Company
InkJetSuperStore wins award for Social Media Marketing
Congratulations to InkJetSuperStore for winning the Social Media Marketing category of Retail TouchPoints’ Customer Engagement Awards 2012! You can read Retail TouchPoint's article here and download the complete Customer Awards Report from there, but in a nutshell it was through a nomination process, the winners were selected based on, but not limited to, four specific criteria: Unique shopping/promotional offerings Customer engagement strategies Customer analysis Technology innovation Using the TurnTo technology, InkJetSuperStore has increased conversion, AOV, and loyalty. Here are some of the results from the past couple of months. Shoppers who asked questions or read Q&A from others converted at a rate 80% higher than those who didn't ... read more
What to do if your “social” Q&A doesn’t actually get social answers?
To date, Q&A on ecommerce sites has been primarily a tag-along application to customer reviews (provided by vendors that specialize in customer reviews). This approach results in a Q&A model that's more like customer reviews than a true social experience between shoppers and customers, missing the benefits that a truly social approach to ecommerce Q&A provides. The key to Social Q&A is that shopper questions should reliably and quickly get answered by real customers, and participants should have the ability to go back-and-forth beyond the initial question, if they choose to. If shopper questions receive customer answers only rarely ... read more
Ecommerce Award for TurnTo
Normally, we at TurnTo reserve our blog for topical posts about online commerce that will lead to spirited discussions about the state of the social web… but sometimes we win awards and can’t resist a little self-promotion. We’re honored that we were recently named an Ecommerce Junkie Award winner. The team at EcommerceJunkie.com selected TurnTo based upon Ask Owners, our best-in-class Social Q&A product. As they noted, “Many of TurnTo’s retail partners have even said that Ask Owners provides more quality user-generated content than their very own customer review systems.” They go on to say, “It has been awhile since we awarded ... read more
Ecommerce Podcast: Social Commerce Innovations and More
In the most recent Ecommerce Podcast, host Shaun Ryan (the CEO of SLI Systems) interviewed our CEO, George Eberstadt, about recent innovations in social commerce and broader topics in Social, including the potential of Google+. (This podcast series includes interviews with leaders in ecommerce to help educate online retailers on best practices and current trends. Highly recommended!) In discussing the state of social commerce, George noted that the quality of innovation in social commerce has increased substantially this year when compared to previous years: "After 10 years of very modest innovation in ecommerce, all of a sudden the innovation level is just ... read more
Announcing two partnerships with leading store builders
We're very excited to announce 2 partnerships today. Both are ecommerce platform specialists. YourStoreWizards are stars at building stores on the Yahoo! Small Merchant platform. We've been working with them quietly for a little while, and they've already installed TurnTo on 3 Yahoo! Stores: www.911HealthShop.com, www.LightingShowroom.com, and www.TimsBoots.com. They've completely mastered the Yahoo! platform, which means A. they are super cost-effective and B. they can solve the hard problems. They've even built great solutions for implementing a couple of advanced TurnTo features on Yahoo stores - the XML feed for enabling all the TurnTo UGC to be embedded as vanilla ... read more
Please note the change-of-URL for our blog – and (re)subscribe!
If our blog looks a bit different to you, it's because we've just moved it here . We recently got the whole site onto WordPress, so this is just a consolidation move. Thanks to our designer, Frodo Schering, for the great work on this. If you enjoy reading our thoughts about social commerce or just want to keep up with the news about TurnTo, please (re)subscribe here, as we won't be updating the old site. Subscribe
Video of Tuesday’s FastPivot-TurnTo webinar: Social Q&A for eCommerce
Here's the full video from our webinar on Tuesday with our partner and leading Yahoo Store design and development shop FastPivot. It's about an hour.
