Owned It Wants To Turn The Order Confirmation Page Into A Social Commerce Opportunity

The humble order confirmation page is a wasted opportunity. Or so says Owned it, a new social commerce platform which aims to help retailers increase referrals and conversions by offering customers incentives for sharing their purchases (and any related offers) via social media, post-checkout. Prior to today, the UK startup has been operating somewhat stealthily, although it claims to be already working with merchants from 18 different countries in the consumer electronics, gadgets, gifts and fashion space.

Available as a plugin for e-commerce platforms such as Magento, Opencart, Zencart, Ubercart and osCommerce, or via Javascript/bespoke integration, the problem that Owned it is trying to solve is that commonly retailers put a lot of effort into converting customers leading up to a purchase, but fail to capitalise on the order confirmation page as a means to generate further sales — the very moment when they have a captive audience. It does this by displaying tailored incentives just after the point of checkout to encourage customers to share their purchase with friends via Twitter and Facebook or through email, thus turning them into “brand advocates”, to use the company’s own words.

So, for example, a customer who buys a TV could be incentivized to buy a Blu-ray player with an offer of 50% off if they share a related offer with their social network, say 20% off for ‘friends and family’. Thus the retailer gains exposure to new potential visitors, leading to more sales, while the customer gets something in return, which could be in the form of a discount code, free delivery or cash back. Offers can be tailored accordingly.

Owned it dashboard imageAlong with the consumer-facing element, Owned it provides an analytics dashboard so that retailers can track their campaigns and even do A/B testing to help fine tune what works best. This includes the number of referrals a particular customer generates, the total number of clicks a campaign generates and the sales resulting from a particular referral. Additionally, retailers can drill down to individual customer sentiments, and comments from their friends, so as to get a better understanding of customer referral behaviour. It also gives retailers the opportunity to target their most influential customers — music to the ears of social media marketers everywhere, no doubt.

Interestingly, Owned it says that the ROI differs significantly for various retailers and for different social networks, and that often the performance of a social network depends on the products the retailer sells. In testing so far, Facebook is the top performer for clothing and accessories whereas Twitter is generating more sales for gadgets and digital products. The company is also eyeing up Pinterest as another social sharing avenue.

Owned it is free to use for up to 500 transactions per-month, otherwise prices start from $49 per month for 1,000 transactions and increase with usage, accordingly.

The startup is a graduate of Oxygen Accelerator and has raised £100,000 from Finance Birmingham and private investors.