Imagine it’s July 2017 and you’re a freshly graduated BIM student. Together with a friend you decide to start your own company and sell your own products. You have some great ideas and great plans! Everything is elaborated in your business plan and you are ready to enter the market. But how are you going to reach your customer? Making use of social media would make sense, since almost 10 million people in the Netherlands visited Facebook (marketingfacts, 2017). How can you use these social media platforms in the most effective way? This is where Sellify comes along!

Sellify. What is it?The name Sellify comes from sell,

satisfy and amplify. “These words stand exactly where our products stand for.”, says CEO and co-founder Lennert Pieters. Sellify is the first crowdselling platform in the Netherlands, what makes Sellify very unique, but what is it exactly?

“With Sellify you can help entrepreneurs reach more customers by sharing the products that you love on your social media. Simply share a product with your friends in order to offer them an exclusive discount and, in addition, you will make a commission on each sale! It’s a win-win situation. You can choose for yourself which of the offered products you like and want to share.” (sellify.com).

As a “influencer” you support other products by sharing them on your social media.

Their mission is to make e-commerce accessible and reachable for everyone by offering a full service of distribution, delivery and payment within 60 seconds. “No cure, no pay”, is what they say.  At first place, the platform was initiated for consumers, small entrepreneurs and retailers, but more and more organizations made use of the platform. That is one of the reasons they switched their business model to only B2B.

Take a look at this video to get a better impression of their platform. How does Sellify work?

How does it work?
You and your friend decide to make use of Sellify. What now?

Sellify places your products online and makes sure of a tremendous reach by making use of influencers in their own network. They ask them to share your product on different social media channels, like Facebook. These social influencers exactly know who their friends and followers are, so they also know whether they will like to buy your product or not. When an influencer decides to share your product on her Facebook-profile, their friends and followers can buy your product with a 10% discount. As a bonus, the influencer gets 10% of the selling price of your product.

Sellify makes use of a cost-per-sale model where the entrepreneur only pays if he or she has sold something. With each sell, Sellify holds on to a minimum of 25% on the selling price, but this money is divided over the seller, influencer and Sellify. Eventually, Sellify will get 5% of the selling price.

So Sellify made a great unique platform, but what now?
Sellify makes use of the social media platform Facebook and Twitter. For the future, they want to add more social media channels, such as Instagram and LinkedIn. Another subject they want to address is to reach a higher conversion by creating a better fit between products and social-media influencers. To reach this goal, Sellify asks the influencers a couple of questions about their interests and are expanding their influencers database.

What do you think?
Many studies showed that when a product gets recommended by a friend or social influencers, the effect of buying this product is much greater than when a company itself tries to promote this product. This is one of the reasons why this idea might work. But on the other hand, there are already so many ways on social media to get the customers more involvement and more engaged. There is already so many promoted and shared content on Facebook.. Will this idea be differentiated enough to make a difference? What do you think? Do you think this new business idea might pull it of?

Sources
http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/social-media-cijfers-anno-2017
https://innovation-awards.nl/concept/professional-e-commerce-as-a-service-for-everyone/
https://startupdates.nl/startupbootcamp-alumni-moneylink-gaat-voortaan-leven-als-sellify/
https://www.sellify.com/en/faq
https://www.sellify.com/en