Meet with us at the NRF Innovate11 Conference
Coming to the NRF Innovate11 Conference in San Francisco next week? Interested in Social Commerce? Stop by and see us in booth 52. Or be one of the first 10 to pre-schedule a 15 minute appointment with us at the show, and we've got a $50 gift certificate for you from Amazon or Apple. Send us an email here, or call Gadi Benmark at 917-763-7868 to schedule your appointment. The fine print: One gift certificate per company. For pre-scheduled appointments only. Qualified retailers only.
July conversion lift numbers
This shows the conversion rate of shoppers who interact with the TurnTo Social Merchandising widget while on one of our partner merchant sites vs the baseline conversion rate for that site. Each letter here is one store. We've picked the biggest stores from our network, since the data are most robust there (ie not just the ones where the data are most positive). Full-month for July.
TurnTo presentation at the New York Tech Meetup last night
Many thanks to Nate and Brandon for another fabulous NYTM. Here's our first public demo and announcement of the general availability of TurnTo 2.0 (aka the Social Commerce Suite). The TurnTo segment starts at 10:30 and runs for about 3 minutes. Watch live streaming video from nytechmeetup at livestream.com
Introducing the TurnTo Social Commerce Suite
It’s a big day at TurnTo: we’re introducing our Social Commerce Suite. (Yes, we know that it’s ambitious to call it a “Suite” with just 2 products – please humor us. Also, there’s more in the pipeline…) Official press release here. So what’s new? 1. We’ve done a nearly complete overhaul of our current product, now branded “Social Merchandising” and 2. We’re introducing a new product called “Social Purchase Sharing”. Social Merchandising. We’ve made improvements top to bottom. Shoppers who open the widget but don’t personalize it by checking for friends will now ... read more
New whitepaper out: Onsite Social for Online Retail
After over a year in the market helping a few dozen innovative online retailers add social shopping features to their stores, we thought it was time to synthesize and share the big lessons we've learned. So here is our new whitepaper: Onsite Social for Online Commerce. In it, we get specific about things like: How to leverage social networks for Social Merchandising within your store How to most effectively encourage shoppers to share news of their purchases with their social network friends Why adding Social to ecommerce sites requires different strategies than for content sites What sort of results are realistic to expect We're ... read more
March and April Conversion Lift Numbers
Here is the conversion lift data for the larger sites using TurnTo for the last couple months. We're comparing the baseline conversion rate for the site to the conversion rate for shoppers who interacted with the TurnTo system at some point in their shopping path on the site. The 2-7X lift factors we were seeing in the first couple months of the year are still evident.
Forrester TechRadar report on Social Commerce cites TurnTo
Forrester retail guru Sucharita Mulpuru recently published her latest TechRadar report on Social Commerce. Available from Forrester here. And for free download from ATG here. We were pleased to be included as one of a select group of vendors profiled in the report. It's a great resource for retailers in planning their approach to social. Here's the chart that summarizes it all in one place:
Jan and Feb conversion lift numbers
These charts compare the conversion rate of shoppers who open the TurnTo widget to that of those who don't on the largest sites in our network.
First announcement of TurnTo performance data
This will sound like self-promotional hyperbole, and I'm going to say it anyway. When we started TurnTo a bit over 2 years ago, it was clear that the viability of the business hinged on delivering measurable, positive business results for the ecommerce sites we planned to have as customers. But, of course, there was no way to know for sure what the numbers would look like without building a product and finding customers to really use it. So we plunged in, built the product, brought merchant partners on board, gained experience, and put in place the systems to measure if ... read more
See you at Shop.Org next week.
TurnTo will be in booth #212 at Shop.Org in Vegas next week. Come by and see us. Or shoot us a note at contact@turnto.com and let's schedule a time to talk while we're all there. Oh, and we're giving away a Kindle!
AuctionBytes podcast from the Internet Retailer Conference
I had fun during the Internet Retailer Conference this week chatting with Ina Steiner, Editor of the AuctionBytes blog. We covered a lot of topics in a short time. She has posted the conversation as a podcast. Enjoy.
