Tag: Collaborative Consumption

Parcel Bright: A Cheaper, Brighter Future for Parcel Delivery

Anxiety is a painful reality for many SME owners today. Making sure staff are content and properly compensated. Proving your worth to investors. Managing the inevitable snags in operation. But nothing keeps business owners up at night more than making sure clients receive their product on time and in shape. ParcelBright is the UK’s newest solution for individual online sellers and small businesses looking to get their package out on time so sellers can rest easy.

Far from one size fits all, ParcelBright tailors its pricing to you. It’s pretty simple, the more you ship, the more you save. But that’s not all, with many different packages to choose from, ParcelBright will help you find the cheapest way to ship no matter how big or small you are. This is a principle eRated values as well. With time and the right support sellers will increase sales volume. In fact, that’s part of the business model. Helping our sellers grow their bottom line helps us grow ours as well. It’s truly a case of one tide raising all boats.

ParcelBright was founded late in 2013. While the business is just one year old, they are already on track to send 500,000 parcels this year, and have attracted a series of investors who have pledged $1,000,000 to help ParcelBright to continue to support small to medium sized online sellers.

Based in London, ParcelBright has one of the most enviable customer service response times in the industry at 60% response within one hour, and most others soon after. That’s better than most corporations with massive customer support teams. Great customer support, reliability and unbeatable pricing means repeat customers have become loyal mainstays. Clients can trust ParcelBright to get the job done and, if it’s one thing we know at eRated, it’s the importance of trust.

eRated is thrilled to be partnering with ParcelBright because, at the end of the day, we have the same mission: Helping sellers satisfy buyers and scale up. Like eRated, ParcelBright’s door is always open, whether you’re a small scale seller with only a handful of deliveries a week or a High Street chain distributing thousands of packages on a regular basis, they are a solution for all sizes.

Good things may coming small packages, but ParcelBright’s tailor-made solutions make sure good things come in all packages.

To start delivering with ParcelBright, check them out at parcelbright.com

SuperMarket: The Artisans Behind the Art

The big boxes of online marketplaces, like eBay and Amazon, have been around since the beginning. They are reliable and convenient, just like their real-world cousins, but they lack the personal character of smaller marketplaces. Worldly buyers want to know the craftmaker behind the cabinet or the bottler behind the marmalade. That’s where niche marketplaces like Supermarket come in.

Supermarkethq.com is a friendly marketplace where designers are connected directly with buyers. This is like the urban marketplace where you can ask the artisan directly about their sourcing and their inspiration. Just as important for savvy buyers, products are unique - you’re not likely to see the same person wearing your necklace on a night out. Finding the right product is as much about finding a great story. Supermarket connects users to stories as well as their suppliers.

Before eRated’s partnership, Supermarket had no existing reputation system. eRated helped to give marketplace users a reputation. Since integration two months ago, the number of Supermarket users adopting eRated has doubled. More importantly for Supermarket founders, eRated is increasing conversion rates.

In the first month, eRated users increased conversion rates by as much as 90%. By the second month, that number had grown by 185%. On average, Supermarket merchants are connecting 3.5 existing accounts and have imported more than 800 reviews into Supermarket.

Supermarket prides itself on offering a story behind every product and a person behind every story. For one seller, he opted into eRated and imported over 1000 reviews from elsewhere. Before doing so he had one sale on Supermarket, since then he has made 27. That’s the power of eRated.

We’re proud of our partners, so check out Supermarket!

As a seller or marketplace, leverage the power if eRated by owning your reputation. Visit www.erated.co to join today.

 

SideLineSwap: Earn Cash by Cleaning out your Locker

SideLineSwap sellers are now powered by eRated. What about yours?

Like Brendan at SideLineSwap, thousands of people around the world are turning their passions into pastimes and hobbies into jobs by creating online marketplaces. They’re trading what they’re passionate about. They’re selling the products they know and love.

