ShopFlick, the LA-based company that just raised $7MM in venture funding, is arguably an interesting approach to video commerce. Positioned as the video store for indie products, ShopFlick offers an end-to-end video commerce solution to independent and small commerce vendors, and more specifically, independent artists. More established commerce sites can also promote their items on ShopFlick, but the checkout is done outside of the site in a model that is very similar to a PriceGrabber or Shopzilla.

From the user experience’s standpoint, there are a few interesting details worth pointing out. The site has that blend of commerce and educational content, that’s just perfect to persuade the potential buyer to take the next step. Each of the stores for example has a feature video where the artist gives sort of an elevator pitch for the brand or just tells a story. On the same pages, you may also find links to product videos which are more sales-oriented, and naturally these pages all have the price of the product, a big obvious buy button and the usual YouTube-ish options to share, comment and embed the video elsewhere.

The checkout itself is fairly simple, an overlay on top of the current page with the traditional payment options. We didn’t go as far as actually buying on the site, but overall we were impressed by the ease of use and the overall clean design.

Whether this site is successful or not remains to be seen – it’s a fairly unique blend of ideas which have worked well for others:

1. Compelling video content, well presented and well connected to call-to-actions.

2. Great search engine visibility: this has been key to the success of comparison engines in the past, and knowing how video-hungry PageRank is, we can expect this site to rank fairly high.

3. Community-enabled: extremely important for building the brand and generating a conversation around the products and the site itself

4. Hybrid business model: they make it easy for independent artists to upload their content, and profit from a direct commission on the sales, PLUS they allow large retailers to publish their video catalog there too under an affiliate model

One of the challenges ShopFlick will have to face is the find its market position between traditional commerce sites, which inevitably are all moving to video, and the established commerce shopping engines (Buzzillions, ShopZilla, etc), which are doing amazingly well in the segment.