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Disclosure: I am a director of one of Japan's largest luxury ecommerce sites, so I feel fairly qualified to give feedback about this :) Firstly, ecommerce + so

Disclosure: I am a director of one of Japan's largest luxury ecommerce sites, so I feel fairly qualified to give feedback about this :) Firstly, ecommerce + social is a really attractive combination for us. In that respect, don't give up on the problem you're trying to solve - I think there is tons of value there. Secondly, I will echo the comments of the poster "secret" - from the merchant's point of view the risk of distraction is not one that I take lightly. I'm very unlikely to pull the trigger on implementing something like this without a lot of data to back it up. You need to work on building case studies that I can see, with statistics that show an increase in some kind of metric I can get behind - facebook activity, sales, etc. Work with some ecommerce partners or even start selling stuff yourself as an experiment, then you'll really start to understand the pain-points that you can concretely help with. Thirdly... I don't think the current implementation adds enough obvious value. A stream of Facebook comments is very difficult to derive ROI from. If I were to pivot, and had to keep the overall theme of ecommerce + social + facebook, I would build a set of plugins with specific use-cases that work with my store and facebook. For example: 1) a plugin that allows a user to create a "shopping list" on facebook from the products in my store. Make it fun, like a game - perhaps I set myself a budget on facebook and then my friends can vote up or down on the things in my wishlist that they think I should get. 2) a plugin that facilitates a "buy me this" feature. A user picks a product on my store and can send it to their boyfriend / girlfriend / mum / dad on facebook (maybe with a nicely formatted letter-style message) asking them to buy it for me. Maybe the purchase is incentivised somehow, with a discount if you get someone to buy it for you. Make a set of these types of plugins, then I think you have a business. Give the most viral one away for free, and charge shop owners a monthly fee to use the whole set. Boom.

fezzl 16y ago
Hi, thanks for the elaborate reply. We clearly have had feedback from retailers that they are concerned that our widget may be too "obtrusive" or "distracting" when they were test-driving it. We are keen on building up case studies, but I think some small pivoting in the product focus is needed or the marketing/sales process is going to be tough. About your suggestions for pivot, I honestly like both ideas, this is what I set this thread up for. We have trouble focusing on creating experiences that shoppers would enjoy because, frankly, we are not online shoppers ourselves. Perhaps we will come up with one or two plug-ins, as suggested, and we will do some customer development from there. Thank you for your comment.

fezzl 16y ago

Hi, thanks for the elaborate reply. We clearly have had feedback from retailers that they are concerned that our widget may be too "obtrusive" or "distracting" when they were test-driving it. We are keen on building up case studies, but I think some small pivoting in the product focus is needed or the marketing/sales process is going to be tough. About your suggestions for pivot, I honestly like both ideas, this is what I set this thread up for. We have trouble focusing on creating experiences that shoppers would enjoy because, frankly, we are not online shoppers ourselves. Perhaps we will come up with one or two plug-ins, as suggested, and we will do some customer development from there. Thank you for your comment.