Trendspotting on Shoplette: Puma First Round Lizoid King
We’re in a bit of a sneaker phase. Uh-oh… But who can ignore these Godzilla shoes? Check out the full series of Japanese monster inspired shoes from Puma’s monster pack!
Categories: shoplette
Trendspotting on Shoplette – RoboQ Bumblebee
Available at The Falcon’s Hangar, Singapore, in May/June 09. Previously, you could only order these from Japan. There’s an Optimus Prime version too!
Categories: shoplette
…that will never go out of fashion.
Trendspotting on Shoplette – Christian Louboutin black open toe leather pumps.
Categories: shoplette
Trendspotting on Shoplette – DIY duct tape wallet
There’s something beautiful in the idea of saving money by making your own wallet.
Categories: shoplette
If you visit Shoplette today, you’ll notice a few changes to the site.
We’ve converted Shoplette into a crowdsourced shopping guide featuring products the community think are hot, that they’re craving for, or that they’ve bought. To participate, you’re no longer limited to posting something you bought. You can now suggest cool products that you like or that you’ve spotted by clicking “Suggest a product”, adding a title and photo, and telling us where you found it. So now you can create your own crowdsourced shopping guide by suggesting cool products and places to shop, and following other users’ shopping suggestions.
We’ve made everything cleaner with a bigger product gallery, so that you can focus on what you really want to see – more great products and where to find them. We’ve done the same thing for Shoplette Shops, so that the product catalogues are more focused on the Shops’ products. We hope that will make your browsing experience more enjoyable on Shoplette.
You can check out the new Shoplette here:
Please enjoy the new changes to Shoplette! And feel free to drop us a comment or email to tell us what you think.
There’s a long-standing debate over whether Facebook Groups or Facebook Pages make better marketing tools for businesses. Technically speaking, Groups were meant for organisations, interest groups and groups of friends, i.e. groups of Facebook users, while Pages were meant for brands and businesses. But who ever used things as they were meant, eh?
Here are some pretty comprehensive comparisons between Groups and Pages:
Why facebook communities can work for your brand by Claudia Lim
What’s the difference between a facebook fan page and a facebook group
Facebook group vs facebook fan page – what’s better
With Facebook’s latest update to Pages, things get even more confusing, because now, Brand Pages are like User Profiles – brands can post twitter-like status updates on their Pages, and these status updates get broadcast on their fans’ newsfeeds (apparently). Although with the latest revision to the Facebook homepage, I’ve yet to see status updates from brands appear in the new twitter-like newsfeed.
So what’s a Facebook marketeer to do?
Well, as far as I can tell, it really comes down to these key differences:
Groups give you:
1. Viral invitations – your group members can invite their friends to join the group with the “invite people to join” link on the group page. This isn’t so for pages.
2. Openness of community – a group is really an open community around a particular interest area, in which the group members participate freely and help to create content for or add content to the group.
Pages give you:
1. Broadcast announcements – in the form of broadcasting your status updates to your fans’ newsfeeds (supposedly). So every time you have an announcement to make on your Facebook Page, all your fans get to know about it automatically.
2. Control over your presence – Page owners have more control over their Pages (like user profiles), deciding what apps to put on them and how they should appear. With Groups, you get the standard apps and the standard layout. A lot of the content on a Page is also focused on what you want to tell or show your fans.
I guess it depends on what you want to use your presence on Facebook for. If you want to create an inclusive community around your product, service or subject area, and let users contribute to the content of the community, then go with a Group. If you want more control over your presence on Facebook and use it to make regular announcements directly to users, then go with a Page.
But don’t forget that viral invitations (letting your group members invite their friends to join) can be quite powerful in growing a Group on Facebook, and there’s no easy way to enable that for a Page at the moment. So if you need to ramp up a community quickly, just start a group and ask your friends to invite their friends.
Finally, check out this link if you need to migrate your Group to a Page.
UPDATE: Oops! Looks like Facebook isn’t doing any more conversions from Groups to Pages. From Facebook’s Help page:
We’re no longer able to convert Facebook Groups into Pages. You’re welcome to create a Page and notify your Group members that you’ll be using the Page instead of the Group going forward. If your Group has too many members to send them a message, we unfortunately aren’t able to provide you with any other solutions for how you might contact them about this change.
