Tell Me What to Buy: A Review of Mulu.Me, Buyosphere, Stylmee, and Lyst
@TeamMulu @buyosphere @lyst @InsideFMM @Gigaom
Last week, following GigaOm’s recommendation, I read Macaia Wright’s piece on product & content curation and aggregation sites (click here for the article). It listed several new and noteworthy product curation start-ups: Mulu.Me, Buyosphere, Stylmee, and Lyst.
If these product curation sites catch on (which everyone seems to think will happen) then in time this may reverse the flow between brand owners/retailers and consumers: instead of consumers going to brands to buy, brands will have to come to these consumer communities to sell.
Given that I am a marketer and expected to have a considered point of view on these developments I decided to give each of them a whirl. So I did – all of yesterday. I am now a proud member of each of these communities. I picked, “lysted”, loved, added, followed, etc., and below is what I learned as I reviewed each tool from a pure interested user point of view as well as from the point of view of a marketer who needs to consider what role these sites may play in her marketing & sales strategy. (Note: Macaia’s article also listed Svpply, which I wanted to test too, but I could not get it to work on my laptop all weekend - It kept loading and loading and loading)
Product curation comes in different shapes
There are two main models
Mulu.Me and Buyosphere are both consumer –to-consumer platforms: Consumers are invited to add recommended products that can be found anywhere on the web and at the same time they can also use the platform to discover and buy products themselves based on other consumers’ recommendations.
Lyst and Stylmee are both brand – to –consumer platforms : The available product selection is directly provided by signed up brands. Consumers are invited to explore and discover the product selection, using their known style & brand preferences and identify and tag and possibly buy the items they WANT. Others can view their WANTS and take inspiration from this for their own discovery.
The quality of the production selection is key – and there are clever ways to influence it
Of key importance to the adoption of these sites is of course the “quality” of the “start-up” community as this defines the quality of the recommended product selection. This is why Mulu.Me’s approach to support its launch by inviting about 20 stylish celebrities to curate their favorite products is so clever! Because, let’s face it, these celebrities are the ones with the money to spend to buy the best products. Moreover, given their public status they are also the ones who have to make sure they use the best beauty products, select the right clothes (with the help of their stylist) and decorate their homes (with the help of their interior designer) – all to keep up their stylish public image. So yes, people do trust their recommendations and endorsements. In addition, their selection of product recommendations is likely to be more high quality and interesting. As a result, Mulu.Me’s site has provided a fabulous selection of interesting product recommendations from day 1….and these recommendations have been very credible.
This approach really made Mulu.Me stand out from the rest. The product selections on the other sites just weren’t as high quality. For example, I was really disappointed by the community on Lyst. There are no known fashion editors or bloggers on the site. Those could really have added some serious fashion credentials to the community and would have made me want to follow them and see what they would recommend. But now it is just a community of wannabees (of which I happily declare to now be one), who do not really have the credentials to influence my wardrobe choices. Look, I liked it, as I loved the fact that so many fashion brands have gotten behind Lyst. It was a great way to put together my “love to have” wardrobe. But as a marketer I think Lyst has missed a few tricks which could make it the TRUSTED place where you discover & buy what you should be wearing.
Product curation is not yet as fast & easy as it should be
Many of these sites are still in private beta …and it is noticeable – I suffered many freezes, bugs and error messages. Overall there were 3 key user experience areas where each of them still need to work on:
Firstly,most of them suffer from speed issues. Their loading speeds are only just in the realm of the acceptable. Maintaining and increasing their loading speed will definitely need to be an area of focus
Secondly, adding products isn’t as easy & fast as it needs to be: Each of these sites provide so called “bookmarklets”. The idea is so obvious – provide the user with a shortcut to “grab” product content when they are outside of the site. However, the reality was not as straight forward.
My Buyo bookmarklet is still not working and dragging my Mulu.Me bookmarklet into my favorites bar took several attempts. In addition, the Mulu.Me’s picking bookmarklet does need a little further improvement as it doesn’t tell you when you go over the allowed 140 characters in the comment box for your picked item, nor does it warn you that your pick won’t upload when you do go over the allotted 140 characters. As a result I had a lot of wasted efforts. So now I write my comments first in a Word doc, so I can use the character count function to ensure i kept to just 140 characters, before than pasting it into the Mulu.Me comment box. A bit tedious and not something I have time to do other than on a weekend…….
Even when you add products when you are logged-in is painfully slow on all of these sites. They all use the same approach (I won’t bore you with the detail. Just try it) and it really is too slow and often falls-over during the process. This will really need to be fixed to heighten adoption beyond the aficionados.
Thirdly and lastly, I was surprised that none of them have yet launched an iPhone or iPad app. Moreover, whilst all their websites were optimized for mobile, none of their bookmarklets worked on the iPad. To me this is a serious shortcoming which will seriously hamper adoption. The one who fixes it first will have a huge advantage. (Discoveredd, which is a content curation platform, has done so and it works brilliantly)
For each of these sites it was completely unclear to me how many people have signed up thus far. This bothered me and will bother brands even more. As an individual i want to know because it would give me a sense of what level of activity to expect on the platform. Can I expect to have interesting new “feeds” every couple of hours or is it, at this point in the development of the site, a waste of time to log on more than once a day. Either is fine. It is just better to know as it saves me the disappointment of finding the same stuff I saw last time I logged on.
