The e-Commerce landscape is flooded with an endless amount of retailers looking to distinguish their brand from the pack. With social media further bridging the consumer-retailer relationship, more companies are being creative in using it to market and sell their products.
Smocked Auctions, an online retailer of designer baby and children’s clothing, has driven more than $1.5 million in sales and more than 50,000 transactions since selecting social shopping platform Soldsie along the implementation of e-Commerce solution Magento.
“It’s a great unified experience for the consumer, because they’re able to check out in the same place across all social networks and the Smocked Auctions e-Commerce site,” said Chris Bennett, CEO of Soldsie. “It also improves the lives of the Smocked Auctions team, because they can manage everything in one place. They manage all inventory on Magento, but they’re able to sell across all of these channels.”
Advertisement
Additionally, Smocked Auctions leveraged Soldsie to streamline its comment selling process, all while maintaining the personal nature that attracted people to it in the first place. The solution enables Smocked Auctions to sell its products across both its Facebook and Instagram pages without having to re-paste the listings, and allows the retailer to manage both pages separately. Since implementing Soldsie, Smocked Auctions has brought in an average of $350 in revenue per social media posting.
The retailer’s business model is designed to engage potential consumers through social media auctions on Facebook and Instagram platforms. In an attempt to “bid” on listed items, consumers can comment under product photos with the word “sold,” their preferred size of the item and their email address. Bid winners, who are determined by the order of comments, receive an immediate email from Smocked Auctions with a link to an online shopping cart so they can pay for the item.
In implementing Soldsie, Smocked Auctions discovered a new stream of revenue with the Second Chance sales feature, which increased the company sell-through rate 12%. This feature enables customers who just missed out on the winning bid to be put on a waiting list in case faster bidders don’t pay for their item. The retailer increased the number of items sold after an auction ended by offering up additional inventory to shoppers who had put themselves on a waitlist.
“Smocked Auctions isn’t known in most e-Commerce communities, because they’re a social commerce company,” Bennett said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Smocked Auctions started their business on social. The reason we work with them is because they started to notice that the market was moving in that direction. Omnichannel doesn’t just mean brick-and-mortar and e-Commerce anymore, it also means social, and that’s where we come into play.”
