How Polyvore's User-Centric Approach Drives Big Results for Retailers
If you’re an apparel, decor, or beauty retailer, you should be well aware of Polyvore. The social commerce platform has been a dark horse in the product advertising space, yet it has quietly been one of the most (if not the most) effective social commerce platforms for brands and retailers.
Perhaps more admirably, Polyvore has been a high-performance channel while keeping the consumer at its core focus. This Amazon-style approach has paid off for the company and for the brands and retailers that advertise on it. Let’s take a closer look at Polyvore’s social commerce platform with its Chief Revenue Officer, Arnie Gullov-Singh.
What exactly is Polyvore?
Arnie: Polyvore is a new way to discover and shop for things you love in fashion, beauty, and home decor. We help people express their style by mixing and matching products into collages we call “sets”. On Polyvore, you can find people with similar taste and get a personalized stream of styles to wear and buy.
What types of ecommerce businesses thrive on Polyvore?
Arnie: Polyvore is one of the few social sites that engages the consumer at all levels of the purchase funnel to drive sales for businesses. Polyvore works with different types of brands and retailers to help them thrive on the site by maximizing their overall presence in our community of influential consumers and shoppers.
Women’s luxury and fast fashion brands, such as Net-A-Porter, Burberry, NastyGal, and Modcloth, are particularly successful on Polyvore for a few reasons. First, they consistently engage with Polyvore community members to find influential brand advocates. Second, they participate in paid programs such as Polyvore’s CPC program, Promoted Products, which amplifies brands organic activity to put their products in front of more shoppers.
Both RichRelevance and Shopify have conducted studies on brands/retailers’ success with Polyvore. How is Polyvore different from a Pinterest or any other social commerce platform when it comes to driving sales?
Arnie: Polyvore is different because consumers come here to shop the latest trends, curated by our community of tastemakers. Every piece of content on Polyvore is shoppable, whereas other companies focus on driving discovery of images across multiple categories and don’t make it as easy for consumers to buy products.
We provide brands with analytics tools to show them which of their products are most popular with our community and paid programs like Promoted Products to help control which of their products are shown to consumers when they are ready to buy. The net result is that we drive brands very large amounts of high-converting traffic relative to other social networks.
Any exciting things we can expect from Polyvore in the future?
Arnie: We are always looking for new ways to delight our users and help them discover and shop for things they love, specifically we are investing heavily in personalization, mobile, and our CPC program. We are continually adding more controls to our CPC program and expect to extend it outside the US later this year.
Where do we sign up?
Check out our page for Brand and Retailers here.
About Arnie:
Arnie Gullov-Singh is the Chief Revenue Officer at Polyvore, where he oversees the company’s vision, strategy and execution of monetization. Prior to joining Polyvore, Arnie served as the CEO of Adly, as EVP of product and technology at Fox Audience Network and as lead product manager for Yahoo’s search marketing business. Arnie has a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Bristol and an MBA from USC.
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