The definition of social commerce that we are most familiar with here at Zuupy is that of consumers helping one another to make better buying decisions. Although the most common way of introducing social into commerce is using love-based product recommendations (e.g. Blippy, ShopSocial.ly, Facebook’s new ad system), another potentially-valuable strategy is to facilitate hate-based social commerce. Of course, promoting negativity seems antithetical to good business sense, but it is arguable that some, possibly many, consumers see their friends as not a go-to source for product recommendations, but a checkpoint for “buyer beware” information.

Promoting hate is certainly damaging to business reputation, but consider Boutiques.com, one of Google’s first forays into social commerce, where consumers are allowed to literally hate a product. While Facebook’s content curation strategy is solely based upon Likes or endorsements, Google’s social commerce content curation strategy seems to be based on both Likes and Hates. Hatred per se is unconstructive, but substantiated negative comments about a product can be very valuable information to consumers that most platforms or merchants neglect to provide.

In our opinion, the new form of community voting (for lack of a better term) based solely on saccharine-sweet Facebook Likes and other approval signals is less useful than the older system based on ratings and reviews. Just for interest, Amazon has been slow to experiment with Facebook-like community features (e.g. Likes, stories, feeds) and continues to rely on its consumer reviews feature to provide purchase planning information to its customers. We have also previously argued that Facebook Likes alone are useless for any real product research.

Let us promote some hate and see what happens. Has anyone ever run an A/B test that pits an all-rosy product page against an objective product page?