Please check out our Facebook groups for Zinerepublic and Shoplette to see how we get on with them. And if you’d like to help us out, please invite your friends to join them too!
P.S.: Perhaps this calls for us to set up a Group and a Page as an experiment, and see which works out better.
Talk to us: Facebook Groups vs Page – What do you think?
Categories: shoplette · startups · zinerepublic
We’re happy to announce the release of a new set of features on Shoplette to help shop owners set up a shop with e-commerce features in under 5 minutes.
With Shoplette’s new Shopping Cart Service, you can easily and quickly open a shop on Shoplette with e-commerce features and a custom payment or ready-made Paypal payment system for just USD 15 per month.
You’ll get a full-featured shopping cart and buy buttons for the items you post for sale so that Shoplette users and visitors can easily order items from your shop directly on Shoplette, as well as simple inventory control and order management features.
You can choose to hook up your shop with a ready-made Paypal payment system so that customers can buy from you using their Paypal account or credit card, or you can choose to make your own payment arrangements with your customers via email once you receive their orders from us.
With this new service, we’d like to make it easy for independent shop owners to own an e-commerce activated shop and sell online without the expense of building a new online shop. We’ve intentionally kept the features simple so that independent shop owners don’t overpay for stuff they don’t need.
So if you’d like to set up an e-commerce activated shop that’s plugged into a community of shoppers, please check out our new service here. Just fill in your details, click “Sign up for Shopping Cart Service” and we’ll set you up right away!
And if you do decide to try it out, please let us know what you think!
This is by far the most beautiful mini notebook I’ve seen to date. Sony’s done an incredible design job with it’s new P series notebooks that fit in your pocket.
It’s a tough call between the P series at SGD 1,299 and the Asus Eee PC 901 at SGD 628, or even the Eee PC 900 at SGD 488 (latest prices on 12 Jan 09) if you don’t mind the non-atom processor.
Here’s my take:
If you’re after style, specs and super-portability, I think the P series wins it, so get ready to hand over SGD 1.3k and stuff a tiny notebook into the back pocket of your jeans.
if you’re on a budget and looking for a netbook to travel with, that you’ll be less afraid to bump around, bring to dodgier parts of the world, possibly drop and maybe even lose while travelling, then the Eee PC will burn a smaller hole in your pocket for your carelessness, and it might actually mean you’ll bring it around more and get more use out of it.
But the Sony is so much more beautiful, and we’re just going to end up buying that, aren’t we?…
Categories: shoplette · stuff we like
We got some coverage in Digital Life, the IT supplement of The Straits Times, on 7 January 2009. Here’s a quick extract from the article:
Sharing best buys
Now you can show the whole world the bargain you unearthed – and see if everyone agrees
By Chan Chi-Loong, ST Digital Life, 7 January 2009
SHOPPING is a very social thing as people ‘just love to tell others what they have bought, especially if it is a bargain,’ says Shannon Low Shen-Li, 32.
Armed with this observation, he and good friend Loon Kok Keong, 32, set up www.shoplette.com in May last year to do just that – tell people about great shopping bargains.The duo quit safe, well-paying jobs – Shannon was in business development and Kok Keong was an IT engineer – to pursue the dream of starting up their own tech venture
‘Think of Shoplette as Twitter for shopping,’ Shannon says. Twitter is a popular mobile blogging tool where people send text messages to give updates on their life.
Similarly, Shoplette uses mobile phones to create content for a shopping social media network.
Say, you spot the latest Prada bag at a fire sale in an upmarket boutique in Kowloon, Hong Kong. You whip out your mobile phone, snap a picture, write a quick description and send text and image to Shoplette, where they are uploaded straight away.
Immediately, friends with a Shoplette account will be notified of what you just bought.
Furthermore, any Shoplette member can track your purchases and even vote on whether the buy is a terrific bargain or not. The more highly rated your purchase, the more visible it is on Shoplette’s main site.
This is a good approximation of the word-of-mouth effect, according to Shannon.
The fact that Shoplette is easy to use is another plus.
Besides user-submitted content, business owners can also set up a virtual shop on Shoplette. Basic accounts are free (for now) but featured sites which appear in a prominent position on the website are charged an affordable fee of US$10 (S$14.50) a month.
…
You can read the full article here.
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