Retailfans.com is a social shopping site where users can look for new shopping ideas and share their own ideas with others. Anyone can submit an item they’ve found on another website and vote on items that others have found. The items with the most votes rise to the top of the listings shown on the site. Users earn “Karma” points when they get votes on their items. Whenever users gain enough Karma points, they are given more responsibility on the site. They can, for example “Bury” items to avoid spam. Social networking aspects of the site include recommendations and commenting on items. Recommendations are items that have been recommended to the user by one of their friends. Any number of private lists can be created by users to organize their shopping ideas. The items that have been submitted to the site are organized into convenient categories, with a navigation menu on the left hand side of the site. The categories include: Hot, Latest, Fashion, Makeup, Hair, Skincare, Body, Jewelry, and More. Pressing More brings up a list of the most popular tags assigned to items that have been submitted by others. Melbourne, Australia based Retailfans.com was founded in 2009 by Alex Rabarts. The site’s primary userbase is located in Australia and the United States. Competitors to Retailfans include Kaboodle, Wishpot and Crowdstorm. All three of these sites are older and have more users. In addition, they focus on the full range of retail products. Retailfans is more narrowly targeted to women, with its focus on fashion and beauty items. This could be an asset, as the userbase will likely be more knowledgeable in specialized areas. Retailfans has a very clean and uncluttered look. A minimum of items is shown on a given page, and pages load quickly. The site is quite responsive overall. Advertising is displayed on the site, but it is unobtrusive. Navigation is obvious and intuitive, with the menu bar on the left-hand side of the page containing links to all of the categories. In addition, there are links at the top of the page to a user’s submissions, recommendations, lists and profile. Membership at Retailfans is free and is required in order to vote on or submit items. The registration process asks for username, email address and password. There is no validation of the email address. Membership is free and there is no premium membership offered by the Retailfans site. RetailFans could be useful for women with an interest in shopping for fashion, jewelry, beauty and body care products. The site offers bookmarklet tools (toolbar buttons) that can be added to Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. These bookmarklets allow users to easily submit items to Retailfans from sites that they are visiting. The bookmarklets performed flawlessly in both browsers. RetailFans is not really different from other social shopping sites and has a relatively small number of users.

• Users can vote on items they find on the site
• Users can submit items for others to vote on
• Users gain Karma points whenever items they’ve submitted receive votes - The more Karma points a user has the more responsibility they are given on the site
• Users can maintain lists of items on the site
• The site is very easy to use and offers integration with Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers

http://www.retailfans.com/