Dead might be the wrong word. Actually, mobile and social shopping has yet to be born. Instead, the landscape is littered with a countless variety of mobile shopping apps, none of which are truly social at their center. You have a wide spectrum of apps out there. First you have the utility based apps that help you compare local products and prices with online stores or maybe manage a shopping list - things like that. Then you go to the other end of the spectrum with animated cartoon looking mobile shopping apps that need a user's manual to understand - but cool looking for sure. Some look like something from a Pokemon movie with graphics and characters bouncing and shaking around like an over designed 1990's website. And for the most part, their angle is to push some exclusive deal or offer on to you from some local or online merchant or try to get you to earn some kind of point rewards and win a trinket or two. Maybe I am being a bit harsh, but you be the judge.
None of these social shopping apps are anything close to being social. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but they are not truly social applications and that is what we are missing. Twitter, facebook and foursqare are true social platforms because they depend on the member community to generate the vast majority of their content. They rely on people and merchants to establish relationships between each other and the world around them. The more people that join the more powerful the app/network becomes for everyone (not just the service provider). The current crop of social shopping apps seem to have missed that memo. Instead they are more like a circus act trying to get you into the big top to watch a few fun attractions using some combination of gimmicks, barcode scanners and GPS features. But these kinds of apps will never get ingrained into the psyche and daily habits of people in same way as twitter, facebook, or foursquare. A different approach is needed.
Successful social apps become part of your regular activity and are largely driven by the behavior of the users themselves and the connections users make with each other and with their surroundings. This should be no different for local shopping. Pushing exclusive deals or getting the user to bounce around stores to earn points is a one-way street controlled by the service provider and not a social network. The consumer and local merchant are not empowered and social networks are all about empowering the end user to interact and contribute back to the network. The more people that join the stronger and more valuable the network becomes. And to be clear, what I mean by successful is not just the success of the start-up or online giant that delivers this service, but success for us means the consumer and local merchant are really benefiting and where the social shopping apps makes a difference in their lives from both a financial and quality of life perspective. Twitter has changed the way people behave and express themselves and for social shopping to be successful it needs to do the same. And this also applies for local merchants as well. They stand to benefit greatly from a truly social shopping network where they are not just offering cut throat deals that are not sustainable. Local merchants leveraging an open social shopping network can benefit from the visibility a social network can provide and that is currently only available to the highest advertising bidder. With an open social shopping community everyone benefits from the consumer to the local merchant (not to mention the service provider).
Consider Wikipedia as an example. Wikipedia would be just another online static encyclopedia if not for the vibrant community of contributors and the way Wikipedia empowers users to interact and contribute. Social shopping, for it to really take off and make a lasting impact in people's lives, needs to leverage the consumer and local merchant in a way that empowers them to share and interact with other fellow shoppers, merchants and with their community as a whole.
At OfferDrop, we strongly believe in this model and are passionate about making this type of open social shopping experience available to the consumer and local merchant. Call us rebels or call us crazy, but we plan to shake things up. We might get stepped on and trampled on along the way, but we strongly believe in what we are doing and hope you will join us.
Version 1.3 of OfferDrop is currently available in the Apple store. We are also feverishly working on an Android version and have many new features coming out in version 2.0 that will keep pushing the envelope. Please check out our website and download our app.
http://www.offerdrop.com
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