Shopping can be a very social activity; in fact it’s the favorite social activity for teens.  So why does social shopping (co-browsing, wishlists, group-buying…) online have such a chequered history? Remember Smackshopping, Microsoft’s $50m social shopping venture (Deal of the Day Dutch Auctions)?  Deadpool.  Or Group Buy pioneer LetsBuyIt?  Deadpool. Enter Plurchase, a new social shopping site that [...]

Interesting article (archived below) from AdAge on the ongoing evolution of Facebook from social networking platform to social commerce platform. Right now, if brands want to sell on Facebook, they can create a shopping widget, set up a Facebook storefront or add to Facebook’s gift store that takes Facebook Credits (PayPal for Facebook).  But Alvenda, [...]

Google Wave, incase you’ve been on another planet, is the next generation email service from Google – a new personal communication and collaboration tool that fuses email, instant messaging and multimedia content into conversation threads called “waves”. With Wave, Google is not only attempting to do nothing less than restructure the Web around conversation threads, [...]

Another day, another top 10 list, but this one is really useful, so I’ve summarized and annotated.  A thoughtful top 10 list of top social media tools for online retailers by Linda Bustos from Get Elastic, the e-commerce blog from ElasticPath.  Top of Linda’s list, in order of impact, are customer reviews – the elixir of social [...]

More evidence that Facebook is transforming itself into a social commerce platform.  Nimbit, specialists in direct-to-fan music marketing has just launched MyStore storefront for Facebook. Nimbit MyStore allows musicians, managers, and labels to sell and market music, merchandise and eTickets directly from the artist’s Facebook profile (no fiddly messing around with iTunes or TicketMaster). Nimbit [...]

From $35 a month, PowerReviews is offering an Express version of it’s social commerce solution. Like its big brother PowerReview Express works as a ‘decision accelerator’ for shoppers on e-commerce sites, giving shoppers confidence to buy by showing customer reviews (and quick scan review summaries).  Does this mark the mainstreaming of social commerce? Before, we had to [...]

Mjedi, a Seattle based social commerce startup has been picked as a finalist at the CTIA Fund Fest this week. Interesting app, you SMS the barcode of an item in a participating store to a special number – and receive a message to your Facebook wall and cell if/when it goes on sale.  Smart inline advertising [...]

Twangü, derived from the Chinese word “tuangou” for team buying, is a GroupBuy social commerce app on Facebook that allows people to shop as a team (and get discounts from vendors bidding for their business). Think Mobshop and Mercata for the Facebook generation. Didn’t work out in those early days – but was that because [...]