Social Commerce Trends & Tools

Peer-to-peer lending has been around for ages, and it's no surprise that it's thriving online. SoFi, a true social lending network, continues to gain momentum since its founding in 2011. According to Sofi's website, their goal is to "…restore the historical norms of community finance to help students meet their financial needs through alumni involvement."[1] Sofi has leveraged the power of social to connect alumni with students. It's $2 million pilot program, launched at Stanford, provided student loans to 100 students with funds contributed by alumni. The loans carry a 6.24 percent annual interest rate.

The CEO's Take

SoFi's low-interest education loans are set to reinvent the way we look at school loans. “We wanted to change the system for the better,” says Mike Cagney, SoFi CEO. Read More »

Spending and earning money is a daily reality, and we look for answers to our financial questions from experts. Now, we can do it using Facebook. New Zealand-based ASB Bank has rolled out a new interactive Facebook application, called Virtual Branch, which allows bank customers to ask ASB employees  financial questions through a responsive FAQ format.

The application asks customers to sign in to their Facebook accounts, and it begins as a "tour" through the program. Then, if they find the app useful, it asks that customers allow access to their Facebook information. Customers don't have access to their bank account through Facebook, and they don't have to sign in to their bank account to talk with members of the bank staff. There are eight employees Read More »

Plimus e-Commerce services has launched BlueSnap, a complete suite of ecommerce services that enables consumers and businesses to pay for rented access to virtual goods and services online.  Plimus, a Fremont, California company with decades of experience in the area of web commerce, looks to use its experience to continue helping vendors grow their online businesses. Bluesnap bills itself as a "global provider of open Cloud Commerce technology and services."^[1] The company aims to help today's digital brands in their efforts to experiment with new business models and marketplaces, with the help of frictionless commerce in a social web-driven environment. Bluesnap's flexible monetization solutions give companies a competitive advantage in an online space dominated by companies with the revenue stream to seize all the biggest Read More »

By John Lynch. Special to FinLab

 The latest version of online classifieds is out and it's called Paygr (pronounced "pager," a pun obviously on those old personal telecommunication devices). Paygr has two features that its creators think will set it apart in an increasingly crowded market. One is its target audience. The other is how the platform leverages social media techniques to foster a "community" of buyers and sellers that will encourage friends to offer services to one another.^[1]

Online classifieds and job boards have been around for some time. The "For Sale" and "Services" sections on Craigslist are prominent examples of the platform. What the latest generation of locally-focused startups like Paygr are seeking to do is use this tried and true concept, but in Read More »

Chad Meyer and Omid Saadati were fed up with looking for parking spaces. They live in San Francisco where parking space is at a premium. Every time they went out it seemed that they wasted at least a half-hour circling the block hoping to pounce on any available spot. What bothered them the most about the situation was that they always saw plenty of private parking spaces open but unusable.

One day over coffee they hatched an idea that might solve their problem and that of lots of other drivers in the city. What if they could connect frustrated drivers in need of temporary parking with the owners of those spots that were sitting empty because the owner was at work, out of town or at Read More »

MovenBank has been referred to as a bank for the smartphone age. With Google Wallet, PayPal, Square, and so many others contending for the crown in mobile payments "it was only a matter of time before a dedicated mobile, cardless bank emerged."^[1] MovenBank plans to fill that niche. It’s an online bank that will channel social, mobile, and gamification technologies to bolster its financial clout. Instead of issuing plastic cards for its customers, MovenBank will use NFC (Near-Field Communication) technologies to turn the phone into a payment device.

The company was launched by Brett King, blogger and author of Bank 2.0. And while it hasn't opened its doors quite yet, company leaders have already decided to use social media to "inform its credit decisions and to Read More »

OpenSky has started a new business model that combines the personal connections of social media, with a marketplace mentality. OpenSky allows individual tastemakers “curators” to accumulate customers like Facebook friends by offering discounts on their favorite products.^[1] Currently, OpenSky recommends that potential curators, who are currently bloggers, have “100,000 monthly unique visitors and several thousand Twitter followers”^[2] so that they can get at least 4,000 OpenSky followers. So being an OpenSky curator isn’t simple, but a well-established online presence with an expertise in women’s lifestyle products could excel with OpenSky.

Celebrity-Driven Shopping

For consumers, OpenSky is free to join, and is easily customizable. They can select which updates they'd like to see, based on their product preferences. OpenSky has a 90-day return policy, so users Read More »

Looking for a friendlier approach to stock trading? Stocial provides an approachable user interface that mixes social media, online games, and the stock market. Some investment-savvy consumers even use Stocial to help prove their trading prowess to potential employers. While it's still in beta stage, Stocial is a new social stock exchange site that's rapidly growing in popularity.

According to TechCrunch, Stocial is the "love child of StockTwits and Yahoo! Finance."^[1] As a combination of realtime market and stock trend updates, key stories from the likes of Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and Business Insider, and a live Twitter feed, Stocial focuses on keeping its users in the know about stock market movements,  large and Read More »

 According to the website, ChoozOn is "the world's most convenient personal service for finding deals and discounts." The site aims to solve a key problem associated with online shopping—there isn’t enough time in the day to chase down the best deals on the web. With all the coupon sites, online megastores, and brand sites, it's hard to find relevant deals. If you don't want to search until you drop, run through coupon sites, or buy into the next random email deal in your inbox, ChoozOn may be for you. It helps filter through all the clutter to find the best opportunities based on your preferred retailers, brands, and other criteria. With a hub on the web and a mobile app to boot, ChoozOn aims to Read More »

If you're an avid music fan, there's a good chance you enjoy personalized music online, on sites like iHeartRadio.com, YouTube, Vevo, and Pandora. You may even stream music on your phone when you're driving to work. But, online music channels have their limitations; there's nothing like having your own music library. For years, iTunes has been the go-to source for legal music downloads, but since the recession extra funds have been tough to come by, and people now spend less money on music. Satellite radio was a big craze for a while, though subscription numbers have been down since the advent of Pandora and other online radio sites. Enter Spotify—a new subscription music service that allows users to listen to anything from anywhere. Read More »

When it comes to researching local merchants, the Internet provides an assortment of useful tools to help you find what you're looking for and stay on budget. If you're looking for good Italian food in your area, you may visit several websites—each with a different set of features: Hunch.com provides personalized recommendations based on your interests, Yelp.com offers a variety of informative reviews, Menupages.com gives you access to various restaurant menus, OpenTable.com lets you book online reservations, and Google Maps (maps.google.com) helps you locate restaurants and print out directions. You may even find a special offer for your selected restaurant on FourSquare.com.

The list of sites you could use to track down pertinent info on the best Italian eateries in your area is extensive. However, Read More »

Whether you're commuting to work or making a cross-country trip, high gas prices and airline fees can easily eat away at your personal budget. Searching for better fuel economy has been a growing concern of many consumers. Zimride, a social carpooling platform, takes a slightly different approach to improving fuel economy by matching drivers with empty car seats to passengers looking for inexpensive ways to get to their next destination. Read on to discover how Zimride has developed over the years and how it works. 

The Zimride Story 

In 2005, co-founder Logan Green took a trip to Zimbabwe and was inspired by the country's grassroots transportation system.^[1] He decided to develop a social carpooling platform and name his company Zimride in honor of Zimbabwe. After meeting co-founder Read More »