For my thesis, I want to have a project where I can incorporate my enthusiasm for designing new user interactions and user experiences. One of possible directions is to utilize projects that I have been working on, such as BeeMe and ITPGuestbook, as case studies. The other path is to come up with a new product proposal, and specifically focus on designing the user interaction with user scenario for it. I will make a decision in a few days!

"I want to buy what you buy!"

Today I came across the concept of “social shopping” while doing some research on different social interactions, and was very intrigued by the idea. According to Wikipedia, social shopping is “a method of e-commerce and of traditional shopping in which consumers shop in a social networking environment similar to MySpace.” Not that I didn’t know about the idea of social shopping. I just never knew that there is a term called “social shopping” with a huge market value, because it seemed so obvious to me that people talk about what they buy and why they buy. The concept has been around some time, and has established very unique markets like those of Woot! and Kaboodle, but there is no King of social shopping sites yet, because the nature of the “social” shopping activities tend to be very community specific. Here are some articles about social shopping:

Examples of social shopping sites

As far as I observed, most existing social shopping services simply leverage popular social networking services like Facebook and Twitter to generate traffic to the site, and provide very target-specific contents to increase the number of returning customers. For example, if you like what Woot! sells, you stick with the site and its community. It’s that simple, but it works. I have one site called @Cosme (Japanese site) that I ALWAYS go back to. They offer a place where users can talk about their favorite cosmetic brands and products, and share what worked/didn’t work according to their age, lifestyle, skin type, etc. I’m a frequent user of the site, because I feel so comfortable sharing my thoughts with like-minded people (whether that’s true or not).

Is there an area that hasn’t been cultivated by social shoppers yet?I wonder if there’s any other and better way to encourage users to make purchasing decisions. I also think that the concept of social shopping is definitely applicable to B-to-B online shopping services. There may be B2B social shopping websites already exist, but I will be looking into this topic a little further. I guess that’s my homework for this weekend.