Shopit: E-commerce And Reselling
This is the second application in our series of e-commerce reviews. For an introduction to this category, including a rundown of features common to all four applications reviewed this week, please see: Web 2.0 and E-commerce, Creating An Online Store.
There are times when the things we sell are not only products but personal items too, and for this there are applications such as Shopit. With Shopit users can capitalize on social networks and a user friendly directory to sell their wares.
Shopit resembles a child’s version of eBay (oversized graphics) in blue, but has the tools that are needed for e-commerce. Tracking for orders, payments, and shipping are worked into the seller’s controls, along with some interesting options for promotion. All of the tools are accessible through the MyShopit link, but it should be mentioned that Shopit is not laid out to be strictly a seller’s tool, and the majority of links send you to the marketplace to find products to buy. Links in the navigational bar send users to shop through celebrity pages, commercials, and what it calls Shop and Want It.
The strength of Shopit is definitely in its promotion; with support for commercials (video clips), and widgets for exporting your cart to AIM, Bebo, Ning, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and Blogger, Shopit has the potential to reach networks in a viral way, letting the social networks do the work while you spend your time promoting through advertising.
The downside to Shopit is the way it lists items, which can make products appear cheap and unrelated to one another. A click on the shop link could return products without any obvious connection (a dog sweater, a car, jewelry, and a Tinker Bell camera for example), which may make prospective buyers wary. Ads are also on every page, but that said, Shopit offers sellers a free product listing and a personal page (shopit.com/yourname) with tools to help you spread the word to your contacts. To find out more about Shopit and applications like it, there is the Listio search: ecommerce+web2.0.
Previously in this series: Cartfly: Flash Exportable E-commerce
Next in this series: FlyingCart: E-commerce, SEO, And Product Management
Application: ShopitListio Profile: http://www.listio.com/web20/app/Shopit/
Website: http://www.shopit.com
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Tags: create, E-commerce, manage, sell
Posted in: E-commerce | Respond
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