What is Storenvy? Storenvy Review

Storenvy is a San Francisco startup. It is a mashup-type online platform that is both an easy-to-use e-commerce and a social media. Storenvy has more than 65,000 merchants and millions of products, mainly selling clothing, home furnishings, jewelry, art, books and other creative products. On the other hand, the website has added social media functions. Anyone on Storenvy can create an e-commerce site for free and promote products through Twitter, Facebook and Storenvy platforms, enabling the sharing of goods and achieving marketing purposes.

About Storenvy

Jon Crawford used to run a website development company in Kansas City. He always believed that as long as the cost of running an online store was low and the operation was simple, more and more small and medium-sized enterprises would open online stores. So in 2009, he founded Storenvy, which uses drag-and-drop operation to enable anyone to open their own online store in less than a few minutes. However, Crawford has a more ambitious goal - to allow these small businesses to gain attention and become stars through this platform, just like YouTube has made many grassroots famous. In 2010, he moved to San Francisco and began to develop Storenvy's social media functions to achieve this goal.

Storenvy has a Facebook-like "Like" button called "Envies", which enables nearly 500,000 buyers to share products and allows users to follow people with similar tastes. In addition, the website also regularly publishes e-newsletters that sort out what users have bought or "Envies" in the past period of time.

Business Model

Storenvy adopts a free business model. The basic online store platform is free, but some additional services, such as personalized domain names and the use of discount code redemption functions, require monthly fees. Crawford said that some stores have also subscribed to premium services. Storenvy charges a 10% commission on the seller's sales (including shipping costs).

How to get store traffic

1. If the newly uploaded product has a lot of likes, it will be listed in the "New and Trending Products" section on the homepage, which will greatly help the exposure of the product.

2. Another homepage section is "Editor's Picks". This section is for products manually selected by the official platform operators. Images need to have visual impact in order to be selected.

3. Paid push traffic, which is also the most important source of order acquisition. Sellers can find it in the following picture in the background.

Operational Strategy

Storenvy stores will have some advertising campaigns every few days. Some of them are $20 per product, and some are $0.75 per advertisement. In addition, there will occasionally be monthly advertisements. The higher the price, the greater the natural traffic will be.

If it is a new product, it is recommended to place an ad with a price of 0.75 to get a lot of exposure. During this period, some orders will be obtained. In addition, the most important thing is that the seller's products and stores will get a lot of likes and store attention, which is very important for the later product ranking and secondary marketing. After several rounds of screening, the single products with high conversion rates in the store are taken out separately for $20 advertising. This platform is a social shopping platform, so the number of store attentions and product likes directly determines the number of orders for the "Buy Love" store, and long-term persistence will achieve good results.

Financing

-In early 2011, the company raised $1.53 million in seed investment.

In 2013, Storenvy received US$5 million in investment from Intel CAPItal and Spark Capital in its Series A financing.