First off, a public service announcement: we could have posted about the iPhone today, but unlike seemingly every other blog out there, we decided against it (you can thank us later).

Instead, we thought we’d let you know that JupiterResearch has discovered some interesting statistics regarding social shopping sites and their influence over shoppers. It seems that social shopping does little to influence a potential buyer to make an unplanned purchase, but aids in branding efforts and reaffirming a potential buy for the shopper before checkout.

Some of the stats:

• Social shopping and community-based sites influence only about 12% of buyers to purchase more than they anticipated on any given site.
• 53% of shopper go directly to a retail site to buy an item… only 3% consult a blog.
• 29% of shoppers used social shopping sites to reaffirm purchasing decisions they had already made.

The main issues, it seems, are inefficiency, lack of “real” information, and reliability - it’s difficult for a shopper to see the benefits of wading through a lot of unreliable, possibly biased information about a product that they’re simply browsing. Think about how many times you’ve only read the very first review on a product at Amazon. I don’t think this study heralds a kind of “death” for social shopping (we are operating on the “social web,” after all) but I do think that the social shopping model will keep evolving to reflect these concerns… it’ll be interesting to see where it goes next.