For a brand it is key for the obvious reason …though one should not expect to see the same user levels as we have gotten used to on pure social media platforms. For example, I work within the luxury goods space and I simply know that there are not 800 million people who can afford to buy my products. For me product curation sites are about identifying real prospective buyers so I am more interested in the quality of the leads and less looking for dazzling numbers.
Size does of course matter to an extent – too small is not good for anyone, however high quality the user base. Hence I expect each of these sites will already be in the process of approaching online retailers and brand owners to put their bookmarklet icons on their e-commerce sites – i.e. in addition to asking consumers to share their purchases on Facebook or Twitter, you also want them to share it on Mulu.me or Buyosphere or Get Vega or Svpply. It is a win-win for the retailers and brand owners as it allows them to leverage existing purchasers to future qualified prospects. In time these might be more valuable than sharing their purchases on pure social media platforms.
In my view these sites should start sharing their user numbers and insight sooner rather than later as they will need to educate the brand owners about their value, which is in my view their ability to connect/engage with “qualified” prospects for their brands (which is different from engaging with a Facebook fan, whose intention to buy is much less qualified). So I would suggest that they from an early stage start sharing insights about their user base such as the top 10 of the most “pinned/picked/lysted” brands; top 50 most wanted products; top 10 most bought products; etc.
Combining what consumers HAVE and WANT in one place adds extra value for marketers
Stylmee and Lyst are about curating your wants and aspirations and desires …even if you haven’t quite got the money to buy all you desire - i.e. on Stylmee and Lyst you can be someone more sophisticated then who you are in real life (i.e. real wardrobe versus actual wardrobe). So for a brand, especially the mid-to-high end fashion brands, the catch with a platform like Lyst or Stylmee is that it may not really give them access to qualified buyers but rather to a lot of aspirational fans who ultimately will have to satisfy their desires with cheaper lookalike clothes from the high street . (Hence that it is absolutely the right platform for ASOS and TopShop, who are both very active on the site and both have a huge following). To make Lyst more valuable as a lead generation engine for these mi-to-higher end brands, it should add a function which allows users to tag what items they actually HAVE. This would then allow Lyst to use that data to identify those users who look like they have the dosh to be real prospects.
Buyosphere and Mulu.Me already have this duality build in. They allow users to recommend an item that they HAVE or to indicate that they WANT/LIKE an item (on both sites this is indicated by a heart-shaped button). To me, as a marketer, that makes Buyosphere and Mulu.Me very interesting as it suggest to me that they have the data to identify a) my existing buyers and their feedback b)my prospective buyers. Moreover, they could qualify my prospective buyers by what products they have curated. For example, the average price point of the products they have recommended would give me an idea of their spending power.
The question is of course a) whether these sites have the ability to analyze the data underneath their sites to that extend and b) how these sites in the future will (be able to) allow brands to connect to these users – eg. through targeted online ads on their site or by sending them exclusive offers via email – but at least they have the building blocks in place to create real commercial value for brands.
What comes first: Discovery or Specific Buying Needs?
Both Mulu.me and Buyosphere allow users to ask questions about specific things they are looking for. The interesting difference is that the questioning theme leads the Buyosphere site – i.e. when you logon the first thing you see are the shopping questions that are trending at that moment. On the other hand Mulu.Me’s homepage is more skewed to the discovery aspect as the engaging grid on its home page shows you lots of products and just a few questions . To me, this was the winning approach. Why? Because other people’s questions are so specif and unique to them and hence most of the time of no use to me (Am I in the market for a pair of bright pink ballerinas? I don’t think so). I rather want to discover first. Perhaps later, once I have been inspired by a product or two, I might want to post my own “what do you recommend” question to the community. Bytheway, I find that quite a “public” and personal thing to do and I think it probably poses quite a high threshold for many other users too. I wonder if Buyosphere appreciates all this. Their slogan is “Ask. Answer. Discover”, but should it perhaps be “Discover. Ask. Answer” ? It is just a thought.
Does gamification play a role?
Stylmee is a free iPad app which combines online shopping with product curation and social game mechanics. The game aspect comes in the form of designing and running your own 3d virtual fashion boutique. I did it, but I can honestly tell you that I don’t think many other fashionistas will be doing the same. (I checked and it didn’t look like there were that many users …or at least I could not find them). It simply was way too gimmicky and tedious and simply too childish. Moreover, you can only place products in your store from the “brand collections” that are available within the app – i.e. you can’t showcase the clothes you really love/want/recommend from anywhere else on the web. So all in all, after spending 90 minutes fiddling about to design my boutique (You can look it up. My boutique is named FloraSophia), I decided to give up and I have already taken the iPad app off my iPad. I won’t be using it. Product curation is fun enough by itself without gamification. (I do feel bad saying this so publicly, as I do know there is a team behind this who have clearly worked really hard to put this together)
That is all for me now. I hope you found this useful.I definitely feel I now have a bit more of a clue about this new emerging space online. In my view Mulu.Me is the frontrunner of the lot at this moment, but time will tell. Buyosphere follows in second place. Lyst comes third for me, but given that they have already had so many brands sign up, I believe they could really be a powerful player in the fashion e-commerce space if they sort out their user proposition. In any case, I will definitely keep a close eye on this space as I do believe it will catch on and cause a big shift in how consumers buy online!