TurnTo Helps Retailers Provide a Social Shopping Experience

Social commerce is a hot topic for online retail businesses, and there are a number of methods and platforms available to help a small business online retailer add a social element to the business.

Long before the onset of ecommerce, the retail world relied heavily on word-of-mouth referrals and sales -- especially those that came from current customers referring their trusted friends.

TurnTo is a new social commerce startup that delivers social widgets to retailers based on this theory: friends make the most powerful references for shoppers . 

TurnTo Empowers People to Share Shopping Experiences

One obstacle that online retail stores face is providing a real-world shopping experience to online customers. Customers in a physical store, for example, may browse and converse with another shopper about an item, or they might turn to a friend and ask an opinion.  Today, when a shopper sits in front of a display screen (often alone) that kind of social shopping experience doesn’t happen.

Shopping offline is a social experience, and socializing your online store with a solution like TurnTo can help shoppers discover new products. It can also nurture the relationship and direct connection with your customers' online network of friends.

TurnTo takes an interesting approach to socializing an online retail store. In a way, the platform adds two distinct social interactions to an online store: customer interactions with ‘strangers’ that you might converse with about products while you shop, and the ‘friend’ you might connect with to discuss a product, retailer or brand.

TurnTo social widgets provide onsite social shopping power. By leveraging Facebook and other social media platforms, TurnTo lets ecommerce site visitors know which of their friends have purchased from the retailer before -- and what they bought. By validating your online store through trusted sources, the shopper feels more comfortable and develops trust in you. In addition to showing which friends have shopped with you, the TurnTo widget also shows other personal connections to the shopper, such as "friends of friends" and neighbors.

How TurnTo Works

Shoppers on-site basically see social-enabled reviews. A small “Friends” floater tab scrolls along on-site, and when shoppers click on it, they see who purchased the item and what they have to say about it. The lets shoppers see referrals from friends and other customers while they are on your site looking to buy.  On TurnTo's back-end, retailers can customize the widget to display any text, style or color to best match the tab to the retail website.

You can think of TurnTo as the broker who sits between the social services and your online store to handle the data, the connections and to safeguard privacy issues. The system will automatically check to see if a “shopping match” has opted-in to being shown as reference.  If a customer has already opted to provide referrals, the shopper on-site will see the friend's name.  In instances where no opt-in has been provided, the friend is identified only as "a friend" and TurnTo offers to broker a connection if the shopper wants it.  

TurnTo provides retailers with the tools to build up the number of opted-in references. You can request opt-ins in at multiple points including post-purchase, the order confirmation page and post-purchase emails.

The Social Commerce Value for Retailers

For the most part, the TurnTo system lets retailers show potential customers people they may know (or people near them) who have shopped in the online store.  This, in turn, gives a shopper confidence and the opportunity to validate you, as a retailer, and your products through a trusted source -- either a friend or a friend-of-a-friend.

TurnTo provides plug-and-play applications that add the onsite social shopping features to your website. The company provides integration -- which the company says averages 5 hours of IT time -- and from there you can manage your own system through a Web-based admin dashboard but TurnTo will continue to work with you, as needed, to manage and monitor your account. 

This is an added bonus for many small businesses, because so many Web-based applications leave you to go it alone or to pay higher subscription fees to access technical support for a service.

One main aspect of the service is setting up the email correspondence with customers to opt-in to social references. While TurnTo provides complete email capabilities with the service, the company will also work with merchants who want to integrate their own email marketing provider for use with TurnTo.

With your account in place, retailers can customize TurnTo so the buttons on-site match your Web store, you can customize all emails out to shoppers -- including requests for opting in to social referrals -- and access reporting online to see engagement and conversions. TurnTo reports allow you track individual orders back to TurnTo widget referrals.

TurnTo services, which include all social widgets and customer support and integration starts at $150 per month.  You can learn more about the social shopping widgets on the TurnTo website.

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Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG

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