PeC Review: Sellit Makes Marketplaces Social

A new “self-promotion” tool lets merchants selling on Yahoo!, CafePress, Etsy, or Cartfly promote their products on leading social media sites, access a social media advertising network, and post a Flash-based widget on their blog or other sites.

Sellit is a “bolt-on” solution that programmatically retrieves a merchant’s product offerings—including product images, descriptions, pricing information, and branding—and outputs it as an attractive widget that is ridiculously easy to share on most of the leading social media platforms. The solution was developed by the same team that created Cartfly, which explains the family resemblance.

For being a speedy means to spread the word about products on leading social media sites, I am awarding Sellit three and a half out of a possible five stars in this “The PeC Review.”

The PeC Review is my weekly column aimed at introducing you to the products or services that I believe can improve your ecommerce business. This week, let me tell you why I believe Sellit has the potential to boost sales for merchants using CafePress, Etsy or Yahoo!.

Simplicity Makes Sellit Easy for Non-Technical Sellers

In truth, what Sellit does is not that an awful technical challenge. It is, in fact, something that nearly any competent web developer could recreate. But the solution is not aimed at developers or even merchants who employ developers. Rather, it caters to non-technical, do-it-yourself sellers that want a quick and professional way to address social media marketing; something Sellit does beautifully.

If a seller is tech-savvy enough to have set up a CafePress shop, Sellit will be a proverbial cake walk.
To get your widget, just register, paste your shop’s URL into the input field on the Sellit site, and you are basically done.

Share the Widget Socially

Sellit’s core function is to provide a promotional platform, allowing sellers to share their marketplace inventory on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, MySpace, and others. A simple “Share” icon on the Sellit widget makes this a very quick process, so that in a click or two I can post my wares on any number of social sites and provide a means for my fans, friends, and followers to share my widget or shop URL in the chain-communication style that is social networking.

Social Media Advertising Network

Sellit also provides ad impressions on several social media sites. When I create a Sellit widget, I am also potentially creating an advertisement that the Sellit system will publish across its ad network. These ads, which in some instances are the Flash-driven widget that shows all or most of my products, could even go viral as online socialites share it with their connections.

Sellit’s Promotional Widget is Embeddable

I can also grab a bit of code and place the product widget that Sellit created for me on my blog or on other associated websites. In fact, you can see an example of the widget in action on this Blogger-based site.

So What Does Sellit Cost

At the time of writing, Sellit offers only a basic free service, with a few addons. But beginning in late October, the company will offer Sellit Pro, a $12 per month solution that supports 150 products, includes 3,000 ad impressions monthly, and offers other advanced features. An additional 15,000 ad network impressions can be had for $15 extra per month.

A Lot of Promise, But It Still Requires Execution

It is important to note that Sellit is not some sort of magical incantation, which will transform a lackluster CafePress shop selling picture tees of your Aunt Mable into an Amazon-like ecommerce powerhouse. Rather, Sellit is one more promotional tool in an engaged, marketplace marketer’s tool box.

Summing Up

I gave Sellit three and a half stars out of a possible five for being an easy to implement social media marketing tool that requires no technical skill other than being able to type and click. I also believe that at just $12 per month, the “Pro” version is worth a try—and will likely boost shop traffic and sales. I wish it worked with more marketplaces (Zazzle or eBay for example) or could ingest an RSS feed, but it does do a great job for those marketplaces it supports. Finally, Sellit is not the end all be all of social media marketing, but it is a good start.