Referral (customer-get-customer) programs are probably nearly as old as word of mouth itself, but they are still the simplest and most effective solution to leveraging word of mouth – the most powerful marketing channel out there. As someone who has been involved with word of mouth marketing for years, what I find super interesting about referral [...]

Online private shopping clubs like Gilt and Vente-privée (directory here) are perhaps the most successful incarnations of social shopping. Whilst they don’t typically offer reviews, recommendations, registries or co-browsing, they are built on an eminently social invitation-only member-get-member mechanism that oils the word of mouth wheels. But how about integrating some more social shopping technologies?  The guys over [...]

I believe the future of social commerce will be mobile.  Soon we’ll see the emergence of  location-based apps that do crowdsourced deal aggregation and collaborative filtering to deliver compelling shopping recommendations in the field. One step towards this future is JustBought.it, a location-based social shopping app (iPhone) that runs on Twitter/Facebook Connect that allows you to share [...]

Another sign of the mainstreaming of social commerce.  Magento, the popular open-source (with commercial option) ecommerce web platform (Nespresso, 3M, Samsung, Lenovo) has launched a Facebook Connect extension ($99) to enable social shopping – allowing people to get advice from people they know, rather than strangers. The guys over at Optaros Labs have posted this short [...]

Stylefeeder is a social shopping site that works like a personal shopping assistant, picking out personal recommendations for clothes, shoes, jewellery and accessories based on stuff you like, and the stuff people with similar taste profiles to you like.  Think of it as Netflix Cinematch or Pandora for fashion. Under the bonnet, Stylefeeder is a collaborative [...]

With the number of social commerce software vendors multiplying, here’s an evolving directory of social commerce software and vendors. Know any more ? Comment below or use the contact form to send us details (name of software, vendor, and software function), and we’ll add it to the list. [table id=2 column_widths="30%|30%|40%" /]