Springleap.com’s holding company Fashion Evolution has acquired the rights to sell the online customer feedback service – eKomi – in South Africa. eKomi allows online businesses to publicly showcase their customers’ views and ratings. We chatted to Eran Eyal, Co-founder of Springleap.com to find out more about this service and how it can effect the South African ecommerce market.

Why have you launched this service?
South African ecommerce providers have suffered from many setbacks thus far ranging from payment options to shipping and bandwidth. Whilst many of these are finding a path of resolution the fact is that many customers fear shopping online – 92% of ecommerce customers site security as their PRIMARY reason for not shopping online. The real issue at play here is actually a lack of GLOBAL standards. With this in mind we seek to launch a fast-growing standard of ecommerce trust and authenticity in South Africa to remedy the issue at hand.

eKomi has processed over 1 million customer feedbacks to date and has over 3000 clients in Europe with fast growth. It is becoming the standard in customer reviews and feedback which not only empower the customer with the knowledge that the site rating is not open to fraud, but also the ecommerce client with a method of talking directly to their customers and converting them into prosumers. That means trust and authenticity for the market and greater revenue streams for the ecommerce trader.

As a well known company trading in ecommerce locally and abroad (last year our site Springleap.com won the SA ecommerce awards) we understand these core needs intimately and the value of a solution that is easy to implement, a global standard, best-of-breed and reasonably costed.

How does it differ from other similar services?

Whilst there are a few other customer feedback systems in the world, eKomi stands apart – head and shoulders – as the only one that is transactionally tied. This means that both the customers who come to a site who see an aggregated customer rating (for the site and it’s services) as well as the ecommerce client themselves knowing that all the customers who give them feedback are real customers with real problems, creates an atmosphere of trust, accountability, transparency and reciprocity.

So when a customer rates the site – they can only do so after a transaction occurs – this way the client knows that all the reviews and issues are authentic and can be directly and easily addressed. There is an arbitration system that comes to play here where once the customer’s issues are addressed, the customer can re-rate the site based on the manner in which the whole service and transaction took place. This is an AMAZING opportunity for the ecommerce client to convert customers who would never shop with them again into happy customers, positively increase their site rating and show their existing and new customers that they are trustworthy and look after their clients. That translates into greater revenue and trust in ecommerce language that’s power.

All the comments also go directly into SEO for the site and push their organic SEO up.

For enterprise clients we can push the feedback into their CRM systems or wherever the feedback is going to be most meaningful for that particular client.

It is also a constantly and aggressively evolving product and now even an iPhone application is possible for managers.

Where are you targeting this?
There are 2 major targets: every ecommerce site in South Africa (and later Africa) as well as educating the market that when they see the eKomi widget – it signifies that the site is trustworthy and authentic; it’s the mark of ecommerce trust.

Where does the name come from?
The product originates from Germany where certification is highly valued – in fact it’s a must. So the name finds it’s origin in eKommerce.

Isn’t it dangerous to expose yourself like this?
How? Clients are already exposed. There are sites and social media platforms where people are CONSTANTLY complaining. There’s word of mouth. Sticking your head in the ground like an ostrich in the face of onslaught really isn’t a solution – the ecommerce players know this. This is a solution where they actually actively get to take control, have power they never had before, a global standard of trust, it’s cheap as chips, there’s a free 30 day trial, they get to talk to customers directly without being held to ransom by third party websites… There is only gain in this case. It’s a win-win scenario.

Sure sounds like a great opportunity for clients and customers! Thanks a lot Eran for telling us more about eKomi – a customer feedback service that will seem to rock the South African ecommerce world.

by Yolandi van Rensburg

Read the article on the Ideate website

Recently I had the great pleasure of attending the Silicon Cape Event held at the Woodstock Biscuit Mill in Cape Town.

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What an EXEMPLARY event drawing over 400 of the most influential people in the Internet, developing, eCommerce, VC and supporting industries.

Of course Springleap.com attended and I got a fantastic opportunity to chime in and voice my opinion about the Silicon Cape Initiative and why Springleap.com are avid and firm supporters of all such events.

Firstly a might big thank you to the guys over at Brainstorm Magazine! Thanks for the awesome feature!

Check out Eric and Eran in all their glory on pages 38 and 39 on this months issue (April 2010) of Brainstorm Magazine.

A multi-purpose online vehicle

Springleap.com does t-shirts. It does pretty good t-shirts. And it’s stimulating local talent while it’s at it.

