Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Jai Rawat, CEO of ShopSocially (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you find them, or did they find you?

Jai Rawat: One of their representatives usually does that. They reached out to us and they test tried us for 30 days, just to see what the impact was. They saw a huge uplift. As I said, you are acquiring fans, getting e-mail subscribers, and you are increasing conversion rates. Every Like post also shows up on Facebook, so it automatically creates word-of-mouth branding. Finally, we also found that there is a strong correlation between the social signals and SEO rank. So they were able to see all these results during the trial period, and then they decided to become a customer. Pricing is an annual subscription, so you sign up for one year and pay us a fixed monthly price.

SM: How much do you charge?

JR: That varies according to the amount of traffic the retailers get and what kinds of modules they want to get. It starts at $1,000 per month, and we have some customers paying us $30,000 to $40,000 per month.

SM: So this illustrates the Facebook Like to shopping conversion. Is there anything else that is interesting?

JR: Another one would be a cosmetics site that is our client. They are using the share-a-purchase module. Right after you make a purchase, you are prompted to tell your friends about it, and there is an incentive attached to that. They are finding that nearly 15% of their shoppers opt in to share their purchases. This is huge. Imagine, as a business, if you can get 15% of your customers to become brand ambassadors by telling their friends that they bought a certain product on your site. That is phenomenal.

SM: And this is because of your software?

JR: Yes. They added this module which proactively gets in front of the user right after the purchase confirmation page. A little window comes up and says, “Congratulations. You bought this thing. Would you like to tell your friends about it?” Potentially you can get a 10% off your next purchase or something else to show appreciation for spreading the word. The company is seeing an 8% uplift in revenue from that. They are getting incremental traffic from these friend recommendation and are acquiring a lot of new customers through word of mouth. There is a very strong SEO component as well, because each time you share a purchase it links directly back to the site to that product page. So you have a large number of back links you are generating, where users enter comments.

SM: And those comments are being published where? On Facebook?

JR: Yes. It depends, though. If their setting is public then Google is able to call them. If the setting is not public, Google may not be able to call them. The sharing happens through a Facebook application we create. We have access to all these comments users are writing. We are able to aggregate all these comments and bring them back to the website. That is where you get all the user entered content.

SM: What format do you publish that in?

JR: There are two ways we can publish them. One is in an aggregate form, which you call a shopping community. It is a live feed where you can see what the shoppers are buying. It has a nice product image, and below that comments from all the shoppers who have bought that product and opted to share it.

SM: Does every product catalog have that?

JR: We automatically create it for them and then they can embed it on their websites or their Facebook pages. We also work with a lot of TV shows. If you go to the Star Trek fan page, you will see a tab there. If you click on that, you will see a stream of activity from shoppers who are buying from the Star Trek website.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Jai Rawat, CEO of ShopSocially
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