Introduction of smatch.com (english)

What is smatch?
smatch.com is the leading online product search for the segments fashion, living and lifestyle. It connects the direct-product-search with social-shopping components.
Features like hyping a product, creating lists of favourite products and creating outfit-styles via our Style-Editor makes it easy for them to be interactiv and communicate with friends in their social graph about trends, products and brands.
Locating fashion, living and lifestyle products that fit one’s taste has become much easier by using smatch.com. The reason: smatch.com combines the choice of hundreds of online-shops, from streetwear-sellers to designer brands. It leads the user through different search and community features to the chosen product. smatch.com’s an intelligent and fast product search combined with a pool of hundreds of partnershops. It is a very unique and new business model within the social and emotional fashion, living, and lifestyle-network.

From where came the idea to connect a product search with a community?
The initial point where we came up with the idea of smatch.com was when we discovered that there was nothing on the internet that would fit our expectations of a social product search.
For example, if you were looking for green sofas on the internet, you had to search shop by shop or deal with hundreds of google search results. So we came up with the idea of integrating not only a product search where you could break your search down for products filtered by price, colour or whatever need you would have, but also enjoy a social community.

Our long term goal is to become the starting point for people when they search for products online - because they know they can gain better insights from the trusted smatch.com community members before making a buying decision.

What are the advantages of the smatch.com platform?
smatch.com helps its users with their shopping decision by giving them product recommendations that fit with their individual taste. A user can select and save her favorite brands and shops and automatically receive the most recent information.

smatch.com refers to several online shops, not only Otto brands. Isn’t Otto afraid of giving competitors new opportunities?

We understand that online-shoppers demand the best possible choice when shopping online. So smatch.com was created with our users in mind - and offers the widest range of products from all kind of stores, whether they belong to the Otto Group or not.

How many shops are connected with smatch.com at this time?
smatch.com includes hundreds of partner shops and we constantly integrate new shops to offer our users  an always growing assortment of products.

Are there shops included that are small or unknown?
Yes, if they have products that are relevant for the smatch users. Niche market players often have good and rare products and it is our aim that the assortment of smatch.com is diversified.

How does smatch.com find interesting partner shops?
We often get suggestions from our users. When they find products that are not listed in smatch.com, they tell us and we integrate them. Also the whole smatch-staff is sold on online-shopping and web 2.0. So they look after new shops during their internet visits. The third way is the direct query from shop owners.

What advantage do integrated shops have?
The most important advantage is the no-set-up-fee-rule of smatch.com - that means that we integrate new shops without taking any admission fee. We only need a datafeed which is formed in CSV and a signed contract.
Can you tell something about the business model? How do you make money?
We provide a CPC (cost per click) model to our partner shops. Each time a user of smatch.com decides to buy a product featured on smatch.com and clicks the link to the shop where it is listed, we get a commission. We make sure that our users see foremost the products they like and that are recommended for their taste. This way the shops on smatch.com are not able to buy a better product placement listing on our site

How many products are online by now?
The number differs because there is a permanent fluctuation in our list. However, it currently includes more than one million products and is rising.

Can you tell something about the business model? How do you make money?
We provide a CPC (Cost per Click) Model to our partner shops. Each time a user of smatch.com decides to buy a product featured on smatch.com and clicks the link to it’s shop, we get a commission out of it. We make sure that our users see foremost the products they like and recommended. This way the shops on smatch.com are not able to buy a better product placement listing on our site

What kind of people are behind smatch.com?
We are a team of young experts in IT, selling and marketing, and we all are interested in online-shopping and web 2.0. Some have been involved in other startups -  others got their experience from different sectors in e-commerce. The bottom line is that the idea of smatch.com brought us all together

Does smatch.com uses web 2.0, for example a blog, product recommendations or social networks?
Yes, certainly! We offer many “web 2.0 features” that support our users to find products that fit with their personal taste. These are functions like tagging, creating lists or styles by drag’n drop, social bookmarking or recommendations. The most important ones are the smatch widgets and the style-editor with which the user can create outfits.
Our users and partners furthermore can get the newest information about smatch.com and our community by visiting and subscribing to our blogs - blog.smatch.com and stilzeug.de.