Nov 07 2007
Social networks and wish lists for ecommerce
With the explosion of widgets (mini-apps, gadgets, etc.), the need for a wish list function that allows the incorporation of all ecommerce sites has become obvious. This gaping void is a great business opportunity that will be filled in the near future. The efforts I currently see are not sufficiently seamless or too limited in scale. But developments are moving very quickly towards true universal wish list functionality.
The opening of third party apps for Facebook and the Microsoft partnership has given them a bit of a head start. Google’s recent announcement of OpenSocial and the alliance with MySpace, Bebo, SixApart, Orkut, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle has a lot of marketers ready to jump in. It appears that OpenSocial is positioned to eventually dominate.
I think e-commerce marketers can wait until this all shakes out. That is, unless you take pleasure in pursuing dead end technologies and starting all over again.
Here are few examples of bleeding edge efforts that are likely to fail because of the changing landscape:
Blue Nile is one of the first to take advantage of Facebook applications and they have done a very nice job of syncing their wish list to your Facebook profile. See the Linda Bustos article at GetElastic for a summary of how it works. But the model for this concept is doomed to failure because you can’t have different Facebook application for each e-commerce business. The clutter would eventually become unmanagable.
My It Things (another social network) has a new widget call Share it! When items are added to a wish list, you can visit your widgets page on your profile, then Embed or Export to any blog or Social Network so your friends and family can see it (supports Blogger, Facebook, Eons, TypePad, Friendster and MySpace). The problem is that you need upload images and input copy to create that wish list.
Wishlist.com is a comparison shopping site that is building its identity as wish list portal. This idea makes sense to me and could be successful if they can build a more seamless method for building the wish lists for items outside of their site. They ask users to bookmark pages from websites to add to the wish list. This method is better but still not seamless enough. You can also automatically add items from within their comparison shopping engine or you can upload images and copy from other websites.
When the technology for building a single profile that can be imported into social networking sites becomes available and a single app can be planted on the product pages and wish lists of any website, the true power of wish lists will be realized. The examples I see now are nothing but noble attempts to work within existing technologies.
2 responses so far
I found a list of social shopping websites by Linda Bustos at Get Elastic that is a great resource: Social Shopping Roundup for Online Retailers. Linda is perhaps one of the best bloggers on the subject of ecommerce. Her articles have more relevant and usable information than anyone else that I have seen in the blogosphere.
Have you taken a look at http://www.wish2list.com ?