Online shopping is lonely. In store shopping does not like crowds or commissioned salespeople, but it does like the energy, excitement and general buzz of a tactile and social experience. Online shopping has none of this. Offline shopping is a destination. Online shopping is not. The legacy of online shopping is utility, three clicks, drive conversion, and create and standard shopping experience. Online shopping has become bland and uniform, and it is also devoid of the energy of the offline experience. When comparing the social benefits of the offline experience to the online experience, Chris Anderson puts it this way in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. “It’s not just the instant gratification, convenience and tactile advantages of bricks and mortar. We’re also a gregarious species, and sometimes we like to do things together with other people. There is comfort in numbers and shared experiences bring us closer.” Online is solitary, with little in the way of shared experiences or social interaction. Some shoppers appreciate this anonymity, the lack of being badgered by in-store salespeople, they like being able to shop in pajamas. We should not lose these benefits of online shopping. But being left alone is not the same as being alone, can’t the online experience be a bit more social and exciting than it is today? In areas outside retail, online has already proven to be a social destination. The social networking sites have done this. People, especially the ones who grow up with the Internet, hang-out on line the way they hang-out in a mall. Retailers do not want to be an online destination per se any more than they want adolescents hanging out in their stores on a Friday night. Retailers are not interested in eyeballs or advertising like the social networking sites are, they still want to drive conversion. But the current online drive-to-conversion is like the badgering of a commissioned clerk, it may drive conversion, but it also drives expediency and drives the customer through and out of the site. Retailers do want a feeling of excitement online, they want buzz, brand and belonging for their customers. Online social retailing is relatively new ground however. But there are some ideas surfacing that address this ecommerce trend. Some social capabilities have been around for a while such as personalization ideas like collaborative filtering that uses the wisdom of crowds to make recommendations and the ability for customers to rate or comment on products has also been around for awhile. Other social retailing concepts are just beginning to show up, concepts such as:

• Showing customers the number of fellow shoppers who are on the site or in a given department
• The general activity of other shoppers. Not specifically what an individual customer is doing, but in-general what customers are up to – where they are browsing, what they are interested in, what they are busy researching or buying
• The ability to see what products are ‘hot’ at the moment in recent sales. This can also be segmented by what women, men, teenagers, etc. are buying. Like someone in a store seeing what other people like them have in their carriages, some general idea of what people are up to at that moment. This is not bland site analytics, but rather a view of what is going on right now.
• The ability to see what others are searching for, such as the top searches of the moment and what is hot in peoples wish lists
• Online gathering areas where customers and sponsored experts would exchange ideas and participate in live seminars. These seminars are not necessarily stored for viewing later, they are live events that are meant to be joined live
• An area where customers can share and exchange ideas of what they have done with products – things built or created, outfits put together, sound systems created, pictures taken or whatever shared ideas could be created in context of the retailer’s products.
• The more we spend the more you save shopping where the price will change depending on customers collective checkout activity during a collective shopping event
• Merchant Blogs that customers can subscribe to
• Shopcasting where products can be tagged and sold outside the retailer’s storefront. Think of a customer dropping a very simple code snipit in a blog, social network or other internet content locaton not directly associated with a retailer’s storefront where product information and purchasing capability is then automatically placed.
• Shop with friends, where shoppers can shop with their friends in real-time and chat and view what their friends are doing

And there are many more ideas on the way as retailers discover ways to attract an ever-increasing online generation. These are ecommerce concepts that retailers can try and see what works and what does not, to experiment with. New retailers are cropping up such as ThisNext (http://www.thisnext.com/) and Kaboodle (http://www.kaboodle.com/) which are dedicated to this cause. These may have swung too far and become social networking sites with retail, not retail sites with social shopping. The ideal social shopping experience may be more subtle and elusive than this. The ideal social customer experience will take some trial and error for a retailer. The best advice is to try a few concepts in a low-cost way. Set up a few sample social sites and see what works and then decide what should be migrated into your primary online storefronts. Social shopping is a new trend that is emerging and gaining momentum. These new social retail concepts should be an engaging way to shop, enriching existing customer relationships and has the ability to tap into new audiences and ultimately increasing the bottom line as the retail experience is redefined.