Shop Like Anna
Today your fashion-conscious tween can go shopping with a very cool friend on her very cool site, Shop Like Anna where moms are welcome to come along!
Designed with your shopaholic tween in mind
Wow! Shop Like Anna makes me want to be 15 again; well not literally, but it sure seems like fun!
This site, supposedly designed by a young girl who wanted to go shopping online but was repeatedly denied this activity is a fashion-loving girls nirvana.
First you create your virtual model
OK. You start out by designing
your virtual model with everything from hair and eye color to height, weight, body type and even hair length.
Next come the fashions
Clothes, clothes and more clothes to try on and add to your virtual closet to see if you might want to buy them. Here’s a cool idea. Moms can ‘visit’ the virtual closets their fashionista daughters crammed full of their favs and buy the real versions of the virtual outfits. How? By adding Shop Like Anna Points to each account (moms you’ll need a real credit card for this part) and then using those points to purchase real items from the Shop Like Anna catalogue which are then shipped and sent to you. Since all the outfits have been modeled by your virtual tween shopper, there are no surprise and no tears when the real thing arrives!
Wait, there’s lots more!
- There are chats (called Blabs)
- There’s fashion and all the pop news you could want; Grammy Awards styles, celebrity happenings, and entertainment news about such tween topics as the latest sightings of Jonas Brothers.
- There are feature stories on everything from fitness, nutrition and exercise to the benefits of a good night’s sleep.
Anna’s Angels
There are some good and maybe not so good features to the online safety of shopaholic tweens. Shop Like Anna does have monitors, called Anna’s Angels; a page of advice on how to stay safe online…including important tips such as “never turn on your webcam for someone you don’t know,” and is compliant with COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
But–and this may be a pretty significant ‘but’–while Shop Like Anna does need parental permission to participate and a parent’s email to join, this is accomplished by way of a sign-up sheet and while it was noted that the ’shopper’ gets Anna Points for giving a valid parental email address it would seem that a savvy tween can easily circumvent this safeguard.
Blab…blab…blab
Chatting–called blabbing in this world–is allowed and tweens can type whatever they want. The User Guidelines explain that Shop Like Anna is a way to chat with friends of the same age. To give it credit the site does warn kids not to give out any personal information.
What’s the bottom line?
It’s free to use…but you’ll need to whip out your credit card to buy any of the designer goodies your tween has tried on and saved in her closet. But all in all the site seems just grown up enough, with it’s real online shopping and grown-up kind of news to keep tweens happy and has just enough safeguards to make it palatable for moms (and dads).
How many ‘Clicks’ does this site get?
We like this site and give it a very respectable 7.9 Clicks! What do you think? Send your views to OneClickMoms.
Reviewed by Deb Golumbek
Deb Golumbek is a full-time mother of two very active boys in elementary school. She is a freelance writer and editor and is a former parenting magazine managing editor. She has published numerous articles geared towards children’s health, educational issues, Internet safety and family fun. She has a background in teaching elementary school-aged children and considers the Internet a great tool that children need lots of supervision to use safely! She lives in Bel Air Maryland with her husband and children.
Tomorrow we’ll be going ‘green’ with a review of Green.com a kids world with a very strong ecology theme that is very committed to safety.
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