 | 54 | 2,564,972 |
| Osoyou | 25-34 | 35-44 | 51 | 49 | 12,716 |
| Reevoo | 35-44 | 25-34 | 54-66 | 34-46 | 10,571 |
| ShopStyle | 25-34 | 18-24 | 47-49 | 51-53 | 216,733 |
| ShopWiki | 25-34 | 35-44 | 47-49 | 51-53 | 213,194 |
| Stylefeeder | 25-34 | 18-24 | 28-58 | 42-72 | 527,284 |
| StyleHive | 25-34 | <18 | 38-51 | 49-62 | 504,689 |
| ThisNext | 25-34 | 35-44 | 41-56 | 44-59 | 324,207 |
| Wishpot | 25-34 | 45-54 | 51 | 49 | 3,072 |
| Wists | 25-34 | 35-44 | 40-56 | 44-60 | 65,877 |
| Zebo | 18-24 | <18 | 48-56 | 44-52 | 49,402 |
What makes a great recommendation? Is it the number of people who recommend something or is it the person who recommends it that matters most? Is social shopping here to stay? Please leave your thoughts below.
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10 Readers have left their thoughts
tom
i use pronto.com
according to compete it looks like they have about 10 million visitors a month (they say 14 million on their site). very cool. very slick. lots of good ratings plus they have more products from more stores than a bunch of the others because they are a comparison shopping engine meets social shopping. i kinda dig it.
[reply to this comment]
Apr 29th, 2008
John Foley
We love your site and your content. Keep up the good work. I also wanted to submit that you might consider Pronto.com for your next round-up of Social Shopping sites. We’re committed to Social Shopping and I think you’ll see ever more rich community features on our site in the coming months, starting with a bookmarklet that we’re launching today.
Again, thanks for covering the space. We look forward to future posts.
[reply to this comment]
Apr 29th, 2008
Chris (admin)
@tom - thanks for dropping by.
@John Foley - thanks for your comments. If you give us a day or so to update I’ll add Pronto to the list. Looks like a nice site anyway.
[reply to this comment]
Apr 29th, 2008
zenith
I think its here to stay. Their primary goal of companies is to sell things. So I would definitely trust other user’s opinions about a product more than a company’s press release or advertising campaign.
[reply to this comment]
Apr 30th, 2008
Jacinda
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the blogger (well, most anyway) aren’t trying to promote a positive view like companies are when they pay for ads. If they don’t like it, they’ll say so. If they think it’s half great and half garbage, they’ll say so.
[reply to this comment]
May 1st, 2008
Lizzy
Yeah, its hard to trust anyone. With affiliates and sneaky paid reviews.
[reply to this comment]
May 1st, 2008
Chris (admin)
@zenith and @Jacinda. In theory, it should mean that you can get unbiased reviews on products/companies, but as @Lizzy suggests, it might end up with people using underhand methods. I still think these sites are pretty useful and hopefully, the community on each site will be able to flag anyone who looks like they are trying to scam anybody.
Thank you all for your comments.
[reply to this comment]
May 3rd, 2008