Social shopping is a method of e-commerce and of traditional shopping in which consumers shop in a social networking environment similar to MySpace. Using the wisdom of crowds, users communicate and aggregate information about products, prices, and deals. Many sites allow users to create custom shopping lists and share them with friends.[1]. Others concentrate on the user interactions consisting information and recommendations that are hard to acquire from the actual sales personnel. Some services even allow users to shop together synchronously to complete the social environment Social shopping sites can generate revenue not only from advertising and click throughs, but also by sharing information about their users with retailers.
Social shopping can also exist in the real-world even beside the obvious changing of consumer stories with people one knows. For example, when you walk into a dressing room, the mirror reflects your image, but you also see images of the apparel item and celebrities wearing it on an interactive display. A webcam also projects an image of the consumer wearing the item on the website for everyone to see. This creates an interaction between the consumers inside the store and their social network outside the store. The technology behind this system uses RFID[2].
Examples of social shopping sites include Delight.com, Thisnext, Yelp, Zlio, Bunnybot, RunToShop and Kaboodle. Business aspects of social shopping are still to be proven, although several companies have managed to publish their services and gather masses of users.
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