SideLineSwap saw a need and moved to meet that need with a marketplace geared to its users. For Mums looking to sell their kids’ outgrown hockey pads; to grownup athletes whose time on the gridline has been replaced by four walls and fluorescent lights, SideLineSwap is a marketplace for users to sell, buy and trade sporting goods.

By allowing users to create profiles as athletes and fans, their marketplace takes a big step toward building more than a store, but building a community of people with similar interests. This actually helps to build trust, but just as important, it lets people get to know one another. It’s also a place for users who see themselves as small businesses, like people supplying a particular type of gear. The marketplace’s crisp display and flexible platform allows sellers to do justice to their goods and get the sales they want. It’s a community for Mums and merchants, and merchant Mums.

What has eRated done for SideLineSwap? Like many new marketplaces, SideLineSwap was looking to improve their reputation system by making it more flexible and allow users to add more information about themselves. Our widget added value for them right away, letting their users bring in their social media profiles and existing marketplace histories. Since adopting our widget, SideLineSwap has seen conversion rates go up for existing users by up to 40%. New users without a history in SideLineSwap have been able to import their existing reputation elsewhere and get selling in Brendan’s marketplace faster.

Visit SideLineSwap and make the most out of your gear!

Contact eRated if you would like to see the same results as Brendan for your marketplace at [email protected].

Trust in the Sharing Economy: In Conversation with the UK Gov’t

How do we keep users safe? What role should the government play as regulator? Can marketplaces really police themselves?

These were just some of the questions in a free-flowing discussion of the challenges and opportunities facing the sharing economy in the months and years ahead. On 17th October, the UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills brought together a motley crew of savvy start-up entrepreneurs, passionate activists and keen government staff from a number of departments to talk about one thing: Trust in the sharing economy.

As engaged members of the sharing economy, the British government wanted to know how we envisioned this space in 2025. We dreamed of a perfect world where there were clear laws and regulations from the government; where working systems of redress kicked in when trust breaks down; where the sharing economy is the “new normal”, and where millions of users behaved according to an agreed code of conduct. One cheeky participant asked: Why wait until 2025?

We love lists in the 21st century and, as it turns out, so does the British government. They asked us to list what we thought were the biggest challenges facing the sharing economy. In no particular order, we listed safety, transparency, privacy, verification, insurance and digital inclusion. Can we ever be certain of a person’s identity online? How do we engage pensioners and those from less advantageous economic backgrounds in collaborative consumption? Is it time to rethink consumer rights legislation for the sharing economy?

As a reputation aggregator in the sharing economy, eRated was especially interested in how we can bring together the history and reputation of sharers online to make their lives easier in every marketplace. I was of course delighted to hear one participant ask: Why can’t there be a universal reputation score for every user? Well, that’s what keeps us at eRated up at night!

There was a pretty clear consensus that, for all its risks, collaborative consumers are making the sharing economy a safe place. One insightful comment from a Blablacar staff member noted that drivers are working harder to drive safe in their marketplace because it’s not just the police watching anymore, but thousands of fellow marketplace motorists. Daniel from BIS said his place is never cleaner then when he’s about to AirBnB it! There’s no doubt that intervention from the government can be a positive force, but the people who share are a pretty responsible bunch. We care about our sharing communities.

Turning strangers into friends is something we can all get behind. By strengthening our sharing communities with clearer regulations and codes of conduct, opening new roles for insurance companies, bringing together our various online reputations and protecting our data, we can help make sharing easier, safer and more transparent.

We are delighted to see the sharing economy at the top of the British government’s agenda. This is one sure sign that the sharing economy is far from being a fad and, at least for this small group, is undoubtedly the future.

Won’t you stay, just a little bit longer? Increasing Marketplace Engagement

Humans on the internet are like kittens in a yarn factory, they hop, skip and jump from one website to another getting tangled in ads, memes and top ten lists. A 5 minute break at work includes reading snippets of articles on the Guardian, watching a 30 second video of a shark fighting a whale and then getting mired in a government website finding out how to get a wedding licence (Mavel Tov, btw).

