EBay, With a Little Help From My Friends (The Page Mage Solution)

EBay to my friends, the Page Mage solution

 
Talk about Social Commerce to your friends and they will give the name Ebay.  And rightly so, since the auction site is the referent of social shopping.

However, Ebay, in its own turn, is impacted by the rapid expansion of social networks and their user friendly quality.  Doesn’t auction selling on Ebay run the risk of giving way to social networks where internet users are increasingly spending the majority of their time?

This is where Page Mage can be helpful.  A platform for designing Ebay auction templates, which helps improve ones selling page using videos, slideshows or even pop ups.

Page Mage is even taking it one step further by incorporating a “share” function that enables to post a page on Blogger, Facebook, MySpace or LiveJournal.

As indicated by Eric Scifres, CEO of Page Mage,

“By sharing the listing where people are congregating, a listing’s visibility grows exponentially.”

For example, on Facebook, your Ebay offers will appear on your “wall”, allowing your friends to leave comments or to share, in turn, your offer with other friends.

If the transaction is still done on Ebay the solution proposed by Page Mage takes the opposite direction of Facebook Connect by releasing the offers into the social network.

Is this a new trend?

RackUp, the shopping game where you are sure to win!

Social Commerce permanently increases new forms of e-commerce and business models.  There will be winners and losers!

It is difficult to say whether RackUp, a new start-up model presented at the TechCrunch conference will succeed in asserting itself.  It does present more than one advantage:

RackUp renews auction items.  RackUp makes shopping fun, and RackUp assures you of winning!

How does RackUp work?  It is hard to explain without having used it before and I recommend the video demo, but here are the main aspects:

1. RackUp is an on-line auction system of gift cards and gift certificates, with all kinds of attractive packages with companies like American Airlines and Travelocity Hotel, including Legal Sea Food restaurants, or brands like Calloway Golf or MocaShop jewelers.

2. RackUp has auction rooms for gathering bidders who want to purchase gift certificates for a particular brand.

3. Each bid is very quick, lasting only 60 seconds.  An auction is held every two minutes.  Therefore there is no long waiting period.

4. At the very beginning of the auction, each bidder can purchase a gift certificate, but only the first will buy it at the purchase price, each of the following bidders will increase the bidding price by 10cents so that the 10^th bidder will pay $51 for a gift  certificate of $50.

5. However, as items are purchased, each bidder progresses to a level which gives complimentary value (from 3 to 100%) to his/her certificate.

6. This progression continues for 60 seconds.  If you reach 100% after 60 seconds and the bid is marginal, it will be cancelled.  However, nothing is lost, you can start over, paying a little bit more for your certificate, for which you are assured a 3% reduction.

In the example given by RackUp, the purchase of a gift certificate for American Airlines at $50 for a price of $51.20 will in turn become a certificate of $76.80.  Well done!

RackUp is part of the array of on-line auction sites that Ebay made popular world wide, casual bidding that has become an incredible success with women and the gift card phenomenon.

RackUp is pretty clever in emphasizing the social aspect of bidding.  The competition sets people up to bid against each other but also increases the stakes by increasing the bonuses.

The bonus system, which is linked to group or personal purchases, is starting to appear more and more often in the new economic models of on-line auction sites.

In these tough economic times, the bonuses given by RackUp are a type of discount and will become more popular.

While you wait, is there anyone that has to take an American Airlines flight?

Team with Twangu?

Form teams with Twangu?


Speaking of social commerce, here is a new Facebook application that is 100% "team commerce".
Only a few weeks old, Twangu wants to initiate this wave of social commerce predicted to be massive within the next several months or years. 


How does Twangu work?  Facebook users are invited to form "teams" that want to purchase items for a fixed price by the users themselves.


Once these groups are formed Twangu intervenes and places each team with a vendor of the product wanted, provided the seller agrees to purchase conditions of the team, notably on the price proposed for the item.


Items are usually purchased through PayPal and Twangu takes great care to guarantee that the transactions do no take place on Facebook itself, but on a secured site.  Obviously the idea of giving out your credit card number several days before buying the item creates a considerable problem, but Twangu is hoping that the possibility of getting your hands on something for a cheaper price will entice users to overcome their fears…..

And what kinds of teams are formed using Twangu?

Here is a sneak peak….

Ipod Touch 32GO for $100; PS3 games (without precision) for $30; jeans for $25; Wii Rockband 2 for $50; Windows7 for $49.95; Iphone 3G's at $199; "Future beach" kayaks for $199; Skullcandy helmets for $21.50 etc….while scrolling through red shoes, red dresses and red accessories for $1.


It is still too soon to tell whether this intermediary business model and the idea of the "group discount" implemented by Twangu will work!  Let's bet that other projects are in the works and is owed to the innovation of Twangu.

Social commerce and the "discount group" are, in any case, signed on in the context of the current recession.

The prestigious Wall Street Journal, in its Smart Money column, published an article in January entitled "How to Score Group Discounts With Strangers".

Shweta Oza, a Marketing professor at the University of Miami states in this article:


"Businesses worried about slumping sales and continued cutbacks in consumer spending are more amenable to offering group discounts.  You're enticing them by bringing them in more business, which they're hunting for in today's economy".