E-Storefront News: Can Cartfly Create Buzz on Facebook? By Michelle Megna
April 17, 2008
This week e-commerce storefront news includes a startup called Cartfly aimed at social networking sites, an upgrade to Infopia's service that supports Amazon sales and the inclusion of e-books at Zipidee's digital-goods marketplace.
Selling on the Cartfly If you'd like to tap into the social e-commerce kitty, a snappy start-up called Cartfly wants to be your solution. Cartfly just launched after coming out of a testing phase, and it offers storefront software as well as a widget for selling on social networks.
"We studied the industry for two years before we even started writing any code," said Josh Manley, president and co-founder of Cartfly. "Our company foundation is built on the concept of allowing anyone, small e-tailers or large, to build a store in 10 minutes, and then give them a snippet of code that they can take to MySpace and Facebook that empowers them to tap into all that traffic."
Selling on Cartfly does indeed look easy — and it's definitely affordable. There are no setup, annual or listing fees, though you are required to use PayPal, but you only pay a three-percent commission when you make a sale.
Cartfly: Set up shop and sell out on social networking sites.
Setting up a store takes about a dozen quick steps, primarily involving uploading your product pictures, descriptions and prices through the administration section.
Once you've created an account and added at least one product to your store, you are ready to start spreading it across the Web. Using the social networking widget is also straight-forward. You log into your account, click the "share" button, in the "Where is this store going?" drop-down menu, choose "MySpace Profile" to display the code for MySpace, or chose the appropriate selection for another destination. Then you select the code, and copy and paste it to your profile page or blog. (The company has a specific code for Facebook.) When you make a change to your store, every shared location updates in real time.
Despite the fact that recent research shows that many social networkers are reluctant to embrace selling on these forums (see related article), Manley believes the trend is destined to take off. "It just makes sense, instead of relying on SEO and driving traffic to one site, your online store, that you take your store everywhere you go online," he said.
With Cartfly, you can have multiple stores in multiple locations, giving you the ability to create an infinite number of points of sale, said Manley, because f riends and existing customers can help you expand your presence by pasting your store into their social network profiles, Web sites and blogs.
Infopia Spring Release Debuts Infopia announced yesterday that the 2008 Spring Release of its e-commerce platform is now available. This release includes Web services, Amazon integration and performance reporting.
The Web services functionality opens up the Infopia eCommerce platform to customers and partners that want to integrate back-office solutions, while the Amazon integration enables inventory to be launched directly to Amazon Seller Central with advanced attribute data. The new performance reporting rounds out the list of major changes, and gives online merchants access to business information for optimizing their operations.
The new Infopia Web services let Web shop owners manage inventory, order and customer data from external Web-service enabled applications, according to the company. For Amazon sellers, the new version provides the capability to automatically place inventory on Amazon Seller Central directly from the Infopia eCommerce platform with advanced product and category attribute data.
Finally, the performance reporting from Infopia gives online merchants more ways to interpret and export store data. E-tailers will be able to make better strategic decisions, according to Infopia, because they will have access to extensive information on product mix, channel optimization and ad budgets.
(Continue to Page 2 for Zipidee News on E-Books)
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