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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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The changing facets of social shopping online

April 07, 2011

We had quite a few comments on my post last month about Groupon UK and the rise of social shopping. Given the interest surrounding this topic, I thought I’d follow up with a post which concentrates on the key differences between the four key types of retail affiliate: Price Comparison sites, Cashback sites, Voucher sites and Social Shopping sites.

One of the first things to realise is that these four groups attract very different online audiences. Using Mosaic, Experian’s in-house audience segmentation system, we can see what types of people are visiting the four categories.

The spider diagram above highlights how different UK Internet audiences use Rewards and Directories sites. Cashback sites for example are most popular with the Careers and Kids and New Homemakers groups, typified by modern professionals with young families. Price Comparison sites are popular with a number of the more affluent groups including Professional Rewards and Rural Solitude. Social Shopping sites on the other hand attract Terraced Melting Pot and Liberal Opinions, which are young urbanites of a brand range of ethnicities living in big metropolises.

As well as attracting different audiences, the four groups cater for diverse sectors of the online retail market. Looking at the breakdown of downstream traffic from each of the four groups, there are distinct variations in where traffic is being sent. Department Stores such as Amazon, John Lewis and Debenhams receive the highest proportion of traffic from Price Comparison Sites, Cashback Sites and Voucher Sites. Where Social Shopping Sites depart from this trend is that most of the traffic sent from Social Shopping Sites like Groupon goes directly to fashion retailers in the Apparel and Accessories category.

We can drill into this further by observing some of the search data of product-related search terms which are driving traffic to the four key sectors.

I’ve divided these search terms into broad product categories of fashion (green), technology (blue), entertainment/travel (pink), home (purple) and insurance (red). So top search terms which are driving traffic to Price Comparison websites are predominantly technology and entertainment based, including searches for ‘ipad 2’ ‘kindle’ and ‘star wars games’. Cashback sites are very much driven by technology products, whereas Voucher sites are driven by insurance products and entertainment products, especially for food and restaurant vouchers. Again, Social Shopping caters to quite a unique niche, with the majority of its top product search terms relating to fashion.

What is very apparent about the search terms driving traffic to Social Shopping sites is that most of them are very specific, looking for items like ‘maxi dresses’, ‘high waisted jeans’ and ‘grecian dresses’. In fact 1.4% of all search terms driving traffic to the Social Shopping category include the word ‘dress’ or ‘dresses’.

As I said in my previous blog, social shopping is definitely a growing trend. What these results highlight is that social shopping is catering to a different audience from the rest of the Rewards and Directories sites and is principally focussed on apparel products sold by fashion retailers.

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Tweet Posted by Robin Goad at 01:25 PM | (6) | (0)
In Categories Demographics | Fashion | Insurance | Mosaic lifestyle | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks

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