June 14, 2011
By the ZippyCart Content Team
Hearst Digital Magazine has teamed up with Pixazza to make purchasing the clothes you see in their digital publication easier. As we have written before, Pixazza is a company that offers a different form of advertising. When you scroll over an image you are able to see which products are pictured and a link to buy them.
Hearst Magazine has said they want their digital publications to be a more “shoppable experience” for readers. They want readers to see something in the magazine and throw it in their online shopping cart.
Hearst has decided that Pixazza is a perfect tool to integrate monetization and product sales into their sites. When someone buys the good through the link of the picture, Hearst will receive money from the supplier. This gives their magazines a new form of revenue that they did not possess before.
Sometimes when surfing websites you may see a double underlined word in green. If you scroll over this a box will pop up with a product. Pixazza is incredibly similar to that kind of functionality, but they do it with images.
Online shoppers and website users are extremely visual. Far too often a user will see a product in an image and have no idea who makes it or where they can buy it. Pixazza solves this problem by allowing you to find out more information about products you see and instantly ad them to your shopping cart. It also does this seamlessly by displaying the information only when you mouse over the item. It doesn’t break the experience by shoving information down your throat.
The first company to use this technology will be Glidden Paints. Users who visit the “House Beautiful” website will be able to scroll over images and see various paints that are similar to the ones in the picture. If they want to go further, they are also given the option to purchase.
Hearst began using the new ecommerce solution on RedBookMag.com. The company did not want to drive customers elsewhere when they wanted to purchase clothes on the website. Instead the reader could see the item right then and there without searching.
Pixazza, based in Mountain View, CA, is rapidly growing in the advertising market. The company has over 100 million unique views to its publication websites, and over half of them are in the United States. Pixazza ultimately wants to reveal information inside every image on the web, thereby enriching those images and the entire internet.
With firms like August Capital and Google Ventures backing Pixazza, we may see very rapid growth within the next year. Stay tuned.
Elliott is native to the Seattle area and currently a Senior at the University of San Diego. With business and sales on his mind, finance is the perfect major to suit his needs. Social media, FIFA '11, and the iPad keep him on the couch staying up to date with the day's top business news.
