Platform hosts a social marketplace for communities of friends

Following on from our article about Zipzoom, we’ve discovered another novel take on e-commerce. This time, however, the innovation does not affect how the goods are sold, but rather whom they are sold to. Keepio is a new marketplace orientated around buying, selling and recommending products to your friends. Users begin by logging on to the Keepio website and setting up a profile. This profile can then be connected to a user’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, and items can be upload along with a photo and description. As items are uploaded, users can set whether to list them as private (creating an online catalog of their items which no one else can see), public (meaning they will appear on the main Keepio marketplace), or they can chose to only list items to their friends from their connected social networks. By listing to friends, Keepio users overcome many of the problems traditionally associated with e-commerce. There are no privacy concerns raised from sharing addresses or contact details, there are no transaction fees, and friends can buy from each other confident that the product will be in the condition that their trusted friend has described. Keepio claim that “90 percent of all purchase decision involve influence and input from our peers”, and point to numerous exchanges already taking place through social network status updates as a precedent for their model. The website, however, hopes that its stored inventory of a user’s wares will make listed sales more enduring than ephemeral status updates. As friends increasingly play a part in consumer behaviour, and the f-factor takes hold, social commerce is already playing a huge role in the way individual brands retail online. With that in mind, a marketplace dedicated to social commerce for second hand wares seems a good idea. Retailers everywhere, don’t get left behind as others go social! (Related: More near-instant e-commerce delivery.)