There’s a secret about clothes shop­ping: men and women do it dif­fer­ent­ly. And that dif­fer­ence, social media man­agers may be intrigued to find, has prompt­ed New York-based online shop­ping club Jack­threads to exper­i­ment with a lit­tle social tweak­ing – a small step it’s con­fi­dent will pro­duce impres­sive results.

From soli­tary to social 

Think about it for a moment: you’re a social media man­ag­er and you want a new out­fit. Do you arrange to go shop­ping with a bunch of friends or do you get it all done fly­ing solo? The answer almost cer­tain­ly depends on whether you’re male or female. Women are more inclined to do their clothes shop­ping with friends and select items accord­ing to their ver­dicts, while for men it’s often a more soli­tary pursuit.

Recog­nis­ing this dif­fer­ence, Jack­threads intro­duced a social ini­tia­tive last year which allowed male online shop­pers to chat with young female cus­tomer ser­vice agents. Called “Chat with Jill”, it gave those male cus­tomers what they’d pre­vi­ous­ly lacked: the view­point of a woman.

Accord­ing to Ben Lerer, whose men’s dig­i­tal lifestyle pub­li­ca­tion Thril­list acquired Jack­threads last year, the idea is sim­ple. It gives male cus­tomers a lit­tle social feed­back on what they’re pur­chas­ing, equip­ping them with some social proof of the pop­u­lar­i­ty of var­i­ous items that they’d oth­er­wise lack. And Lerer says the fea­ture pro­duced a “huge spike in conversion.”

A game chang­er for male shoppers?

You don’t need to be a vet­er­an social media manger to fig­ure out that adding a touch of social to the cloth­ing ecom­merce expe­ri­ence for men might yield impres­sive results. And this is why Jack­threads is adding anoth­er lit­tle social ini­tia­tive: the new fea­ture lets guys give each oth­er that miss­ing social proof. It’s a but­ton called “Busy Views” that shows the num­ber of times an item has been viewed, the num­ber of times it’s been placed in a bas­ket and the num­ber of times it’s been “want­ed.”

This is the kind of feed­back hes­i­tat­ing male shop­pers might need in order to flip the switch and buy. As Lerer puts it:

“It’s a small ges­ture, but we expect to sub­stan­tive­ly affect con­ver­sion for a cer­tain kind of guy. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how it goes as we mea­sure it, but we think it should change the game for a lot of our guys.”