We know that 55% of website visitors spend an average of 15 seconds on a site, that’s about enough time to skim 3 sentences. We also know that only 3% of visitors to a marketplace website actually make a transaction. If 97% of visitors are “just visiting”, why is that? Part of the reason is engagement - this is basically how much time is spent on a website and how much a visitor does whilst there. Weak engagement means less time on your marketplace and less time spent on your marketplace means fewer transactions.

So, as a marketplace, how do you keep the kittens just a little bit longer?

eRated has been researching this and we’ve come up with a list of do’s to help keep your kittens happy (for longer):

1. Cut the clutter: There’s a reason most start-up websites have a clean, crisp, logical presentation. What they know is that crowding brains with too many ads, search bars, newsfeeds and other shiny objects creates stress. If your visitors are already at work, they don’t need more of that. If they’re on your site, they’re there for a reason - everything on your site should jive with why the visitor is there.

2. Answer questions: Think of the answers to the top five questions a visitor asks before they’ve asked them: What is your marketplace doing? (tasking, lending, selling, etc.) Is the marketplace secure? Is the marketplace for them? (are they parents, athletes, craftmakers?) Don’t leave them guessing.

3. Grab them: Most marketplaces list select items or services at the outset. This shows the visitor what you’re about and what they can expect. Reward your top sellers by listing their items.

4. Give them a story: Many niche marketplaces, particularly craft and handmade, ignite their visitors’ passion by building a story around their products. People love stories. They personalize products and experiences and it lets your marketplace build a relationship with its visitors. People are more comfortable in a friend’s house than in a stranger’s, so make your marketplace feel familiar with product and seller stories they can sink into.

There’s no doubt that increasing engagement increases transactions. Make them stay just a little bit longer by making your marketplace clutter-free, responsive to visitor expectations, alluring and familiar.

Check out eRated.co to find out how we can help increase engagement for your marketplace.

eRated: A More Human Way to Trade

Want to be a part of the sharing economy? Start by joining eRated.

For centuries, sellers and buyers wouldn’t dream of buying or selling products, or using services they couldn’t see, touch and smell. Fish was smelled, fruit was squeezed and services were provided by the people you knew, almost always in the same town market. Trust between sellers was built on familiarity, rather than on a brand or corporate emblem.

This changed in the 20th century when the vast majority of goods and services purchased by the average consumer came with a corporate tag. The “marketplace” narrowed to the consumer and a small collection of corporate providers. You bought from “trusted brands”. Brands were trusted because they came with history, a history of quality and the confidence that comes with scale.

In the 21st century, we’re harkening back. Collaborative consumption is returning consumers and sellers to marketplaces again. The difference now is we’re not confined by geography, as in the past, but by the anonymity that comes with the online marketplace. We can’t touch our goods and we don’t know our sellers. Additionally, individuals and small enterprises don’t come with global corporate brands. So, in the shared economy, where does trust come from?

Trust can only be built in one way: Reputation. eRated is the world’s first tool built to bring the trust of town marketplaces to the global, online shared economy. eRated spans the divide between hundreds of marketplaces, large and small. It works for first-time sellers and large-scale buyers. eRated is free because it’s filling a crucial need: The need to establish trust between tens of millions of sellers who don’t live in the same town and don’t shop in the same marketplaces. It’s the friend of a friend who told you, “You can trust this woman because I’ve bought from her before.”

Collaborative consumption is returning us to the way exchange should be – between people who care about their products and a marketplace where quality is guaranteed by reputation, not by a corporate brand. eRated is offering the world a more human way to trade.

Be a part of the collaborative consumption movement by telling your friends about eRated:

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/erated.co?fref=ts

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Visit us our website: erated.co

Reputation is the new currency of the 21st century

Rachel Botsman, in her inspiring TED talk, said the following line:

“Reputation is a currency that I believe will become more powerful than our credit history in the 21st century. Reputation will be the currency that says that you can trust me”.

We at eRated couldn’t agree more. As the number of online marketplaces continues to grow and the adoption of e-commerce sellers continues to rise, Reputation online is and will be OUR currency for transactions.