New start-up Laudable offers South African consumers an online shopping portal that brings together the products sold by both large and independent retailers and, in the process, gives those retailers useful information on just who’s buying what. Think of it as a South African version of Pinterest or The Fancy, where everything you see you can actually buy, the company says.
Founded by two 27-year-olds, computer science graduate Ian Marvin and chartered accountant Haydn von Maltitz, Laudable was developed in-house and self-funded and was launched commercially a week ago.
Marvin knocked up a prototype of Laudable, which he showed to friends, before getting Von Maltitz on board.
“It’s tough to find stuff to buy online in South Africa,” Marvin says. “Sure, you can search Google, but you’re only going to find the big players. But there are a lot of really nice independent stores out there with real gems.”
He describes Laudable as a “social bookmarker tool”. Users install a small browser plug-in that allows them to tag or “laud” items. The site then automatically generates a store page for the corresponding e-commerce site, which the retailers can take over and customise should they wish to.
“We don’t explicitly integrate with retailers,” Marvin explains. “Everything you see on Laudable has been crowdsourced.” At the time of writing, Laudable had over 1 200 products listed at 89 local online stores.
“We’re not looking to monetise too early,” Marvin tells TechCentral about the start-up’s business plans. “We want to increase engagement on the platform and build a big community first.”
One option it’s considering is creating affiliate feeds where it bills for the traffic it generates to retailers that results in an actual purchase. Another is encouraging retailers to push deals or special offers through Laudable once it can demonstrate a suitably large and product-appropriate audience.
Marvin hopes to have 2 000 users by the end of the month, from a “few hundred” now. In order to reach this goal, work is taking place to make it easier for users to invite their friends to use the service. “You get more out of any platform if your friends are on it.”
To use Laudable, users need to log in using their Facebook account details, though there are plans to integrate with Twitter at a later stage. “Facebook is the social network with the highest penetration in South Africa right now,” Marvin says. Laudable taps into Facebook’s recently launched graph search functionality to suggest items to users.
“It’s a great way for retailers to get their products on graph search and for people to discover socially relevant items,” he explains. “Social context is more relevant than the metrics other search engines apply and we think graph search could be really big.”
One of the obstacles it’s faced is that people are generally reluctant to allow third-party applications and services to access their Facebook accounts. “We don’t post anything to users’ Facebook walls or anything nefarious like that, but people are still nervous, and considering how many spammy apps there have been in the past its understandable.”
Laudable moderates the items users add to the site to ensure they are available locally.
In addition to driving sales, Laudable hopes to offer retailers useful demographic insights about their customers — along with information on the popularity of specific products. Marvin is working on an analytics platform for retailers to use to get the most out of the platform. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media
