Most of the focus on social shopping has been on how stores can build a presence on Facebook and Twitter.  But new research from BIGResearch for Shop.Org suggests this is backwards.  Online stores will likely benefit far more from bringing the social networks of their shoppers into the buying experience within the store.  Here’s why:

[Social networks] are rarely the starting point for shopping per se. When we asked consumers, “Where do you typically start your online shopping? (Check all that apply)”, consumers told us that they are most likely to start their online shopping at merchant Web sites (almost three-quarters), search engines / directories (one third), and catalogs or offline stores (about a quarter) — with social media sites trailing far behind.

So if you want to truly tap into the power of your customer base and the social network of your shoppers to influence purchases, do it ON YOUR SITE.  That’s where real buyers come to do their research.  And that means leveraging tools like Facebook Connect to make all that social data available to shoppers when they’re really in-market.  (TurnTo can make this easy.)

Here’s data from the report, available here. (You must be a Shop.Org member for access.)

Paul Dunay, The Global Managing Director for Services and Social Media at Avaya, gave this description of social commerce in an interview in eMarketer:

Social commerce is working with or using your social graph, which is defined as your followers or your friends, and allowing them to help you make buying decisions.

Social commerce can be anything from a buying suggestion or recommendation—perhaps a tweet from a Dell outlet saying, “Hey, we have a special on this”—to something like Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect would allow you to go to a Website like Dell.com and authenticate yourself using your Facebook profile, allow your identity to be known and access your friends so you could spark up a chat. So I could say, “Hey, Jeff, I’m looking at this new fancy laptop or this netbook. I heard you bought something. Would you recommend this to me?”

So you could almost take your friends shopping with you. That is the potential with this example.

Hey Paul, come look at the sites using TurnTo.  Your vision is alive today!