Social shopping spans a wide range of definitions but can largely be divided into three categories: Group shopping sites, Shopping communities, Recommendation engines.

Social shopping sites may generate revenue not only from advertising and click throughs, but also by sharing information about their users with retailers. Some sites concentrate on the user interactions that pass on information and recommendations that are hard to acquire from sales personnel.

Social shopping sites motivate their users to participate in various ways. Many sites offer nothing of specific value in return, relying on the user's intrinsic sense of social reward to share information with the community. Other sites offer tangible rewards for sharing information. For example, the Canadian based Wishabi offers cash rewards for price submission and other sites offer incentives in the form of reputations points that can be redeemed for gifts.

Social shopping can also exist in the real-world beyond the obvious swapping of consumer stories with people one knows. For example, when you walk into a dressing room, the mirror reflects your image, but you also see images of the apparel item and celebrities wearing it on an interactive display. A webcam also projects an image of the consumer wearing the item on the website for everyone to see. This creates an interaction between the consumers inside the store and their social network outside the store. The technology behind this system uses RFID.

There are various ways for stores to use social shopping features. Some websites offer comparison shopping with social features. Others combines physical stores and social features, for example, allowing customers to share finds and deals from physical retailers through the phone and website and interact with users that have similar shopping interests.

Some websites use established online social networks and tools rather than trying to build their own. by implementing applications like Facebook Connect which allows users to ask their Facebook friends' opinions on purchases directly on the social shopping site. Others implement the Twitter API, allowing their users to share content through tweets.

The success of social shopping as a business model is still to be proven, although it is a common theme for many startups. The latest technical progresses show a movement towards real-time social shopping. Consumers connect to their online friends via social media and launch a live, co-browsing, shopping experience. This way, two or more consumers can browse products, chat together and get instant advice to make the right purchase decision, almost like in real life. An example of real-time social shopping is provided by the Dutch startup Shopwithyourfiends.