Want to sell something? The traditional route has been to set up an account at a storefront like Etsy, or to put down stakes on a whole new site. There's a problem with that model, says Katherine Hague, co-founder of ShopLocket: “Most people already have a presence online. When we want to sell a product are we expected to set up an entirely new place for that product to live?”
Enter ShopLocket. Instead of a storefront, ShopLocket treats each product as a media element. Products can be set up quickly, and once they are, you get a code that can be embeded in your site just like a video, sound file, or photo.
The service grew out of Hague's experiences designing themes for Shopify (a service she loves). When she found herself with a few T-shirts to sell, she decided that a full storefront was overkill but that the other online marketplaces didn’t measure up in design quality. “I couldn’t understand why what seemed like the simplest problem, ‘I have one product to sell,’ was actually so hard to solve,” she says, “ShopLocket was my answer.”
>ShopLocket has no central site. It was designed to be a module. Think Instagram versus Flickr.
By aiming at hobbyists and people with just a few things to sell, it promises to make the long tail (selling less of more stuff) even longer. And unlike many other start-ups, ShopLocket launches with a business model, taking a small cut of every transaction.
It's not an entirely new idea: Services like CafePress> andAddaStore have their own widgets), but ShopLocket has no central site. It was designed to be a module. Think Instagram versus Flickr: Both let you share photos on your phone, but one of them was designed from the ground up to be on your phone.
Also: the speed of the ShopLocket's setup, social-media friendliness (you can embed your minishop on Facebook pages, Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger, WordPress, anywhere), and sleek design make it feel like an update that needed to happen.
ShopLocket has been quietly testing its interface since the beginning of the year and took on its first live customers earlier this month. Hague says that most of their work on iterating the design of the service was in asking over and over how they could make everything simpler.
“Its easy to add features,” she says, “but harder to decide which ones you can leave out.”
