For folks looking for an easy way to design, produce, and sell products like t-shirts, caps, and stickers, there are really only two games in town; Zazzle and CafePress.
With CafePress' recent announcement of their partnership with distributed shopping service Sellit, both companies are now offering embeddable stores that can extend a merchant's presence across a broad a variety of social media sites.
The argument for distributed shopping is pretty simple. The more distribution a merchant can gain for their wares, the more they will sell. The promise of embeddable stores is to move beyond simply distributing an advertising message, and actually present the products for sale on multiple sites.
Because widget powered shopping is such a compelling proposition, we've seen quite a few companies try and tackle an aspect or two:
- The now defunct Edgeio tried a distributed content selling network that was designed to help publishers sell content
- Seattle based startup MPire experimented with a widget powered affiliate ad network, a concept that would later morph into Widgetbucks
- Companies like Kaboodle (my analysis), ThisNext (my analysis ), CrowdStorm, MyPickList, Wists, Stylehive, and GiftTagging (my analysis ) all tackled or are tackling a widget powered social shopping angle - helping people recommend products to their friends
- And then there's Adgregate Markets (my analysis), who went all in on distributed shopping and actually allows in widget credit card submission
There have been some mild successes among this group - Kaboodle was acquired by Hearst Media for $40M or so, and Widgetbucks has achieved decent traction.
But I haven't seen a distributed shopping service break into the mainstream yet. To date it has mostly been start-ups chipping away at the edges, no pun intended.
CafePress and Zazzle bring something different to the table. Because they both own thriving commerce businesses made up of millions of merchants with a vested interest in increasing their own reach, there is now more muscle behind the effort to push commerce out to the edge.
Let's take a look at the embeddable stores from each:
Zazzle offers both JavaScript and Flash embeddable "panels" that display your products wherever you choose to embed them.
Interestingly (and I think confusingly), the Panels seem to be marketed more to affiliate marketers trying to make money from Zazzle than the merchants themselves. For a merchant to set up a panel for their own products, they first have to search for their own account. It's clunky.
The panel (widget) itself is attractive, and allows viewers to zoom in on products and check out the product details from within the body of hte widget. To do anything else (get embed code, rate, comment, and buy) you have to click back to Zazzle.com.
CafePress implementation is powered by distributed commerce provider Sellit (formerly known as Cartfly (my review)) and is a Flash widget.
The primary difference between Sellit / CafePress' execution and Zazzle's is that Sellit / CafePress provides two different views (product grid and full widget), and offers the embed code within the body of the widget. Like Zazzle, you have to go back to CafePress to purchase the product.
I've been following distributed commerce for a while now, and this is the first time I've felt that we may be seeing some headway into the mainstream. Cross your fingers.
