Appropriately enough for a revered designer, Ms. Kamali is in the vanguard. A technology called ScanLife was installed at her boutique in recent weeks, and it already allows people to scan bar codes on merchandise and obtain details about the clothes through videos. The part about buying items day or night will come in another week or two.

Neinan Marcus-owned luxury shoes retailer Bergdorf Goodman has an iPhone app. 

Only one designer shoe is featured daily and a customer is given 24 hours to purchase that particular item.

Top Takeouts

• Consumers trust friends, family members and peers more than advertising, expert reviews and bloggers;
• Consumers rely on advice from family and friends more as the price or importance of a purchase decision goes up;
• Most online shoppers are interested in seeking real-time advice from friends, family, customer support and even other shoppers on a website.

DecisionStep White Paper_Social Shopping

Mars Inc.’s Snickers is running a multichannel campaign that features a mobile game, a WAP site, banners and in-store marketing to drive consumer interest.

The application lets consumers browse fashion apparel by brand or category and features items for men, women and children, as well as accessories such as bags, shoes and furniture. Consumers are redirected to the retailer’s checkout page but remain within the application.

“We’re the leading fashion search engine and social shopping site,” said Andy Moss, cofounder/vice president and general manager of ShopStyle, San Francisco. “We wanted to extend that brand so people could use ShopStyle on the go simply because of the belief that mobile will make-up more and more consumer traffic in the future.”

Meanwhile however, he seems to have re-considered, perhaps due to his investments in sites such as Twitter. Now he blows the social commerce horn. 

After sleeping through some important developments the last couple of years, the social shopping segment is now bustling with hectic activity. The former pioneers are re-orienting themselves and are in part rolling out completely new strategies:

• ThisNext and Stylehive are coupling together as Curatemedia (“to dominate social shopping”) and want to run a bundle of niche sites. “What should I buy?” is the motto here (and not only for the users).

• Kaboodle, a part of the publishing group Hearst, puts its hopes on a fundamental redesign and wants in the future to swim on the “realtime” wave.

• Zlio pays tribute to their roots withShopmarking (“On the fly social shopping”).

In general the developments should tend away from social shopping and towards personal shopping.