These charts compare the conversion rate of shoppers who open the TurnTo widget to that of those who don’t on the largest sites in our network.

This will sound like self-promotional hyperbole, and I’m going to say it anyway.  When we started TurnTo a bit over 2 years ago, it was clear that the viability of the business hinged on delivering measurable, positive business results for the ecommerce sites we planned to have as customers.  But, of course, there was no way to know for sure what the numbers would look like without building a product and finding customers to really use it.  So we plunged in, built the product, brought merchant partners on board, gained experience, and put in place the systems to measure if we were really doing any good.  And today, in conjunction with three of our partner merchants, we announced some actual results.  So this is the self-promotional, hyperbolic part: it truly did not occur to me when we set out that we’d be able to deliver numbers this positive.  I thought if we would able to show a conversion effect of 10% or 20% we’d be doing pretty well.  And here’s the data from over the holidays for these three sites:

Conversion rate of shoppers who opened the TurnTo widget vs. the baseline (shoppers who didn’t):

Jomashop.com (IR #209) Watches and luxury goods: 6 X the baseline (i.e. 500% higher)

ChristianCinema.com, Christian-themed DVDs: 8X the baseline

ePartyUnlimited.com, gifts and party supplies: 8X the baseline

To be sure, we know we’ve got a lot more measurement work to do before we fully understand the effect the TurnTo system is having on shopping behavior.  But still, after 2 years, it’s very nice to be able to announce numbers like these.

Optaros’ “Social Ecommerce Ebook” makes for great reading if you are trying to optimize the performance of your ecommerce site.  You can download it here.

They make the points that: 1. higher levels of shopper engagement on retail sites drive improved business performance, and 2. social commerce tools are a powerful way to drive engagement.

A couple highlights:  From the Harvard Business Review Article, “In Ecommerce, More is More“, they cite,

The majority of managers we spoke to in our global study told us they believe that a broad array of information diverts attention from the core offerings. But we found it helps customers search for solutions, invites them to think of all the ways the core products might add value to their lives, wins their loyalty, and entices them to buy. In fact, we found that exploiting consumers’ desire for engagement is the single dominant driver of superior shareholder value for e-commerce companies.

In the section titled “Making Shopping a Social Experience,” (p.44 on) they cite an article in the Wall Street Journal on the benefits of social shopping.  (The article features the positive results Teavana and Compsource are seeing from their TurnTo implementations!)  Their “Business Takeaway”:

People like to go shopping with others when shopping in person. With Facebook Connect and other social shopping applications, you can replicate this experience for your customers online.

The bottom line of their study (well, it’s actually more like the title): “Retailers Achieve Higher Conversion Rates Using Social Shopping.”

I had fun during the Internet Retailer Conference this week chatting with Ina Steiner, Editor of the AuctionBytes blog.  We covered a lot of topics in a short time.  She has posted the conversation as a podcast.  Enjoy.

Here’s the full article: http://bit.ly/14Wl0n

And here’s what they have to say about us:

New York-based TurnTo Networks Inc., for example, which was launched in September, helps retailers link their customer accounts with social-networking accounts and email accounts using Facebook Connect and other tools. TurnTo charges retailers a percentage of the revenue from sales attributed to the system.

Tea retailer Teavana Corp. is a TurnTo client. Jay Allen, Teavana’s vice president of e-commerce, says the conversion rate—a measure of how many shoppers make purchases—for people who use the application is 20% higher than the rate for others, and their average orders are slightly more expensive.

TurnTo founder George Eberstadt says preliminary data for the company’s first 20 clients show that using TurnTo tends to increase conversion rates 20% to 50% and builds traffic to retailers’ sites. Some 700,000 new users, for instance, have come to computer retailer CompSource Inc.’s site through its TurnTo application since July. TurnTo is “a lot better than average” in terms of price per new customer compared with pay-per-click advertising, says Dean Bellone, CompSource’s president.