Rise of the Aggregators

As each additional brand increases its online presence - the number of Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, google ads, advertorial blog posts, email marketing, the flood of marketing messages is leaving the consumer overwhelmed. With thousands of brands offering great products on their websites, it is become very hard and time consuming for the customers to find the right product on the internet.

This trend fueled the rise of the aggregators - one stop shops that bring all the products together in one place. Aggregators sites such as Amazon and Ebay pull together products from merchants all over the world for consumers to search on a single platform. But can aggregation be improved? 

The next big thing in the aggregator market is 'curation' - a concept that is being testing out by many. Netflix, known for having one of the world’s most effective personal recommendation engines, revealed a remarkable statistic. “We have adapted our personalisation algorithms… in such a way that now 75 percent of what people watch is from some sort of recommendation,”

But in the complex market for fashion, with its subjective tastes, trend cycles and gatekeepers, many debate whether Netflix-style recommendation algorithms are the answer. 

Fashion start-ups are trying different ways to curate the products for their customers - some are testing 'social curation' - users can create collections of things they find interesting and follow collections created by others whose tastes they like. Pinterest is one such site and has been followed by many others that are testing and tweaking this business model. It's still early days.