Social Wishlists

Are social wish lists any good? In the past two years we have had many social wish list websites pop up everywhere delivering price comparison to direct purchase to consumers. Pinterest, Fab and Thefancy are a few that are in the lead. All of them allow the user to Pin “Stuff” from different websites on to their sites and link back to the original content with most of the information grabbed directly from the Site. While Fab and Thefancy enable direct purchase and delivery, they both operate in the domains of exclusive items that are easy to spot..

What is the regular user searching for?

The regular user is still searching for mundane stuff like Shoes, Jeans, Shorts, Razors on every other e-commerce site and buying them or adding them to their wish list. This wish list either exists within the e-commerce website or outside on Social Wishlists shared with other users. However, there is no way to merge the two without getting into complicated API and data sharing.

Whats the Solution?

The fact remains that the user still searches. And he/ she searches on multiple websites multiple times to get to his / her goal. The idea should not be to create a curated list and increase the search pool thereby increasing the time between Decision and Spending. The smarter way is to enable the user to search multiple sites at the same time in a Tagged, Categorised, E-Commerce environment and then lead them to the correct product, thus reducing the length of the chain.

Social shopping are actually increasing the browsing time per product with repeated content and is going to slow down the process in the longer run. And a slower and longer process of buying can only hurt the business.