Female shoppers guard online fashion secrets

Monday, July 30, 2012 - 11:58 by Paul Tissington

A new survey has found that almost a third of female consumers will keep fashion bargains they find via safe shopping online a secret, rather than letting friends and family know about the savings.

The study, conducted on 2,000 users of fashion site, Lovarni.com, found that the reason for this is that people do not want to give away details of a deal which leads to other people they know buying the same items as them.

This makes sense if you want to avoid going out with friends and all end up wearing the same thing, although it does slightly detract from the idea that safe shopping online is becoming a more social experience, thanks to modern networking tools.

Ten per cent of respondents said that they kept online fashion sites to themselves, because they did not want smaller services to become more popular, for fear that price hikes would eventually follow.

Spokesperson, Charlotte Webb, said that many fashion fans want to be able to keep a site a secret so that they can get bargains that are unique within their social circles.

This does mean that retailers might find it trickier to encourage people to share deals via Facebook and Twitter, than has previously been assumed.

Of course, the statistics here are largely going to relate to smaller fashion retailers rather than major brands, because the latter will already be very well known and easy to find online.

Sites like ASOS and New look will be able to benefit from social sharing, because shoppers will feel that there is no harm in distributing deals, since these retailers are highly visible.

It will be interesting to see whether this secrecy hampers any of the smaller fashion sites or whether the majority of women who are willing to share will even things out a little.