Fancy 'The Fancy'

For those of you who are familiar with Pinterest, you'd know that it allows users to 'pin' images they find interesting or photos they took onto their pinboards to be organised categorised and shared to people around the world. What if there was a social media network that allows you to purchase the things you pinned on to your image collections, this is where 'The Fancy' comes into play.

Fancy provides a platform where people can browse through categories or random photos, see what they like, 'fancy it' and if they like it enough and at the same time can afford it they can simply purchase it through the fancy website/app itself.

There's the ability to follow other users especially on the people who you think have shared or similar taste with yourself so in the future your customised wall will be filled with photos based on your interests. This emphasizes the peer to peer recommendation which seems to fare better than advertising through the brands themselves.

An incentive to invite friends and convincing them to make purchases within 60 days is that there are credits to be earned when they accept the invitation and make a purchase. Bloggers are also rewarded with 2% of the purchase price on the product to their fancy account when a person buys a product through the 'buy with fancy' button on their blog via a javascript code.

High fashion brands such as Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent have associated themselves with fancy and integrated a 'fancy' button on their site perhaps seeing the e-commerce opportunities with the avenue of fancy the reach to potential customers will be greater than before.

Although it does provide great convenience to people who want to buy products or services that appeals to them, it doesn't always work seamlessly as people would want it to. One of the issue of the system is that unless the poster puts the appropriate web link to the image he/she posts, it'll only take the person to the URL of the image and won't allow them to make a direct purchase through fancy. Another problem is the fact that while one may fancy a lot and frequently, chances are they are likely not to be able to afford all that they fancy especially if they are luxury goods.

Compared to the main social media networks, fancy can be considered not so well known outside of US, however they do have a more than adept board including Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Chris Hughes of Facebook, also a celebrity following including Ashton Kutcher,  Marc Jacobs, Kanye West and Pink, even Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg  has a fancy account with the id 'zuckd'. Recently there's even news that Apple are interested in purchasing fancy. With buzz like this it won't be surprising that fancy will grow in popularity more so currently than previous years, could 'The Fancy' be spearheading a new form of e-commerce?