ShopSocially Unveils Social Commerce Suite for Retailers and Reveals Key Stats

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ShopSocially today announced the general availability of its social commerce suite ?Social Connect? for online retailers and unveiled partnerships with dozens of top retailers including Sephora, CafePress, Zales, Rawlings Gear and several others. Retailers can sign-up and get started for free within an hour by visiting http://shopsocially.com/partners.

?For social commerce to be effective, you have to put social before commerce. Bombarding users with ads or peddling products on Facebook and Twitter has been largely proven ineffective. Offering deep discounts works for a short duration but is not sustainable?

?ShopSocially fit perfectly with our customer acquisition goals. 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,? said Sumant Sridharan, Vice President of Online Acquisition and Retention at CafePress. ?Today, ShopSocially is used by a significant portion of our customer base to share product recommendations to over 300,000 social media users daily.?

Social Connect turns shoppers into brand ambassadors generating significant incremental traffic and new customers via friend recommendations. It also helps retailers monetize their fan base by creating a shopping community called ?Shoppers? (see example, http://on.fb.me/e8nntb) 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. Shoppers tab also features top shoppers, top products and other engaging social widgets.

"We are excited about our partnership with ShopSocially. They have a great solution with a perfect blend of social and commerce," said Bridget Dolan, Vice President of Interactive Media, at Sephora, a leading beauty retailer.

?For social commerce to be effective, you have to put social before commerce. Bombarding users with ads or peddling products on Facebook and Twitter has been largely proven ineffective. Offering deep discounts works for a short duration but is not sustainable,? said Jai Rawat, CEO and co-founder of ShopSocially. ?Enabling users to share their purchases with friends creates engagement, product discovery and trust, or in other words, makes it social. It is a simple but powerful concept.?

A Booz & Co. report (http://bit.ly/fwaYW0) is predicting that the social commerce market will reach $30 billion per year by 2015. Booz advises retailers to jump in and experiment immediately.

ShopSocially revealed some key statistics confirming that social commerce hype is fully justified:

• Facebook posts generate 3 times more clicks compared to Twitter (after normalizing for number of friends/followers).
• Each shared purchase is worth $3.08 to $5.56 on Facebook and worth $1.27 to $1.89 on Twitter. The numbers vary by product category.
• Shoppers who opt into sharing their purchases on Twitter tend to have much higher (480) followers compared to average.
• There are clear influencers amongst friends which change by product category. Shared purchases by influencers drive 40 to 60x more clicks compared to average.
• Conversion rate from friend referred traffic is 48% higher than average.
• Enabling Social Connect creates an immediate revenue lift of between 2% and 6.5% depending on the product category.

ShopSocially offers both performance-based and subscription-based pricing models. There is even a free, full featured version available for small retailers. Paid subscriptions start at $49 per month. Custom pricing is available for large merchants.

About ShopSocially

ShopSocially is a social recommendation platform for friends to give and get shopping advice. Retailers can use ShopSocially?s social commerce suite, Social Connect, to harness the power of social recommendations. ShopSocially helps turn every purchase into a social endorsement driving significant ?friend referred? traffic back to the retailer site.

Founded in November 2009, ShopSocially is a privately held company in Mountain View, CA. For contact information, please visit http://shopsocially.com/contact.html.

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