Social Shopping Essay

Online shopping is strongly beneficial for both consumers and businesses, as it allows ease of service, customization for customers, and can increase sales and reputation of businesses. Giving the consumer the ability to shop in the comfort of their own home, without spending a large amount of time, as they may experience at a Retail location, gives them the sense of freedom while purchasing. This can improve a Company’s reputation, and allow for targeting a larger mass market by appealing to customers.

Five of the social shopping services that started the online buying craze, were Polyvore, Farfetch, Fancy and Wanelo. According to the Fast Company (2015), Polyvore, founded in 2007, has 20 million users, and allows them to create collages of products they want, allowing them to purchase. Farfetch, founded in 2008, has 450,000 users and is known for having goods from 300+ boutiques from all over the world, and are not widely sold online. Fancy, founded in 2009, has 10 million users and offers users the ability to choose the style they are interested in,

This problem varies across many stores depending on the demand of the product and quality of a store. Customers with overlying body sizes tend to come into the store and leave it, empty handed due to size mismatch. Medium sized clothes tend to be used up the fastest due to the average size of humans corresponding with the size of the clothes. This issue is one of the many factors that interferes with the population of customers that prefer in-store shopping. This problem is very easily avoided through online shopping since the clothes are deliberately being ordered from the location in which they are manufactured; factories. This removes the aspect of size mismatch and enables its online shopper population to get access to the size of their