Metafluence

The Social Shopping guide for clothing and fashion companies

Rather specific, huh? Well, I compiled this research for a couple of friends of mine. I spent several hours pulling this info together and thought some other people may want to benefit from this resource. I started this resource with some competitive intelligence, then built up social bookmarks to seek out additional recommendations, Google searched for articles with lists of sites, compared them in Alexa, and wrote up the results. Hope it helps!

Quick fact: Over half of all online shoppers start at aggregator sites rather than going directly to a merchant’s site (Bizrate/Shopzilla, March 2005).

Aggregator sites are places that pull together a variety of products, stores, and/or shoppers into one convenient place. Kind of like an online mall concept. Developing a presence in these places will significantly increase your sales. Aggregator sites break out into 3 types: Social shopping, Product blogs, and Social bookmarks.

To get started, here’s a few of the most important sites:

Social Shopping

These are sites where shoppers create profiles and make friends in order to share and discover products to buy. You can participate on these sites to promote yo shit. These first three sites could be all you tap and it will be huge for you, they are:

Stylehive, http://www.stylehive.com/

This is your #1 recommendation because it is social shopping and completely dedicated to fashion.

Kaboodle, http://www.kaboodle.com/

This is your #2 recommendation because it is larger than Stylehive, but it’s about more than fashion. However, fashion is their #1 category.

This Next, http://www.thisnext.com/

Your #3 recommendation is a competitor to Kaboodle. It’s #2 in size to Kaboodle and fashion is also their #1 category.

These are smaller sites, but they are dedicated social networking sites for fashion and could bring in great traffic:

• Iqons, http://www.iqons.com/
• Favorite Thingz, http://www.favoritethingz.com/
• ShareYourLook, http://www.shareyourlook.com/
• FashMatch, http://www.fashmatch.com/
• Shoutfit, http://www.shoutfit.com/

Product Blogs

These are sites that regularly find and post cool products. What’s interesting about these sites is that readers buy exactly what’s listed on the blog. For example, if the blog posts a pink leopard print cashmere hoody, then over 90% of the readers will buy the pink leopard print cashmere hoody, even if there are other colors available. It’s important to try and build relationships with these blogs so they feature your products because they drive a ton of buyers to your online store. Here are some product blogs (some a couple stores) you should try to get in (they are listed in order of traffic size):

Shopbop, http://www.shopbop.com/

This is a store and they are huge. Six times the traffic of Shop Intuition.

DailyCandy, http://www.dailycandy.com/

This is a product blog and it comparable in size to Shopbop.

Productdose, http://www.productdose.com/

A product blog that focuses on design and style.

Cool Hunting, http://www.coolhunting.com/

Also a product blog that focuses on design and style.

Shop Intuition, http://www.shopintuition.com/

Another product blog that focuses on fashion.

Elsewares, http://www.elsewares.com/

An online store that focuses on design and style.

Social Bookmarking Sites

These are places where people save links to things they want to buy. You’ll want to get on these lists because these sites make recommendations to their users based on what they’ve bookmarked. So, if you create your own account and save all of your site’s links, then go around the web saving related product links, then your site will be recommended to people when they save those other product links. There aren’t a ton of these dedicated to shopping, but here’s a few that matter:

Wists, http://www.wists.com/

The only real bookmarking site dedicated to shopping.

StumbleUpon, http://www.stumbleupon.com/

Not dedicated to shopping, but it does have a shopping category and a huge user base.

Delicious, http://del.icio.us/

Also not dedicated to shopping, but they do have shopping tags and a huge user base.

I also have a great post on social bookmarking if you’re interested in learning more about it.

More

Once you’ve conquered those sites, you can dig into more social shopping links and product blog links.

Are there other sites I should be aware of? Was this resource helpful? Is there anything you think is wrong or off the mark? Let a brother know in the comments below.