Social Commerce & Digital Malls

What are retailers concerned with? Two things: 1. Reaching the millennials 2. Mobile conversion

How do you do that? Social Commerce

What is Social Commerce? It is a subset of electronic commerce, involving social media networks to assist in online buying and selling of products in services.

Do you mean like shopping from Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram? No, they simply were not designed to be shopping platforms. Deena Varshavskaya, founder of social commerce shopping platform, Wanelo, says “We don’t go to there to shop.” She claims “If a user stumbled upon a desired item on Pinterest, for example, it’s hard to find if the product is in stock, if the store has it in their size and if it’s on sale.”

What is Wanelo? Think of Wanelo (“wah-nee-loh,” short for Want, Need, Love) as a digital mall, where people can curate, discover, and buy products on the internet. Wanelo has over 12 million products from over 350,000 stores, including independent boutiques and sellers you have never heard of.

Digital Malls vs. Regular Malls?

• A regular mall has only 150 stores, while the number of online stores is endless.
• In the Nineties, consumers visited malls about two times a month for about four hours at a time, driving $1 trillion in sales (Strugatz)
• Today, 15% of malls are expected to shut down over the next decade (Strugatz)
• 87% of Millennials never leave their phones and can spend up to three hours on social networks every day. One third of them don’t frequent malls, 84 percent hate advertising and 50 percent shop online nearly every day for at least an hour. (Strugatz)

How does this bridge the gap between online and store? To be determined, but Nordstrom recently rolled out Wanelo wall displays in 107 doors, featuring styles it already carries that were rated most popular by Wanelo’s users.

Why Wanelo?

• The average product on Wanelo gets 140 saves and 19 buy clicks, versus Pinterest, where a pin typically sees about 10 repins. (Strugatz)
•  Urban Outfitters’ Wanelo shoppers convert at a rate four times greater than any other social network (the store has implemented a Wanelo button alongside other social media action buttons on product pages). (Strugatz)
• Sephora called the platform its “fastest-growing social platform.” (Strugatz)
•  Farfetch said Wanelo converts five times greater than Pinterest. (Strugatz)

Why is it useful for users and retailers?

•  Users èThe content on Wanelo is user-generated and users can only post items from verified retailer sites. Therefore, users go on Wanelo to shop accurate information on product availability and pricing. 
• Brands èA brand can claims its page and once it does this it can editorialize collections to engage with fans. Brands like Urban Outfitters have more followers on Wanelo then they do on any other social media platform.

How does Wanelo successfully solve the two concerns of retailers? 1. With over 10 million users, it has continually reached Millennials 2. The website is primarily accessed via its mobile app and conversion is also completed here

Check out my virtual store: http://wanelo.com/anaprodanovich :)