Social Shopping in Italy: An Explorative Research

In the last months both the real and the virtual world have been shattered by a spreading phenomenon: social shopping. Social shopping combines social media and e-commerce, letting all the features of social media – friends, groups, likes, comments and discussion- converge toward the activity of shopping. Social shopping involves the main actors in the market: companies and consumers. The first benefits from the increasing selling, the latter from the bargains. As far as the demand side is concerned, the success of social shopping is due to such factors as the growing influence of customer reviews (user-generated product reviews), the spreading of word-of-mouth, consumers’ empowerment but also, and probably manly, by the economic situation which pushes consumers to look for bargains and savings. As far as the supply side is concerned, social shopping enables companies to generate traffic on their websites, thus achieving free advertising, and to increase sell out. Although the first Groupon deal goes back to 2008 and the financial value of the company has skyrocketed since since then, there is still a lack of academic research on this topic. The aim of this paper is to present the preliminary results of an explorative research conducted on Italian users of social shopping aimed at understanding the motivations behind the success of the phenomenon: why people use group shopping sites; if and how they changed shopping habits because of social shopping; which kind of products they mostly prefer; if they share coupons with friends; if they share opinions after the deal; if they are only “cherry pickers” or develop a relationship with firms/shops; if they use deals to discover new shopping experiences; if they have the intention of continuing the social shopping experience in the future; etc. Some available brand-new data can help in achieving another goal of this paper: to set social shopping into the more general frame of e-commerce. Does e-commerce increased also because of social shopping? How big are the most important group shopping sites in respect to the biggest e-commerce sites? Is it possible to make some previsions?