Shoplette is a social network for shoppers to flaunt their shopping loots to others and also discover what others have purchased. Users post pictures (together with details like price and store location) of what they bought and others can view, rate and comment on the posted items.

In addition to shoppers, Shoplette allows merchants to establish presence on its platform. Merchants can setup Shops to showcase their products. Similar to all items posted on Shoplette, community members can rate and comment on items posted by the merchants. Currently, there are over 200 Shops on Shoplette.

Flaunt It on Shoplette

With its recently launched Shopping Cart Service, merchants can now eCommerce-enabled their Shoplette Shops. Some of its key features are order taking, shopping cart for buyers, PayPal or credit card payment system and also, simple inventory control and order management features. Merchants will be charged US$15 per month for the use of the shopping cart service. Shoplette plans to introduce more pay-as-you-use services in coming months, as part of its monetization strategy.

Shoplette Social Ads?

Besides services, social ads is probably another potential income stream for Shoplette. Peek at any member’s profile page, you can see his/her purchases, preferences and ‘Wish List’ – a potential advertising goldmine. By harvesting the information, Shopholics can deliver more relevant and contextualized ads to members of its social network.

Shoplette is a flagship initiative by Mobrick Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based Web 2.0 technology firm founded by Shannon Low. Launched in May 2008, the site today has over 1200 registered members with over 3000 items posted on its platform.

Shopaholic-Generated Content on Shoplette originally appeared on GreyReview on March 11, 2009.

Since its birth on August 06 1991, the World Wide Web has spawned numerous words and concepts. Its 17 years of existence probably can be arbitrarily divided into two epochs; the first (circa 1991 to 2000) is broadly dominated by e-commerce and the current one (c. 2001 to present) by social networking. Here are some of the popularly used terms and concepts used in both epochs, so far:

Inventory of Web(Words)

From Google News Archive, we can see the popularity of both ‘e-commerce’ and ‘social networking’ over the years.

Timeline for “E-Commerce”, 1991 to 2008

Timeline for “Social Networking”, 1991 to 2008

Rise and Fall of the World Wide Web(Words) originally appeared on GreyReview on February 10, 2009.

Elevyn is a social purpose e-commerce platform. Developed by Mike Tee and Devan Singaram, Elevyn aspires to assist marginalized communities to improve their economic well-being by (a) encouraging and enabling them to trade online with socially conscious consumers from across the world and (b) a more effective means to raise money for social causes.

This venture is probably what Bill Drayton described as social entrepreneurship, which involves a combination of pragmatic and results-oriented methods of a business entrepreneur with the goals of a social reformer.

Social Economy on Elevyn

Anyone can signup for free at Elevyn. Members can support / suggest a cause and setup an online shop. Preferably, the online shop sells products made by the community artisans and the community members manage the online shop, from creating product catalog to product packing to delivery to customers.

Every online shop on Evelyn is also encouraged to must support a Cause. A portion of every sales made through the online store will fund the Cause. After each completed transaction, a buyer will automatically see how is channeled to the Cause.

An example, “raise $200 to buy books for kindergarten.” Evelyn takes 5% for each sales and also 10 cents for each item listed on its online product catalogue. Another 5% goes to PayPal with the remaining 85% will be collected by the seller. Once the fund reaches the target $200, Evelyn will send it to field coordinator to fulfill the Cause (which is, purchase books for the kindergarten).

Online Shop at Evelyn

Besides purchasing products, a member can also contribute by (a) joining the cause, (b) making a donation and (c) raising awareness of the cause by embedding widget on website.

Based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Elevyn took 8 months to develop its front-end interface; it was launched on November 11 2008. The company is currently developing backend analytic engine that is able to calculate optimum selling price for each country, by aggregating prices on its platform.

Elevyn Empowering Fringe Communities originally appeared on GreyReview on November 29, 2008.