Using ‘Likes’ for Gift Ideas
Retailers Are Tapping Social Profiles to Help Customers Shop for Their Friends — Online retailers are experimenting with the idea that friends can make shopping easier. — Companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Etsy Inc., a site that sells handmade and vintage goods …
Context & Ripple Effects
Social shopping is getting a second act. A 2006 experiment asked whether shopping could work with social networks and largely went nowhere; four years later, Amazon and Etsy are trying again with a sharper mechanism — instead of building shopping communities, they are reading signals their customers' friends already publish. The timing is no accident: it lands days after Facebook's December 2010 e-commerce drive made clear that the Like button was becoming commercial infrastructure rather than a vanity metric.
First-order effects
- Amazon and Etsy gain a new recommendation input for the hardest retail problem — gift buying — by mining friends' Likes to suggest presents for people the shopper doesn't know well enough to ask.
- Shoppers get a workaround for the annual gift-idea bottleneck at exactly the peak season moment when it hurts most, with no extra effort beyond permissions they have already granted.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's position strengthens on both sides of the transaction: retailers that want social taste data must build on its platform, making the social graph the tollbooth between merchants and purchase intent.
- Rivals that lack social-graph access face a widening personalization gap during the highest-stakes selling weeks, pressuring them toward partnerships or data deals of their own.
Third-order effects
- If gift discovery via friends proves out, product discovery broadly shifts from shopper-initiated search toward socially derived signals, and whoever controls the social graph — not the retailer's catalog — sets the terms of commerce.
- Using published social data for commercial targeting puts permission and privacy norms under real strain, setting up the questions regulators and users will eventually have to adjudicate.
The trend: E-commerce discovery is migrating from what shoppers type into a search box toward what their friends publicly signal, turning the social graph itself into retail infrastructure.