There is good money in applying certain proven business models to niche areas of interest. Many startups have attempted to climb the ladder on the backs of giants, with pitches that go something like this: “we’re the Groupon/AirBnB/Pinterest for…” The possibilities are endless, though those who make it big tend to be few.
Startup ideas like this are prevalent in ecommerce. ShopperBoard is one example. They term themselves as a Pinterest-style social network for shopping, and have today launched their iOS and Android apps.
Simply put, they want to make window-shopping possible in the world of online retail. “In the midst of testing beta version of our desktop site, we conducted a survey with around 500 avid online shoppers, and discovered that eight out of 10 offline purchases came from window shopping,” says Wilson Ng, head of product and marketing at ShopperBoard.
They also realized that window shopping behaviour was sorely lacking in online shopping, largely because there was no proper available platform for users to do so. Ng adds that most of respondents do some form of window shopping on Pinterest and Instagram, even though these platforms are not shopping-focused at all.
The team also felt that today’s online retail landscape is getting increasingly cluttered, especially with small blogshops and bigger retailers such as Zalora and Rakuten thrown into the mix.
With these observations made, ShopperBoard was born as a web-based platform with two main components: a simple bookmarklet feature that is highly similar to Pinterest’s Pin It button, and a user profile which neatly aggregates all the shopper’s shopping carts.
The platform has been performing well so far. In the last six months, they have seen a monthly user growth rate of 20 percent, with their users actively saving over 5,000 new products onto ShopperBoard per month. “We [also] have over 60,000 over user-curated products on ShopperBoard, with over 1,000 store pages present, including popular sites such as ASOS, Love, Bonito, and Zalora,” Ng adds.
See: 14 popular ecommerce sites in Singapore
An Asia-specific model
Not surprisingly, the team has recently raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Rebright Partners. The money will go into expanding their reach into Southeast Asia through marketing. In Singapore, they have already engaged high-profile Instagrammers to bring in blogshop-loving followers.
Ng is confident that ShopperBoard will be a hit in Asia because, in his opinion, the ecommerce landscape in the region is very different from the rest of the world. “Shoppers here – especially in Singapore and Malaysia – are almost addicted to the small to medium sized blogshops,” he explains. He claims that they are currently the only platform that organizes all the disparate shopping options available online, and presents it to shoppers as a discovery platform.
Founding general partner of Rebright Partners Takeshi Ebihara concurs strongly with this sentiment. “The progress of e- commerce is not necessarily the same here in Southeast Asia as it is in the United States or Japan. People here buy and sell products on blogs, social media, and classified media,” he says. “Those are rapidly shifting e-commerce platforms in recent years, and will remain in the market for quite a while.”
They are also working on “a unique personalized recommendation engine”. Using machine learning and artificial intelligence technology, the site will be able to recommend relevant stores, products, and even stylemakers that users might like based on users’ tastes and preferences and their social interaction data on ShopperBoard. “At the end of the day, they [users] just have to launch the ShopperBoard app, and it’s a one-stop collection of their favourite stores and shoppers personalised to their own tastes and preferences,” Ng says.
There is only one glitch in the smooth operation: shoppers are not able to purchase items directly from ShopperBoard’s interface, and instead will be redirected to the online store. “But with increased traction and user demand, we are exploring the possibility of letting users directly purchase the items on our platform in the future,” Ng reveals.
(Image credit: Flickr user Bill Sarris)
The post This startup wants to bring every online store in Asia onto a single platform appeared first on Tech in Asia.
This startup wants to bring every online store in Asia onto a single platform
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