ShopFlick Wants to Be the Next Online QVC
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.
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July 14th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
This was exciting to read when I saw this company was funded. I agree Shopflick will have a challenge but it looks like they’re trying to position the company as a super-affiliate. I have just a couple of bones with the site - don’t want to sound too negative here as overall I think it’s a cool idea and just might work:
1) Content is still sparse. For example, when clicking on the “Beauty” category, I see a thumbnail for a “puzzle stool” next to a thumbnail for “facial cleanser.” I can get the facial cleanser but a stool? C’mon.
Looks like some content may be tagged hyper-broadly to make up for overall lack of content. Still, I could see it growing over time.
2) Had a problem with launching checkout overlay with a video playing in the background - it eventually worked, but seemed very slow.
3) When trying to buy a product, I kept trying to click on the video, but that just paused the video. The “buy” button is quite obvious on the page but I think this illustrates something about the user experience that is unique to video. When watching the video, I want to interact directly with the video and go to the checkout page. I’m focused on the video - 100% - and the rest of the page just tunes out a bit. I would be interested in seeing them do an A/B split of the conversion rates on identical videos with embedded links to the cart vs. placing these elements externally.
4) This is e-commerce design 101 but in Shopflick’s eagerness to collect user accounts they are making a big mistake to require a user to create an account during the initial stage of the shopping cart. The abandonment rate must be insanely high.
5) Even worse, there’s a confirmed opt-in process during check-out for new accounts. I come from the email world, and am all for confirmed opt-in as a way to promote strong deliverability and build trust, but by slicing the user experience during checkout into pre-confirmed to post-confirmed, Shopflick is killing sales which has got to be the kiss of death for a startup like this. One thing to remember about video is that it is extremely effective at creating impulse buys. That’s because video can ’sell’ a product in ways images and text simply can not. The further removed from the video I am as a shopper during checkout, the more I want to second guess my purchase decision before completing payment. To make matters even worse, on clicking the confirm link, I’m prompted to sign in again, not taken to the cart. This is a process that definitely will need some fixing.
5) For the small seller, a 12.5% cut may not be much. However, to really attract large advertisers to the site, I don’t think this is going to cut it. 12.5% just seems too high, and for a startup seeking to be a super affiliate for videos, it sort of baffles me why they’d price this way out of the gates. I would think for a new startup the focus would be on attracting more content, but I guess it’s more important for them to prove the model before the value (content) is really there.
Justin
March 16th, 2009 at 10:57 am
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