Social Media Needs to Go Shopping

Online, everybody shops alone. Retail sites and checkout user flows have evolved around a single user, with a single mouse and a single credit card. For the most part, our friends are missing from our online retail experience. Friends are part of our shopping ritual. What happened to dragging a sobbing, just-dumped pal out of bed at noon and taking them to buy — I don’t know — a Porsche GT3? Online retail is a lonely place. At the same time that individual stores began enabling product ratings as a way to “engage consumers,” the landscape of our online experience changed. Here it comes: Social networks now account for a significant portion of our time online.

This is a strange time. The people we know live on one site. The stuff we want lives on about a million others, two or three of which are good retail experiences. If you have motorcycles as one of your interests on your Facebook profile, and have friends with similar interests, you’ll get an ad for motorcycle insurance in the ad space on your Facebook feed page. But the clickthrough rates for those ads are 0.032%. The ad recognized you, but you don’t care.

Likewise, if you go to the motorcycle insurance site to shop for a quote, you’ll find that the site treats you like an anonymous drone. Guess what: As far as the insurance site knows, you are an anonymous drone. So there is no cross-selling, no friend recommendation, no integration of your life into the process of buying insurance. This is a big miss for retailers and shoppers alike.

Attempts have been made. You can become a fan of a product on Facebook — if you have no life. You can rate songs on music sites — if you love music and have no life. You can have a virtual friend make a recommendation for you on iTunes and feel virtually not lonely. But the chasm between the people in your life and the stuff you all love is still huge.

To bridge the gap, profiles must become portable. Not autofill portable, but truly integrable into our various online experiences. This brings up a number of issues — you can hear Jim Gaffigan’s high-pitched voice as the chorus chiming in here: “Who owns the platform?” “What about privacy?” “What if somebody sees me shopping for Basha CDs?” But the big question is, “Who owns my profile?” And the answer in the context of social retail is, “We all do.”