How It Works

The power of the TurnTo approach is context: your customers are only connected to their friends at just the moment when those friends are actually shopping. That makes the shopper feel like they are getting helped by their friends, not spammed. And your customers feel like they are helping their friends rather than being used to promote your products.

The user experience is simple. A shopper on your site sees a button that says "Need ideas? See what friends bought!" (Or anything else - you customize this.) With a few clicks, the shopper connects to their Facebook profile or email account. The system compares this list of contacts to the list of your customers and shows the user any matches found. Sometimes the shopper will reach out to these friends for advice, and sometimes it's enough just to know that friends have shopped at your store and to see what they bought.

To deliver as many matches as possible, the system also looks for friends-of-friends and neighbors (and soon, groupmates). Neighbors are based on zip code. If no direct zip code matches are found, the system will search a broader area, ensuring that there are never zero matches.

Of course, TurnTo rigorously preserves the privacy of your customers. The system always checks to see if a match has opted-in to being shown as reference. If yes, the shopper sees the friend's name. If no, the friend is identified only as "a friend", and, the system offers to broker a connection if the shopper wants it. That enables you to make your entire customer base available as a reference pool from the first day you turn on the system. To build up the number of opted-in references, the system also provides tools for you to request an opt-in at multiple points post-purchase, including the order confirmation page and post-purchase emails.

The best way to understand what TurnTo is all about is just to try it. Go ahead!