While everyone is busy pinning away on Pinterest, there’s an interesting contender sneaking up on the horizon that you might not have heard of yet. Now, don’t get us wrong. We love Pinterest as much as the next person. We can sit for hours Pinning away. We’ve built boards on dream houses, built a wardrobe even Princess Kate would be envious of, and have posted our way to a positive mind and body.

However, in a lot of ways, Pinterest is little more than a dream board.  A place for users to collect pretty things, good ideas, and inspiration as they cruise through websites and other Pinner’s boards.  As marketers, there hasn’t been a clear line drawn as to how effective the site really is in getting people to your website to actually PURCHASE something, though.  Sure they come, which can certainly be tracked, but do they BUY once they are there?

At just over a year old, relative newcomer The Fancy is looking to take the visual posting board to the next level. Instead of just pinning items, users make lists of things they “fancy” and can actually purchase items. While you can “fancy” things that aren't for sell by a merchant, there is no doubt that this is a shopping platform. For a lot of the items, users are redirected to the merchant's website, but they are beginning the process of enabling users to purchase the items from within the Fancy website. The user will never have to leave the actual site and that, friends, is what is going to start shaking up the e-commerce game. Add earning badges to the Fancy mix, and now you have e-commerce meets gaming.

Visually appealing like Pinterest with the stickiness factor of Amazon. What’s not to love?

There are a couple of other unique things about The Fancy that I like:

• Badges. You earn badges based on your browsing habits as well as earn special discounts by unlocking those badges.
• Recommendations. You like those boots from the Gap? Well then, you may like these stores and/or items as well.
• Browse. If I'm here to shop, then I want to quickly and easily find merchants that interest me.
• Deals. Fancy something in one of the stores, and you'll unlock special deals (and earn a badge)

Of course, Pinterest is the (social) media darling du jour, with membership hovering right at 11 million users. While The Fancy currently weighs in at around 300,000 users,  with some pretty big investors (Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes) and high profile Fancy users (Ashton Kutcher, Kanye West), it stands to gain momentum very quickly.

Will it kill Pinterest? Hardly.  (Google+ and Facebook, anyone?) Will it make the landscape of how consumers buy products and companies cull information? Absolutely. I predict that very soon you'll see Pinterest adding this functionality to their site and then it's “game on.”