“It’s not just limited to [a] storefront. The shopping experience really is baked in across the site,” said Nic Barajas, senior project manager at BDG. Once a reader clicks on the product, its information is featured in a sidebar on the content page so the user doesn’t lose their reading place. They can then see the price, size options, color options, etc., and add it to the cart from that position. “We’re not glomming a shop onto the existing website, we’re baking commerce content natively into the website experience,” he said.

Bustle is the first site that will have the shop integration, called Bustle Shop. The Zoe Report Shop is set to launch in two weeks. The rest of BDG’s nine sites, except W, will be live by June or July, said CRO Jason Wagenheim.

Last holiday season, the publisher hosted a virtual holiday bazaar that created a video-game-like experience for consumers to interact with brand partners that sold products during the event. While Wagenheim said engagement was good (he declined to say how many people attended the three-week-long event), sales were only OK, due to “a lot of friction” caused by not being able to check out from multiple retailers at one time during the event.

Using the Swedish-based e-commerce checkout platform Tipser, BDG will be aiming to solve the friction problem by giving readers the ability to check out from as many brands and retailers as they want in one transaction at the end, without having to leave Bustle’s site. Any sales made on BDG’s properties will earn a commission that is shared between BDG and Tipser. Wagenheim declined to disclose what the revenue split is.

Right now, Bustle Shop will have access to dozens of retailers and thousands of products that it can sell on its Shop pages, including Hampden Clothing, Showfields, Linda Farrow and E.LF. Cosmetics. Within the first six months, Wagenheim said he is expecting the number of retailers to grow by hundreds. Tipser is bringing some of its European-based retailers into the fold, but BDG will also be signing up brands that it wants on its site as well.

E.L.F. Cosmetics as well as a department store retailer BDG is not yet able to name, are the two starting sponsors for Bustle Shop. But they are not just taking product images from their websites and slapping them onto a Bustle article. The Shop integrations will be a part of BDG’s branded content offerings that use influencers, videos or slideshow integrations, but rather than focusing …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron