Feeding Frenzy: Profile on StyleFeeder’s take on social shopping

For some people shopping is an obsession. Award winning personal shopping engine StyleFeeder, is out to help facilitate that obsession.

StyleFeeder provides consumers with the ability to create feeds of products they are interested in as well as receive personalized product recommendations. Their flexibility as a destination shopping site as well social shopping platform has won them many industry accolades including: 2008 Golden Link Technology Genius award from LinkShare and the 2008 MITX award for Collaboration & Social Networking. I sat down with Shergul Arshad, VP of Business Development for StyleFeeder, to find out more about this up and coming affiliate.

Who uses StyleFeeder and what exactly is a style feed?

We are a personal shopping assistant. The people who use StyleFeeder are often times shoppers who are stuck at the category level of shopping. For example, they may know they need shoes but they may not have an exact brand or item in mind. They are in what we call the product discovery mode. StyleFeeder helps them make those discoveries.

The fact is that a style feed means different things to different people. For a lot of consumers it is a collection of products they are interested in, or maybe have already purchased and want to list them for friends, or maybe they simply think the items are cool. Some people use the feeds as their wish list of items that they are shopping for.

What are the benefits to merchants who want to work with you?

The primary benefit to working with StyleFeeder is that we are a personal recommendation and shopping engine. Whether you’re small retailer like a clothing or jewelry boutique, or a large retailer like a Macy’s, having your items listed on StyleFeeder will provide you the dual benefits of being surfaced to consumers via style recommendations as well as natural search results benefits since we are driving traffic from third party sites such as social networks and blogs through our platform.

We are the largest social shopping application on Facebook. Many of our users display products through our platform on their accounts. We are expanding quickly to more social networks. Our goal is to become the de facto shopping engine not only on Facebook but on sites like MySpace, and Friendster etc. So for the retailer who wants to reach consumers shopping in the social media space it makes sense to partner with us.

Although many retailers are interested in the social media space, it has been argued that consumers are not in a buying mode when they are on Facebook as compared to when they are in a shopping portal like BizRate. What are your thoughts about shopping in social networks?

The social media space is still very new. When Facebook first came out you wouldn’t have necessarily thought that social networks were the place you’d go and spend all your time to play poker for or other online games. You would have probably thought go to a gaming site. Now social networks like are getting a large share of the gaming traffic. Similarly, with the integrated components like instant messaging, communication is happening directly on these platforms. As more and more of these traditional online activities move to the integrated communities of the social networks, shopping becomes a natural next step.

For people who love to shop, especially the young female audience, many of their communication points and interactions with their friends are centered around shopping. Giving them tools within their social network to shop is absolutely a growing market.

How many products are on your platform currently?

We currently have 13 million new products on the site. About 5% of those products have been added by our users. The fact that users can add products from any websites keeps our product catalog fresh and vibrant. Beyond the sort of expected products found everywhere, on StyleFeeder you can find the unexpected.

Are you focused on any particular product categories?

We are primarily focused in six overall categories that are: apparel, accessories, jewelry, shoes, gadgets, and home and garden. There are of course many other subcategories ranging from music to sports. But we find ourselves focusing on those six because of course style is a very important aspect to our users.

Why CPA over CPC?

Our business model is predicated on three primary sources: we have affiliate revenue, we have price comparison links which are CPC, and we have display advertising opportunities on a CPM basis. The CPA relationships are primarily designed to bring more retailers into our site. We can quickly access products through our affiliate network partners in more a structured manner than individually. We also have a partnership with Shopping.com. For many commodity items like music and clothing we will surface price comparison for consumers and in cases like those we useCPC links.

If you don’t have an affiliate relationship with the retailer of a product a consumer has listed on your site do you map back to an analogous product?

We find that a lot of our shoppers will often show off products they are interested in on their blogs or on their MySpace accounts using our widgets. If they discover a particular item on another site and they add it to their style feed, we bring that item into our product catalog. If it is from a retailer whom we already have an affiliate relationship with, we will then replace the link our user provided with the appropriate affiliate link. If it is an exact item from a retailer that we do not have an affiliate relationship with but the user has chosen to add it from a different site we will not replace the link and allow the original link remain in place because the user may have wanted to save that specific retailers information.

What is the biggest challenge with data feeds?

The biggest challenge is the discrepancies in format. It ranges from the level of information that the individual merchant provides within the feed to formatting inconsistencies from one merchant to the next. Let’s take for example Shoes.com. In every single product they mention Shoes.com, even on products that are not shoes, like backpacks. If you are searching under keyword shoes a backpack could surface. We have to standardize how it displays for the consumer. The biggest challenge is how do you standardize the data and work more efficiently through the feeds. Every data feed we bring in undergoes a manual process prior to bringing in the information into the database.

If you had a wish list what would it be for merchants?

From an economic perspective someone like Zappos has a wide array of products and pays very well. We obviously like having those types of feeds.

Our notion though is that we don’t want to exclude products. If a retailer has a unique item even if it has a low commission structure we will bring it into our product catalog. However if it is a commodity item like for example a Dave Matthews CD and it’s available everywhere if then we display those retailers who pay more aggressively and have higher commission structure.

Does commission structure trump conversion rate?

We are using commission structure as only one of our criteria. The reputation of the merchant, especially from the consumer perspective, weighs importantly. It is just not a pure economic decision when it comes to displaying a product. So if it is fairly close in commission structure then reputation is the tiebreaker. We are in a race to bring in a wide breadth of the items now, Later we will focus on improving how those items display based on conversion and commission. It is the type of thing we will refine as we grow.

As a Golden Link winner what do you find different about LinkShare than other networks?

The experience is very different with each affiliate network. With LinkShare what we appreciated most is they were able to dedicate account management resources to work with us early in the process. Our account people, Adam Weiss and Jessica Kingman, were crucial to our success and helped guide us in terms of best practices and facilitated introductions to retailers. At the same time our engineers challenged LinkShare with a few new ways to manipulate and structure data feeds. Our systems architect Eric Kilby has really taken a hands on approach, working closely with LinkShare feed by feed to ensure that we are bringing in the best quality data. I feel that collaboration ultimately helped us win the Golden Link award.

What are StyleFeeder’s goals over the next year?

We’ve done very little in regards to search engine marketing and we are curious to see whatSEM will do to augment our already robust platform. At the same time we have such great viral traffic that our goals are to continue to grow our user base and become a destination shopping site for people who are looking to discover new products. We are also focused on increasing the product mix and at the same time growing traffic while improving our product filtering mechanisms. Six months from now we want to have a growing user base of people who are obsessed with shopping and are using StyleFeeder as a vital component to their shopping experience. That’s exciting to us.