Social shopping segment growing; Kaboodle leads the pack

Social shopping sites only receive less than one percent of Internet traffic in the United States, but the segment grew 447 percent from a year ago last week, Hitwise reported yesterday.

This is good news for the social shopping segment and some good visibility, too.

Hitwise ranked the following sites in terms of traffic volume and social shopping market share:

1. Kaboodle: 68 percent; up 200 percent from last year
2. Buzzillions: 8.23 percent
3. ThisNext: 7.23 percent
4. ShopWiki: 6.89 percent
5. Stylehive: 5.18 percent

To put this in perspective, Photobucket, the photo sharing site recently bought by MySpace, accounted for two percent of US Internet traffic with 14 million users.

Both Quantcast and Compete report Kaboodle's traffic to be about 3.2 million uniques per month.

These sites differ from traditional CSEs in that they encourage their users to create lists of items they want or already have that define their personal style.  Often, these sites will show which users are most compatible to your own tastes.

Business models mostly include affiliate fees, co-branding deals and advertising -- and possibly selling the market data they collect to outside recipients.

Written by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor

Comments

[BobM]

How does their traffic and share compare to typical CSEs? It doesn't seem purpose of 'social shopping' sites for users is really different from CSEs, some just have the feature of saving a list.

[Saman]

BobM is totally right. When you break it all down, the difference between typical CSE's and "social shopping" CSE's is minute. The true potential of combining social networking and eCommerce are yet to be explored. Something tells me we'll all get to take part and I get the feeling that this something I speak of will change the entire landscape of eCommerce all together...