As we have highlighted in this post, many online shops use Twingly to connect their sites with the blogosphere. One of our partners in the e-commerce sector is CoolStuff, which offers a wide selection of gadgets and fun products through its Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and German site (the latter one is called Yomoy). We chatted with the founder Christian Omander about why he decided to implement Twingly.
Hi Christian. Tell us why you choose to implement Twingly on CoolStuff.
We like to have an interaction with our customers as well as seeing them communicating with each other. Hence it was a logical consequence that we intended to link to bloggers who write about our gadgets. And then came Twingly that offered a solution that suited us and our needs very well!
How do you use Twingly on your site?
The Twingly Blogstream widget is embedded on every single product page. When a customer who bought something from our shop writes a review on his or her blog and links to the product page a link from our product page to the blog post is created. Other customers can head to the blog article and read more about a gadget.
What role do you think social media plays for the Internet as a whole and for e-commerce in particular?
Social media has become a keystone of the web. People like to be social and to interact with other people. So naturally we have the same needs when we are sitting in front of the computer. We are likely to see different players and services come and go, but the general desire of being social through the web won’t disappear anymore. For online shops social media is a good way of increasing visibility as well as reaching out to our appreciated customers and having a dialog with them. Nevertheless I believe even “unsocial” companies can succeed online, but they don’t capitalize on the web’s full potential which means that they do have a competitive disadvantage.
What are the big trends in e-commerce?
Good online stores strive to expand into new markets. Most of the world’s biggest e-commerce companies have for example expanded into the Nordic countries. That is a trend that will continue. Another trend is of course mobile. Currently about 5 percent of all visits to CoolStuff come from mobile devices and this number is increasing at a rapid pace.
How does the roadmap for CoolStuff look like?
Overall we are happy with the shops performance, but there are a few things that we will improve. We want to make CoolStuff more modern. An ongoing project is the improvement of how we present our gadgets. Having better pictures, videos, picture viewing options (like rotation), descriptions and so on. We are permanently focusing on making these aspects better and easier to use.
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