SNW INTERVIEW -- Oct 25 -- How can you make money with SNS? Well, one way is to add a shop perhaps. Shopit.com can help you do that. I interviewed the CEO of Shopit.com, Matt Hill. - Mark Brooks
Can you tell us the founding story of Shopit.com and how you got involved in this business?
In 2005, when me and my partner Rhett McNulty saw the growth of MySpace and Facebook, we started to look at what some of the bigger e-commerce companies were going to do, to see how they would monetize beyond advertising in social communities.
We quickly determined that companies like eBay and Amazon had big focuses but were primarily built in a walled garden infrastructure and charged fees. So we set out to build a platform that synchronizes across multiple communities and allows people to create stores and/or turn their profiles or blogs into full featured commerce stores.
Today, Shopit is a highly targeted e-commerce ad network that allows people for example from MySpace to sell to people on Facebook. We don't charge any listing and transaction fees so it's been quite appealing and we've grown quite a bit in the past 6 months.
How exactly do you make money?
There are two ways. First we make money from premium a membership subscription which is $3.99 a month. The membership entitles member to advanced analytics for their store, segment their audiences, build customer database, etc.
The second way is from the highly incentivized but non-mandatory advertising fee which allows you to target people outside of your sphere. If you build a store on your Facebook page, all your friends are going to see your products. However if you want to sell to people that are outside of your network, people you don't know, then we are going to advertise your product on your behalf and target people across our network.
How many stores do you have set up so far? What are the top items being sold?
We have probably about 600,000 stores in the network right now with between 5,000 and 10,000 new stores being created a day. Most of the stuff is apparel and pretty much the same goods you would find on eBay.
What is the most unusual store you've seen so far?
I can't comment on that one. We ended up turning that one off. Clearly when you provide a free service to users in any category, you're going to end up with a good cross section of different and interesting things that sort of end up popping up there.
Who would you regard as your primary competition?
We had the good fortune of building a pretty robust platform and moving into this space really early. And as a result of that we've experienced early growth that most of the other people, who we would consider competitors, haven't.
But I do admire some of the other companies in our space. There are some people doing great things in social shopping.
What major features are currently in development for Shopit.com?
Some of them are confidential but the major one is that we're releasing a new web portal, so there will be a new site coming out. We like to look at it like LinkedIn meets Yahoo stores. We're also launching a mobile portal which will allow you to communicate with people who are shopping in your store via mobile, make offers and also perform transactions, all via the phone.
One of our more recent developments was powering the AOL IM application so users can grab a product out of their catalog and insert it directly into the IM conversation and perform a transaction right there.
What are your goals for the service heading into 2009?
We've been a very seller centric business so far. We've appealed mostly to sellers, people that want to sell things and want to list their services or products. Our next phase of our development is going to be very shopping centric. We are launching on a new social network almost every week this quarter, so watch out for us. 2009 will see the evolution of a true global commerce network, where people across multiple social communities and in countries around the world will conduct trade. We count on being the leader in making this happen.
In 2005, when me and my partner Rhett McNulty saw the growth of MySpace and Facebook, we started to look at what some of the bigger e-commerce companies were going to do, to see how they would monetize beyond advertising in social communities.
We quickly determined that companies like eBay and Amazon had big focuses but were primarily built in a walled garden infrastructure and charged fees. So we set out to build a platform that synchronizes across multiple communities and allows people to create stores and/or turn their profiles or blogs into full featured commerce stores.
Today, Shopit is a highly targeted e-commerce ad network that allows people for example from MySpace to sell to people on Facebook. We don't charge any listing and transaction fees so it's been quite appealing and we've grown quite a bit in the past 6 months.
How exactly do you make money?
There are two ways. First we make money from premium a membership subscription which is $3.99 a month. The membership entitles member to advanced analytics for their store, segment their audiences, build customer database, etc.
The second way is from the highly incentivized but non-mandatory advertising fee which allows you to target people outside of your sphere. If you build a store on your Facebook page, all your friends are going to see your products. However if you want to sell to people that are outside of your network, people you don't know, then we are going to advertise your product on your behalf and target people across our network.
How many stores do you have set up so far? What are the top items being sold?
We have probably about 600,000 stores in the network right now with between 5,000 and 10,000 new stores being created a day. Most of the stuff is apparel and pretty much the same goods you would find on eBay.
What is the most unusual store you've seen so far?
I can't comment on that one. We ended up turning that one off. Clearly when you provide a free service to users in any category, you're going to end up with a good cross section of different and interesting things that sort of end up popping up there.
Who would you regard as your primary competition?
We had the good fortune of building a pretty robust platform and moving into this space really early. And as a result of that we've experienced early growth that most of the other people, who we would consider competitors, haven't.
But I do admire some of the other companies in our space. There are some people doing great things in social shopping.
What major features are currently in development for Shopit.com?
Some of them are confidential but the major one is that we're releasing a new web portal, so there will be a new site coming out. We like to look at it like LinkedIn meets Yahoo stores. We're also launching a mobile portal which will allow you to communicate with people who are shopping in your store via mobile, make offers and also perform transactions, all via the phone.
One of our more recent developments was powering the AOL IM application so users can grab a product out of their catalog and insert it directly into the IM conversation and perform a transaction right there.
What are your goals for the service heading into 2009?
We've been a very seller centric business so far. We've appealed mostly to sellers, people that want to sell things and want to list their services or products. Our next phase of our development is going to be very shopping centric. We are launching on a new social network almost every week this quarter, so watch out for us. 2009 will see the evolution of a true global commerce network, where people across multiple social communities and in countries around the world will conduct trade. We count on being the leader in making this happen.
