I have submitted a previous thread on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1711585), basically describing our no-traction situation. Our idea mixes social with ecommerce, and we work with retailers to introduce social throughout the buying process. However, we're not seeing adoption because -- and we guess -- people just don't want to shop that way. But we don't know for sure, as we don't know if it's a "marketing" problem.<p>We are in public Beta, but it's been one month. We have an okay number of sign-ups but actual adoption and usage have been very poor. We have repositioned and reiterated the product multiple times and have not seen much improvement.<p>HN has always been my go-to source for inspiration and good ideas, so I was wondering if anyone has a pivot suggestion for us. We don't know if this idea has legs, but our experience so far has been discouraging. Any feedback/quick thoughts would be tremendously helpful.
Some quick thoughts:<p>1. I went to the demo page and even though I read the instructions, it still took me longer than it should have to notice the FB stuff. Without instructions and specifically looking for it, I would have never noticed it was there. I guess placement can vary by store design, but the demo would leave me with that worry.<p>2. From the merchants perspective, I could see the benefits of having users talk about my products on Facebook, but I don't know if distracting a shopper when they are closer to making a decision is worth the trade off. In other words, is the expected value of the links worth the diminished likelihood of purchase? I can't see this increasing the possibility of a sale to the current user. I could be completely wrong and in that case, any data/statistics you could provide merchants would go a long way to convincing them to use Zuupy.<p>3. To combine 1 & 2 and suggest a potential pivot: As a guy, I am highly unlikely to ever talk about or seek out advice for a general run of the mill purchase. I may seek out the help of, for example, a photographer friend if I'm going to buy a camera, but that may be the extent of it. Maybe I'm just more introverted than others, but going by my FB feed, I've haven't seen it happen much. Judging by the background graphic on you widget, you seem to agree that the target users are women. From my highly unscientific observations of my wife and her friends, they like to show off purchases they are proud of (say they discovered some new fashion and got it at a huge sale). So, what if instead of allowing users to chat with friends before making a purchase and possibly deterring it from occurring,
users are presented with a big widget right after the purchase to share and discuss with their friends. You still get the free links plus a stronger social endorsement (this person has just made a purchase) and you don't ruin the conversion funnel. If I was a merchant, I could definitely see myself signing up for something like that (bonus points if it just plugged in to existing shopping carts).
Disclosure: I am a director of one of Japan's largest luxury ecommerce sites, so I feel fairly qualified to give feedback about this :)<p>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.<p>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.<p>Thirdly...<p>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 <i>specific use-cases</i> that work with my store and facebook. For example:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Boom.
One thing that complicates your situation is that your customers are not the users; your customers are the e-commerce sites you sell to-- the end-users are <i>their</i> customers.<p>This makes "Have you talked to your users?" a bit more complicated.<p>My pivot suggestion: "e-commerce mixed with social" is a great niche, but I don't think your MVP has nailed it, yet. I'd move away from the emphasis on real-time, and think, rather, about "How can I leverage social networks to support the sales process?" Note that one of the tough nuts to crack is the chicken-egg problem; the more content that's produced by end-users, the more valuable the service is-- but you need to prime the pump somehow.<p>As I mentioned (via email), I'd love to talk to you in more detail about possible ways to do this in my particular sub-niche (online bookstores), but I imagine that a lot of the stuff can generalize.