'Net Features : shopsocially

Three's a Charm for This Social Platform

Allison Howen — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 17:00:00 GMT

A new social commerce platform helps merchants leverage the power of social networks to obtain more conversions, higher average order values, increased engagement and better word-of-mouth advertising.

The ShopSocially platform embeds social experiences, such as rule-based targeting, incentive management and social analytics into the merchant’s buying workflow to help improve discovery, engagement, decisions and conversions. Additionally, the platform offers a Social App Library with extensions that include viral offer sharing for better email promoting, incentivized share-a-promotion and share-a-purchase technology, ask-a-friend functionality, a Facebook fan aquisition tool and a shopping community feature, which allows merchants to create a social online shopping community.

“There are three key elements to a successful social commerce strategy,” says Jai Rawat, CEO and co-founder of ShopSocially. “One, focus on generating authentic word-of-mouth, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) recommendations. Two, embed rich, targeted social experiences in the entire buying workflow to create a better user experience. Revenue uplift will follow automatically. And three, experiment a lot. While there are certain best practices, social experiences have to be fine tuned for every site.”

According to ShopSocially, merchants that have leveraged the platform have reported up to three times an increase in sales from email promotions, a 12-percent average increase in site conversions, a larger social media audience through converting 2 to 5 percent of site traffic into fans, as well as an increase average of 95 percent for onsite and fanpage engagement.

ShopSocially Unveils Social Connect for Merchants

Linc Wonham — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:25:00 GMT

Social recommendation platform ShopSocially has publicly released its social commerce suite for online retailers, concurrently unveiling partnerships with dozens of top retailers including Sephora, CafePress, Zales and Rawlings Gear.

Social Connect strives to turn shoppers into brand ambassadors and generating traffic and new customers via friend recommendations. It also helps retailers monetize their fan base by creating a shopping community called Shoppers on their Facebook fan page.

Fans can see what their friends and other shoppers are buying at the retailer site and engage in a conversation. The Shoppers tab also features top shoppers, top products and other engaging social widgets.

“ShopSocially fit perfectly with our customer acquisition goals,” says Sumant Sridharan, Vice President of online acquisition and retention at CafePress. “First and foremost, to encourage our user base to broadly share our unique, custom products across their social graphs – and then do so in a manner that produced a significant return on investment. From day one, we saw thousands of incremental, high quality clicks. Today, ShopSocially is used by a significant portion of our customer base to share product recommendations to over 300,000 social media users daily.”

Retailers can sign-up and get started for free within an hour.

Consumers Share With Friends at ShopSocially

Linc Wonham — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:15:00 GMT

One startup social commerce site is carving out its own niche by offering online shoppers a unique spin on user-generated product ratings. ShopSocially puts the emphasis on friends’ recommendations, with the belief that a few of those possess more value to consumers than countless reviews from anonymous strangers.

And many users seem to agree, as do a number of investors. The company, which launched in May, already has more than 10,000 product recommendations on its site, and just secured more than $1 million in new funding.

ShopSocially uses the social graph to connect its users with their Facebook friends once both parties have joined the service. Then shoppers can use the site to share their opinions about products they’ve purchased, or to ask questions about a product before making a purchase.

ShopSocially saves and organizes the content so that the information can easily be used to search for a specific product or recommendation in the future. Naturally, the most active members earn badges and rewards for their social shopping prowess.

Retailers can integrate with ShopSocially to earn their own rewards from social recommendations. ShopSocially turns every purchase into a social endorsement, thus driving “friend referred” traffic back to the retailer’s site. Interested merchants should take a look at the site and contact ShopSocially for more information.