Part of helping our clients navigate the new customer narrative means we need to be informed and up to date on digital customer behaviour. By extension, this means being familiar with the tools people are using to research their purchase, share information, and make a decision to buy or not buy a product or service.

I’d like to introduce a new feature you will start seeing regularly on our blog – where we share with you the tools, website and media that Sequentians are using at work and at play.   Consider it a more personal look at the digital space we live in.

Who: Buyosphere

What: A website self-described as “People Helping People Shop”.  Essentially, it’s a site where you can share your purchases or your “wishlists” with people you choose to connect with on Buyosphere.

Where: I use it mostly on my desktop – there is a button you can drop into your toolbar so you can add products to Buyosphere easily.   There is currently no iPhone app which doesn’t feel like a hindrance to me since I normally don’t surf for products on my mobile.  But if you do, you will probably not like their mobile experience.

When: I started using Buyosphere months ago in another incarnation – they have since gone through a rebrand and some product updates which has made it easier to use.  I now see it as something I would use once or twice a week as I am surfing the web, perhaps more around the holiday shopping season.

Why: I use it in a couple of ways – mostly, to keep a wishlist of things I want to purchase.  I often browse the web for products that I am not ready to buy and this helps catalogue my finds using a very visual  interface.  It’s also a cool way to discover other products that people I follow have either purchased or wish to purchase.  For example, I found some holiday gift ideas for my extended family by seeing what other similar people have bookmarked in Buyosphere.

I do find parts of the UI a little clumsy, especially around editing product information, and I would not use it to send in my receipts and track purchase history, as they suggest. I also wonder if I will continue to use it in the long run as one more digital channel to manage or get social network fatigue.

The takeaway: Whether or not this is something that appeals to you, it is a great example of how buying behaviour is changing; it’s no longer about just typing something into Google and finding the top results, which nowadays can often be the most SEO-friendly sites and not necessarily the best sites for you.  It’s about seeing what people in your network are recommending, which has more influence than what a company says about their own products.

What do you think?  Would you use Buyosphere?  What social shopping sites do you use, if any?  And yes, if you feel like purchasing that Ned Pratt photograph for me, please go ahead!