What if a Facebook fan page wasn’t just a place for brands to interact with fans but also a place for them to convert likes into sales? Say your followers get this new deal in their feed and instead of just clicking like and putting on hold the idea to buy the product for a later date, they actually buy it right away.
Chooos is the first free app that enables purchasing goods directly from Facebook posts. Sellers can publish product posts with buy-buttons to their timelines. It releases buyers from the need to go to a separate brand’s website to purchase the item or visit the app to learn more about the product. What you do as a user is just click ‘Shop Now’ and you automatically proceed to the checkout.
About the Team
Pavlo Matviienko, founder and CEO of Chooos, is all of 23 and before Chooos, he created a marketplace for social shopping and launched more than 1000 successful advertising campaigns for various kinds of businesses. Viktor Voronin is the CTO and met Pavlo at a hackathon back in their student years and have been in good relationship since, sharing their experiences and advising each other. “I have more of entrepreneurial mindset and Viktor possesses lots of precious technical knowledge”, says Pavlo. Chooos was launched in April 2014 and since then it has grown steadily, adding new talents and the team now has five more members donning various hats.
About the Startup
It all started late December 2012. Pavlo was having a tough time deciding on a Christmas gift for a friend and checked out her Facebook likes to get an idea. While surfing around he found a few pages to have some pretty good products on offer and ended up getting a great gift. But finalizing order details with the seller was a painful experience and it got him thinking about how to make the Facebook shopping experience smoother.
It is a great idea since people already spend so much time filling out their likes and dislikes on Facebook and sellers are automatically getting sustained traffic for their products, the missing piece of the puzzle is making the transaction integrated and seamless. That’s what Chooos offers but it was hard to explain the concept to sellers as they were used to “Promote on Facebook, sell somewhere else” model. Says Pavlo, “Based on these findings, we created a simplified landing page with clear copy and straightforward CTA (Call to Action). Also, we shipped a very convenient on-boarding that literally guides a user through adding their first good and posting it to Facebook.”
But that was not all they struggled with. Even though Facebook and Twitter are both testing this concept of direct purchase from posts, for users there weren’t any clear incentives. “It forced us analyze thousands of posts made by our clients as well as publish various kinds of posts on our own in order to get the ‘anatomy’ of a perfect product post and the most efficient way to promote goods via Facebook Ads. Now, we’re happy to share this knowledge with our clients through our blog.”
In the end, the Chooos team managed to tide over these niggles and create a reliable and easy to use product.
What Sets it Apart from the Competition
Social networks are where you follow your favorite brands, those that don’t sell stuff you can buy in shopping malls. Facebook allows public pages to add third-party apps to their timeline and so far nobody has come up with a quick and easy way to purchases directly from timeline. Not only that, these third-party apps don’t work on mobile. According to Facebook’s Q3 2014 report, the number of active mobile users has almost reached that of the desktop users which means that the usage of these apps is very limited.
Chooos solves this problem with the help of responsive design. “We’re proud of our simple checkout responsive to different screen sizes and all kinds of devices.”
Pavlo certainly has reasons to be proud of the unique solution that Chooos provides but he is also confident that when Facebook launches their own version of Chooos, they will still have a competitive product. He explains, “Facebook’s ‘Buy Button’ will undoubtedly be very useful for marketers and advertisers. But it will work with Stripe payments only, cost some fee and will not provide a storefront.”
There are others competitors (Soldsie, Shoppost, Beetailer) but their solutions are either a temporary workaround which runs the risk getting blocked in the future or they are obsolete.
About their Plans
Chooos is targeting both small and large businesses. Small sellers can benefit by not having to set up an e-commerce enabled site; just the Facebook page will suffice. While the more advanced sellers can use the mobile checkout feature to target those on mobile devices.
More than just sell their Facebook timeline shopping solution, Chooos also wants to aid sellers with marketing their products properly. “It turns out that hardly anybody knows how to use advertising campaigns, some don’t even know such an opportunity is available. We want to provide an easier way to promote goods via Facebook through configuring optimized customer targeting and calculating only the most significant e-commerce metrics”, says Pavlo.
Basic features of Chooos are free. However, all the extra services will be charged. For instance, starting from February 2015, the ability to add PayPal payment method on your page will be a paid feature. Also, future features like integration with Facebook Ads will be part of the paid package.
Visit their website for more details and a live demo of the app.