Stop by and visit TurnTo at the Internet Retailer Conference
If you are in Boston today or tomorrow, please come by and visit us at the Internet Retailer Conference. We're in booth #947. And in case the pleasure of meeting us isn't enough incentive -- we're giving away a Kindle.
TurnTo is in the Wall Street Journal today
Here's the full article: http://bit.ly/14Wl0n And here's what they have to say about us: New York-based TurnTo Networks Inc., for example, which was launched in September, helps retailers link their customer accounts with social-networking accounts and email accounts using Facebook Connect and other tools. TurnTo charges retailers a percentage of the revenue from sales attributed to the system. Tea retailer Teavana Corp. is a TurnTo client. Jay Allen, Teavana’s vice president of e-commerce, says the conversion rate—a measure of how many shoppers make purchases—for people who use the application is 20% higher than the rate for others, and their average orders ... read more
Vote for TurnTo for the Silicon Alley Awards
In addition to the very nice recognition we just received from AlwaysOn, TurnTo has been nominated for the Silicon Alley Awards in the "Most Loved Product" category. If you like what we're doing - or even if you just appreciate the potential - please vote for us. It'll only take a moment. http://tinyurl.com/cl4u7l Thank you thank you!
TurnTo wins 2009 AlwaysOn East 100 Award
There are many stellar businesses on this list. We're honored to be included in their company. The AlwaysOn East 100 Award is given to private, emerging technology companies creating new business opportunities in high-growth markets. TurnTo was selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team based on demonstration of growth, market opportunity, quality of innovation and customer traction. “It’s no secret that technology and innovation are vital to bringing our country out of economic recession,” said Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. “The companies on this year’s list have not only created innovative technologies that solve real business problems, but have stimulated economic ... read more
Nonprofits, especially, can benefit from Trusted Reference Systems
We're looking forward to the Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTEN) this Sunday - Tuesday in San Francisco. If you're there, please come by and see us in Booth #42. And on that topic: here's a link to a press release Earthwatch just put out on their expanding use of TurnTo to increase volunteer recruitment though their website. We're thrilled, since Earthwatch provided the inspiration that led to TurnTo.
TurnTo Selected as an OnMedia 100 Winner
Always nice to be recognized, particularly in such good company. Thank you to AlwaysOn for the honor. (Sounds like a long list, but we are one of just a few in the social commerce area.) The full announcement and list. Plus, we'll be speaking at the OnMedia conference on February 3rd at 3:00pm here in NYC. Agenda.
5 more sites join the TurnTo network
We're very happy to kick-off the new year by welcoming 5 additional sites to the TurnTo network, bringing the total to 14. Go Away Travel is a leading vacation planning agency Kenmar Watches and WatchWear are sister sites that sell an incredibly broad range of timepieces Mac-Access sells a diverse array of accessories for Apple products Paganum is an online farmers market supplying meat and produce from family farms in the Yorkshire Dales, UK Check them out!
We’ve officially launched, and we’re live with two more partner sites.
We're out at the DEMOfall conference in San Diego. Our official launch announcement went out yesterday morning, but I thought I'd wait until after our stage presentation this morning to post. You can watch it here - it's about 5 minutes long. We've had some nice press coverage already. We're also excited to announce that we are live on two more great partner sites. CompSource is an electronics site and a member of the Internet Retailer 500. You can find TurnTo at the top of their pages under the search box. And Teavana is a specialty tea merchant. They're using TurnTo ... read more
TurnTo is turned on!
With thanks to our core engineering team, Eric Pederson, John Rauchenberger, and Jan Vejsada, it gives me great pleasure to announce that TurnTo is live! It's also particularly great that our first partner is the Earthwatch Institute, where special thanks are due to Kathy Santos and John Jorgenson for making it happen. It was about 10 months ago that I had some time on my hands and offered to design social features for the Earthwatch site. Earthwatch is a fabulous organization that enables regular folks to assist environmental scientists with their field research. After 37 years, Earthwatch has brought about 90,000 people ... read more
