Comparison shopping search engines have been around for a long while - enter what’s touted to be The Next Big Thing; social shopping sites.

Much like other forms of social networking and social bookmarking, social shopping sites are places where users add products or services of interest to them, purchases they’ve made or wishlist goodies from all over the web to their profiles. Rather than being an added feature of their profiles; shopping is the focus.

Imagine that you’re looking to buy a solar panel - you could go to all the reviews sites and comparison shopping engines; knowing that many of the results were rather biased or confined to a few people’s opinions. Social shopping sites are a more peer driven recommendation system; connecting consumers to consumers.

Example: Fred buys a solar panel from Retailer X, he thinks it’s great; posts it to his social shopping site profile; his friends take note, add it to their profile as a good purchase or a wish list item; perhaps add their own comments; then their friends take note of the conversation - or someone just browsing the site looking for solar panel suggestions stumbles across the listing. You get the idea :).

If you’d like to take a look at a couple of the more popular social shopping sites; Kaboodle and Stylefeeder seem to be getting a good deal of attention.

For a more in depth look at social shopping; read this article on Internet Retailer. While social shopping sites are very much in their infancy, they could very well help make or break some companies in the future. eBay’s acquisition of StumbleUpon recently certainly wasn’t a case of them splashing money around for the hell of it.

Social shopping sites are yet another avenue to monitor for buzz on your goods and services; perhaps a good source for finding new hot products to stock; or for the more enterprising - a place to start creating buzz about your what your business has to offer.