Add Live Chat with Social Shopping App for E-tailers
This week in e-commerce news, a startup provides an interactive co-browsing application that e-tailers can offer on their sites for customer social networking, a “green” search engine for eco-friendly products gears up to launch, PayLoadz upgrades with unlimited file storage and social shopping site Shopit.com announces a contest for “crappiest gift.”
The main features include: co-browsing, co-scrolling, co-highlighting and chat. Clavardon also provides a way for visitors to meet friends by e-mail and invite other visitors to co-browse. (The name of the tool comes from the French Clavarder, to chat.)
“We sell our solution under the SaaS model which means low cost (no cost of ownership) and easy integration. We host the application on our servers, there is no maintenance or any technical related cost for the store owner. Upgrades are automatically installed,” said Jonathan Stoikovitch, president of Sosign.
He said the integration is very straight forward: a few lines of JavaScript code to add to the Web pages. Those lines allow e-tailers:
- To display the link that opens the application
- To customize the link appearance with external stylesheet or inline styles
- To set the link modes that lets you control the behavior of the link (Co-browse with a random visitor, co-browse with an admin, invite a friend to co-browse, meet an admin later…)
- To enable co-browsing features on the page including: co-scrolling, co-highlighting and (coming soon) co-fill in forms
Stoikovitch said Clavardon can be deployed on any e-store within two hours. “It's low risk as Clavardon never interferes with the Javascript code or the CSS styles of the Web site on which it is installed,” he said.
Get Ready to Go Green
Greenzer.com, a shopping engine for eco-friendly products, is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2008. The new site is partnering with Channel Intelligence Inc., which is contributing its data classification know-how to filter a wide selection of environmentally preferable consumer products available on Greenzer.com's shopping engine.
The company says the collaboration will help consumers find green products and understand what makes those products green. Greenzer will use optimized product and commerce data provided by CI's SellCore Publisher Solutions for advanced capabilities in identification and integration of significant green product attributes.
Founded as a shopping engine focused solely on green products, Greenzer presents product and retailer information so that consumers can shop knowing that products listed are environmentally friendly. Working behind the scenes, CI provides the technology to identify the eco-labeled products based on attributes such as “Energy Star” qualification, industry-approved certification marks by the Green Electronic Council through EPEAT (the Electronics Products Environmental Assessment Tool) and other green product attributes, according to the company.
Pay It Forward
PayLoadz.com, a self-service digital content e-commerce platform, just released a new version of its content storage and fulfillment system to deliver downloadable content such as e-books, music, videos, software, crafts or any other digital file. This new platform provides unlimited file storage for sellers using its services without any increase in cost, according to the company.
The PayLoadz free, basic Service gets a file storage increase from just 50MB to 1,000MB representing a 20-fold increase, the company said. Higher level accounts feature unlimited file storage.
Turning ‘Crap' into Cash
Shopit.com, a social shopping community on the Web, is spending $10,000 on two of the crappiest gifts received this holiday season. Members simply add their crappy gifts to their Shopit stores in one of two categories; Ugliest Apparel Item, and Most Useless Item. The Shopit community will then vote on which item they think is the crappiest and the winner of each category will receive $5,000, according to the company.
Contestants' gifts will appear everywhere their Shopit store appears; including Shopit's Flash Store Widgets — portable stores that can be posted anywhere on the Internet. Members can also have friends vote for their gifts through their Facebook profiles by adding the Shopit Facebook Application, the latest in Shopit's arsenal of community-powered free stores.
Shopit gives its members a free Web storefront, free flash widgets and a set of free networking tools to promote, sell or trade their products and services. Members create their own catalog or upload it from other existing online sales channels (eBay, Craigslist, Amazon), then use Shopit to mass syndicate it by embedding widgets and applications into the most popular online communities, blogs, e-mails and instant messages. Shopit has no transaction fees and no service fees for users.
Anyone is welcome to participate by adding a gift or voting. They simply join the free Shopit community and begin adding items. Ads for the Crappiest Holiday Gift Contest can be found on Facebook and elsewhere during the month of January. Contest ends Jan. 31.
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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