Riding on the back of Pinterest, ‘The Fancy’ is a shopping site that allows the customer to look at images of a range of merchandise ‘on line’ in visual format on a social networking platform. It allows the customer to browse and make purchases on a trusted site away from the main ecommerce store. The Fancy are tapping into Facebook and Twitter as they are mediums trusted and used constantly by a global consumer audience. All the big names are trying this. It provides a platform for their merchandise and adds other routes to their markets.
It allows numbers of people who ‘fancy it’, to bookmark the products they like, and put them on a wish list. For the retailer or the manufacturer it allows them to provide an offer etc or not on certain product lines to ‘seal the deal’.
The lesson for all companies here is that to use a variety of routes and e shop windows for your products makes them visible to the customer groups. In business to business the techniques may not be the same but the same result is desired – more contact, more sales.