Recently we launched a site with several pages copied from 37signals’ Highrise. We did more than take inspiration from their design – we actually used html & css code, and hotlinked to images on their site. We apologize to David and 37signals for ripping off their work. It was stupid, lazy, and disrespectful of their creative efforts. It’s particularly painful for us to have done this to 37signals because they are big heroes of ours. We just hope they will accept our apologies.
Diamond Candles interview with Shopify
We were reading the shopify blog, as usual, to see what interesting things those guys are up to and came across a new series where they are interviewing some of their most successful customers so other store owners can learn what makes these fast growing companies so successful.
As a first for their series, they interviewed Justin from Diamond Candles, who happens to not only sell a pretty nifty product (a candle with a diamond ring inside) but is also a Curebit user.
The remarkable thing about Diamond Candles is the level of engagement they’ve achieved with their customer base. Its a great interview that goes into how Justin and his crew are very effectively using social media to engage their audience at levels light years ahead of other companies, and touches on some good insights that other people can learn from.
Towards the end, the interviewer asks Justin what some of his top 2-3 go-to-apps are, that he uses quite a bit and have really provided value. We were surprised and excited to receive a shout-out for Curebit! Here’s what he had to say:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srspASpxQ4U#t=28m21s
Thanks for the endorsement Justin! We’re really excited to be one of the top products making a significant impact on your business.
Eventbrite: Users are 10x more likely to share post-purchase
Matt over at Adgrok sent this post over to us the other day. Really interesting stuff.
Eventbrite did a study where they had share buttons before someone registered for an eventbrite event, and after they purchased a ticket for an eventbrite event–on the order confirmation page like how Curebit works.
They found that
1: people who’ve purchased a ticket to an event shared 10x more than people who hadn’t.
2: post purchase shares drove 20% more new Eventbrite ticket sales.
We’d imagine that if you added an incentive like in our system, Eventbrite would be able to increase sales even more.
Very interesting study with real numbers to back it up.
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Product level deals or Order level deals?
We’ve been asked this question a few times, so I thought I’d do a quick blog post about it.
When people first use our system to create deals, they have two choices. Order level deals and Product level deals. Which one should they start with? How are they different?
Order level deals can be applied to the entire cart, and can be shown to all customers who come through. The advantage here is that more of your customers are getting offers, so there is a higher likelihood that they send it along to their friends.
Product level deals have a separate set of advantages. They’re more targeted, so you can 1) Discount more heavily since some items are higher margin than others, or 2) Control sales of particular products. (if you want to boost sales in a new product category but dont want to lose profitability in another).
Our experience is that the more important component to generating more sales is making sure more people see the deals and have an opportunity to share them. That means you shouldn’t be restricting the deals to just people who buy specific items, but you should target people broadly. If you want to do a product specific deal, what we’d recommend is to first create an order level deal that applies to everyone, and then have additional specific deals for particular products. Bottom line, you want to expose the deal to enough people that have a chance to share the offer with their friends.
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Social Commerce is the next evolution of Social Networking
I was browsing Google News and I ran into an article in the guardian that caught my eye.
Its an interview with Sophy Silver–one of the international PR heads at Facebook. The article is mostly around reflecting on 2010 and the high and low points for Facebook, but near the end she gives her (and by extension, I’m assuming Facebook’s) view of where social is headed.
The general thesis is that social is bleeding into other categories.–Zynga brought social to games, music and TV are also striving to incorporate those elements into its products. In particular though, she singles out Social Commerce:
“Social Commerce excites me – we already know how powerful recommendations from friends can be and the group shopping experience can easily be replicated through social commerce. If I like a pair of trainers on a retailer’s website then my friend can see what I want and click on the product to buy straight away, without us having to be in the same place at the same time – the potential here is huge”
We agree with Sophy that social commerce is an untapped area. Thats why we’re providing social commerce tools for online retailers. Purchasing decisions have always had a social element in the real world. We like to shop together, we get recommendations from our friends, we gripe about products we don’t like. But online, its a pretty lonely and individual experience between a consumer and an ecommerce store. Its a rapidly evolving space and it will be interesting to see how it unfolds.
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