Social Commerce startups are getting funding and traction on the same principals fueling PollCart’s customer engagement messaging platform.
A friend sent the PollCart team an excellent article about Pinduoduo (PDD) described as a kind of Facebook-Groupon mashup that could revolutionize e-commerce. It has raised over $100 million with a valuation of over $1.5 billion.
With that kind of validation and acceptance, we took a look at how it reflected on PollCart’s innovative customer engagement model.
The article describes PDD with similar language that we use to describe PollCart:
- “give shoppers an experience more like spending a day at the mall with friends.”
- “get feedback from people you trust.”
- “social commerce.”
The article also noted that Facebook and Twitter discontinued their social commerce experiments because “most users don’t want to be solicited while hanging out with friends online,” which we discussed previously in our article about Twitter’s Buy It Now button.
Same Social Commerce, Different Focus, Use
While PDD and PollCart have a different focus and use, the key to PollCart is that neither PollCart, the retailer nor the platform is soliciting. Customers are engaging their friends: This is a highly important distinction. PollCart is retailer focused with a view towards making a shopping experience on the retailer’s site a social experience much more mall-like.
The article notes that demand for PDD has exploded, demonstrating the impact of Social Commerce and a focus on customer engagement. In fact, PDD is now the largest private e-commerce company in China by sales volume.
The other positive for PollCart is that investors finally see the value of Social Commerce. Investors look to Social Commerce, customer engagement and capturing sales from abandoned shopping carts as a recipe for a high growth, organically growing company innovating into high margin markets.
PollCart loves that a prominent Social Commerce app is emerging as a “Social Commerce” app.
As retailers struggle to find a way to attract more customers and make their online experience a social experience, they will conclude that PollCart helps their customers engage with their products and share them with friends and family, follow through with a sale of a product in an online shopping cart and keep products that buyers might otherwise return.
Pollcart Social Commerce 