Using group buying or collective buying power is nothing new I Market America as it is fundamental tot the plan and business. But we can easily make similar offers along with our Paid to Shop offers.Shopping communities bring like-minded people together to discuss, share, and shop.  Using the wisdom of crowds, users communicate and aggregate information about products, prices, and deals. Many sites allow users to create custom shopping lists and share them with friends.[2]. To date, fashion communities such as Kaboodle, Stylefeeder, and Polyvore have largely dominated this space. Yet, shopping communities are not limited exclusively to fashion. Other shopping communities include Listia, an online community for free stuff, Shiny Orb, an online wedding apparel community and Tribesmart, which allows you to create your own wish list. Activity-based clubs (such as travel or adventure-sports clubs) are the in-person analogy for this category of social shopping.

We already do this in the business and MA Network and Chatterbox are both built to do exactly that. This is extended by our blogs, fan clubs and social networks. The Market America community is all about sharing wisdom and advice of others. Its called networking and we get paid to do it as we have sophisticated software that tracks it. This is what Shop Consultants is all about—giving advice and guidance on the internet.

Recommendation engines allow shoppers to provide advice to fellow shoppers. The in-store analogy for this category of social shopping is asking a fellow shopper for advice. Traditional online product review companies such as Amazon, Bazaarvoice, and Power Reviews have helped many consumers to date but currently emphasize obtaining and giving advice to strangers. Up and coming social shopping startups such as ShopSocially, Blippy and Swipely now encourage conversations around purchases with your friends / people you know, which seem to be the next wave of product review companies. Market America actually serves customized recommendations and relevant offers to each individual preferred customer on the portal and provides a shop  consultant  to give advice or guide the customer.Social Shopping Marketplaces which bring sellers and buyers together to connect and transact.

The offline analogy for this category is a farmers market or bazaar. The marketplace brings together independent sellers and creates a forum for them to display and sell their wares to buyers. The marketplace affords buyers and sellers methods to connect and communicate whilst also performing the role of e-commerce facilitator for sellers and discovery engine for buyers. Growing online Social Shopping Marketplaces include Shoply and Facebook specific payment.  Market America is a real and live community with a market place, auctions, aggregation of all hot deals from thousands of partners. Add to that the power of being paid to shop, with Higher Cash Back, and  being paid to invite others to shop and you have a very powerful combination.

Want to get involved with social shopping but don't know where to start? These 7 essential social shopping websites will get you started whether you are interested in window-shopping on the web, getting product reviews, getting involved in a shopping community, keeping up with the latest fashion trends, or mainly focused on designer fashions it is all combined at Market America.com and now combined with Shop.com’s incredible shopping advice and the best comparative shopping anywhere. Combine that with One cart or EZ cart,  state of the art enterprise search and navigation that is both intuitive and narrowing to find what you want, 50 million products and over 3000 merchants and name brands, a Shop consultant who cares about the customer to assist, Shop.coms incredible merchandising displays and then being paid to shop and invite others to shop and you have a combination more powerful than anything else out there. It is important to understand that any site that is going to be a great social shopping site, must be convenient, user friendly, and must have a fabulous comparison engine! There is none better that Shop.coms’

In the coming months Shop.com ’s and MarketAmerica.com ’s strengths will be integrated and combined. There are several unique and powerful tools or platforms at Shop.com that lend themselves to social shopping like none other that you and your customers will be able to utilize in the social shopping arena!  Two of these are Trend Shops and E-Gifts!

Trendshop is a social shopping site at Shop.com that help you make interactive fashion collages of products available on the portal and share with friends and customers.  The site allows you to create displays pictures of particular fashion styles. The same thing can be done to design rooms.

You know those style pages in magazines where the stylists have decided on the look they want to create and they build the look by showing you great shoes, dresses, jeans, handbags, make-up and accessories? You can search and select from over 50 million indexed products and  3000 brands, merchants or designers and pull them together in your own collection.  Users can also share branded products or sets via Facebook and Twitter.

The site builds user generated index of products, with member clippings using the clipping tool using products from the portal and around the web and capturing meta data to collect sets known as fashion collages.  It’s like painting a virtual blank canvas, creating for others, sharing with friends, of clothes, interior design, art and more, you can spend hours on this doing so fun and easy.  The website filled with eye candy ( clothes, accessories, cosmetics) and make your own outfits from designers, and show it to your friends and see if this is something they like.  You can link the sets with descriptions and purchase the item from a third party or the portal. Contest can be run and customers or UFO’s can be stylist or designers. Its fun and it is a very socially attractive. Of course with a click one can order an of the items on the one cart or easy cart. The E-gift platform allows visitors or customers to select gift or make a gift registry. Friends can go on and see what someone wants or likes.  It sends them to the product and they can give the friend or relative the gift. The recipient gets notified—so you can instantly take care of gift giving without having to go buy it at the store or order it, and then ship it, or worry about it getting there in time. They can select color, size, style, etc. and you get charged by credit card and they never know what was spent. But they get it instantly and get to make the choices they want as well as get the right style and size .  What a fabulous  service.  It's perfect for special occasions, birthdays, anniversaries, graduations , Valentine’s day, Mother's days, Father's day, celebrations, congratulations, etc. It has social shopping written all over it and it is interactive and fun to  share with friends. So it is easy to see how Market America with Shop.com will lead the way in social shopping, creating an addictive shopping experience and change the way people shop! Be at World Conference to see it first hand and to experience it!

~Keep Growing

JR