Taking the pain out of shopping on smartphone.
Business overview
| Location | London, United Kingdom |
|---|---|
| Social media | |
| Website | www.shareight.com |
| Sectors | Clothing & Accessories Mixed Digital/Non-Digital B2C |
| Company number | 08515185 |
| Incorporation date | 2 May 2013 |
Idea
Introduction
SHAREIGHT takes the pain out of shopping on mobile.
If you want to go shopping on your smartphone the task gets progressively harder. A standard search leads to multiple retailer websites that, even when optimised for mobile, are hampered by their e-commerce heritage. Comparison between retailers is difficult and there is no central place to store what you find. Checkout is laborious and cart abandonment rates are high.
So we built something that would work for all stakeholders in the shopping environment.
FAST SEARCH - Top 500 retail search terms available in just 3 taps.
EASY COMPARISON - Save the best from all the major stores in one place.
PAINLESS CHECKOUT - We aim to deliver a super easy checkout in partnership with a leading UK retailer in Q2 2014 and roll out in UK in Q3 2014.
Intended impact
SHAREIGHT aims to be the go-to place for shopping on smartphone.
Consumer behaviour is changing fast and Google state that 77% of mobile search now takes place where a PC is at hand. But whilst sale conversion on smartphones is improving, it is still only a quarter that of tablets and PCs.
Tablets convert better than smartphones currently because e-commerce developed for PC’s works on tablets. The principal reason for this is that the screen size is not that different. A website designed for a 13 inch screen still works well on a 9 inch screen.
Retailers are slowly improving their mobile sites but are restricted by e-commerce legacy needs.
With approximately 1.5bn smartphone users worldwide, this is a big opportunity.
We are not only aiming for SHAREIGHT to enable people to shop on the small screen more easily, we are aiming for that to be the easiest of all screens.
NOTE: SHAREIGHT IS AVAILABLE AND IDENTICAL ON iPAD.
Substantial accomplishments to date
Launched 8 October 2013 with 28 retailers and 400,000 products.
- Now 80+ retailers and 1m+ products.
- 10,000+ users.
- 12,500+ social media followers plus www.blog.shareight.com.
- Principal assumptions of business model proven (user acquisition cost, average basket size, average affiliate fee and conversion rate).
- Three updates since launch in line with user feedback. We made the app faster, simpler to use, and more stable.
- Two seed investment rounds completed.
Monetisation strategy
SHAREIGHT aims to serve the growth in smartphone shopping both nationally and internationally, with centralised tech and localised operational teams. Our highly scalable business model is monetised in three ways:
1. Affiliate partnerships - we have accounts with all the major affiliate networks and are already earning commission on sales.
2. Native advertising and product positioning income - retailers and brands will be able to bid for product position. Facebook Vs Google has shown that ads work dramatically better when consumers have purchasing intent. Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand – they simply harvest it.
3. Market Intelligence - retailers and brands know what is selling or not, but they have no reference as to how they are performing against competitive products.
SHAREIGHT is uniquely placed to offer valuable behavioural intelligence.
SHAREIGHT benefits from free distribution via app stores and already encompass products in fashion, beauty, home, technology and gifts. Future expansion may include the large inventory of entertainment and some services.
Use of proceeds
We will use the investment money to work towards the following milestones:
- 100,000+ users
- Tech pipeline of exciting innovations
- Android phone and tablet versions
- SHAREIGHT as the point of checkout
- Soft launch in USA.
This will involve expansion of the team to around 20.
Market
Target market
SHAREIGHT has broad appeal. If you have a smartphone or tablet and buy online, we want you to become a SHAREIGHT user. But users are not only consumers seeking to find and compare products. Brands, stores, bloggers, stylists, wedding planners and others who want to connect in a retail context are also part of this shopping network.
HER - she has an iPhone and keeps an iPad at home. She already buys online but mainly from her iPad or laptop. She finds shopping on her smartphone frustrating. Comparing between retailers is hard work and she forgets where she saved things.
She wants all the retailers products in one place, on her iPhone because that's always with her and always on. As well as checking her facebook and Whatsapp when she has a quiet moment, she likes to browse what's new and trending on SHAREIGHT, see what others have picked out and message her closest friends about the things she really loves. On many of her visits she will have absolutely no intention of purchasing anything.
HIM - he doesn't love shopping, but he does like to look good and have the latest gadgets. He likes apps generally because they make him efficient.
Efficient shopping is appealing to him. Going to the shops isn't. He won't browse too long - in fact he mostly wont visit the app unless he needs to buy something. When he does he wants to find great products quickly and will make fast decisions. Even then, occasionally he wants reassurance from a close female about what he's buying. He likes that SHAREIGHT makes all this possible for him.
Characteristics of target market
Online shopping is huge. The UK online retail market alone is almost £40bn* and is highly consolidated; in fashion, the top ten companies have a 50% market share. In homeware consolidation is even higher.
Smartphone use around the world isn't growing - It’s exploding. Projections are for approximately 3 billion users worldwide in just a few years. That includes almost 2/3 of all Americans. Nearly all users have their phones at the ready 24/7. Something that big, that all-encompassing and that personal doesn’t just constitute an opportunity, it defines a necessity.
Market conditions are ideal: Smartphones are highly developed with high resolution screens, 4G is in roll out, WiFi coverage is growing, unlimited data bundles are packaged into phone contracts and the affiliate networks are adapting fast to the growth of mobile.
Marketing strategy
We aim to reach this market in several ways:
1. Online advertising - our test marketing on Facebook and Twitter is performing well and in the short term provides immediate user acquisition.
2. Inbound marketing - our social media presence is growing steadily and channels such as Pinterest are ideally suited to retail content. We have found that significant growth in user acquisition can be obtained directly from these channels and particularly from our own multi-category blog at blog. shareight. com which we believe is due to the highly ranked unique content.
3. Inherent SEO advantage - every 'eight' created by users is fresh, unique content. Google can crawl this content which contains multiple endorsed links between highly ranked retailer websites and SHAREIGHT, driving more traffic to SHAREIGHT and reinforcing our connection to them. Additionally Eights can be shared via all other major social channels and viewed on any internet connected device. Growth in user Eights should cause exponential growth in inbound traffic, improving the ratio of organic to paid downloads.
4. Referral - once Android versions of the app are complete we will trial several referral reward programmes, and scale the best performing.
5. Device distribution - post Series A round we would look to distribute the app pre-loaded on new devices in partnership with the relevant mobile telecoms companies.
Competition strategy
SHAREIGHT is a unique proposition. It not only fills a gap in the market, it is designed to dominate that space.
1. We aim to only work with the major stores. Shoppers want to buy brands they know from stores they trust. John Lewis alone has online sales of £1bn per annum.
2. We cover the whole of retail and are user agnostic.
3. We are a true m-commerce business. Our competition is focused on and restrained by their e-commerce legacy model.
4. Our unique taxonomy enables fast search and whilst it appears simple to the consumer, the tech behind is sorting 1 million products from over 80 major stores using complex search algorithms coupled with manually created exclusion and inclusion rules. It is not easy to duplicate.
5. The social element of SHAREIGHT, once established, will act as the ultimate barrier to entry. Positioning SHAREIGHT as a market leader in the near term will also provide the opportunity for exclusive commercial arrangements with leading retailers.
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