Why, asks Springleap.com founder Eran Eyal, would someone invest R4 million in a T-shirt company? Well, they wouldn’t. Someone has invested R4 million in Springleap’s holding company, Fashion Evolution, though, and what they’ve invested in, says Eyal, is crowd-sourcing.

Crowd-sourcing is one of the new Web 2.0 concepts on the block, and big companies, with serious money, are doing it on a professional basis-Amazon.com, Unilever, and Cisco systems being notable examples.

On Springleap this takes the form, says Eyal, of thousands of artists, worldwide, contributing design ideas to the site. These are voted on, and every two weeks anew winner is announced, and t-shirts with that design are produced.

The designer gets R7 482.18 (R3 741.09 in cash and R3 741.09 in t-shirts), whatever sponsored prizes apply, R2 for every shirt sold and royalties if the design is used in the future.

Springleap gets an endless supply of good ideas. It also gets a vocal and interested community, contributing to quality control by voting on the designs they like.

Corporates also interact with the site, says Eyal: “Absa used us to crowd-source a design for the last Casual Day.” AMD has also made use of the site, finding it via the Industry standard Innovation 100 Awards, where Springleap placed second in the retail category in 2008.

Test-bed

According to Eyal, Springleap has been a test case for the creation of white-labelled software. Fashion Evolution is currently using the R4 million that it raised in it’s first round of funding (late last year) to redevelop the software. It then plans to go back to market to get another R50 to R100 million.

“We’re creating a web platform that will enable you to drag and drop crowd-sourcing, events, social networking, e-commerce-any functionality you need to create functional and interactive websites in less than 4 minutes with zero know-how, “says Eyal.

The cincher is in the crowd. As CEO and co-founder Eric Edelstein put it, in a statement released at the time the funding was raised: “Imagine a large company, such as a beverage company, creating a new name for a beer. Using our web-based platform, in a matter of weeks, not only can they have a fully-functioning, 100 percent branded crowd-sourcing, social network website centred around their offering, but using our methodology, they can also have a community of people wanting to get involved.”

The software platform will be available on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis, and companies wanting more-like custom theme, or custom URL (www.you.com not www.you.springleap.com) will be able to pay a small fee ($10 per month, Eyal suggests) to obtain such.

“Our goal, within three to four years, is to have 30 to 50 million people in the community across 1.5 million networks,” says Eyal, who obviously isn’t shy about dreaming big. All of the networks will be trading and sourcing solutions using crowd-sourcing.

“We can create the platform for free in three to four minutes,” he adds. “If you want extras you’ll have to pay a small fee.

“We’ll be giving it [the platform] away for free and monetising it to millions of people via different value adds. For corporates, we can customise it within two to four weeks, including corporate logo, appropriate skin, corporate identity and so on for far less than the R1 million and 12 months it typically takes to develop a corporate site,” he says.

Once again, Eyal emphasises that the people are what makes the offering valuable. Having a platform is one thing, populating it is another.

Says Eyal: “We’ll be able to go to corporates and say we know what triggers communities (positive and negative) and we have a way for people to move ethically between communities, s we can give you 50 000 or 100 000 people, and manage that community for you and help you understand how to monetise that community and manage it yourselves.”

Eran says sites like Ning and Yola have taken the approach of ‘lets build and then monetise’, where Springleap has taken the approach of monetising first so it understand show it happens and can make it happen again.

Pone of the first sites to launch will be a charity site, “doing something for the greater good”, Eyal comments. The site will be available to any charity that wants to crowd-source, enabling people to give back without “having to go pack fish in Alaska”.

Newbies

For a two-year-old company, Fashion Evolution is aiming high. Eyal says the SaaS platform will be ready for launch by August, as well as the revamped site and another three or four brands powered by the platform later this year. He aims to have 15 to 20 internal brands live within the next three or four years, all on the platform, with a combined community of around one or two million people.

“the VC’s are loving it,” he states. “We’re saying ‘no’ at the moment until the software is ready and the company is more highly valued than the current R50 million.” Nice position to be in, really.

Latest news is that Eran Eyal, co-founder of Springleap was interviewed on local South African radio station GHFM by DJ JP Naude yesterday!

He spoke about the development of crowdsourcing and how Springleap fits into the bigger picture. Way-to-go Eran!

A Podcast will be available here soon!

ONLINE t-shirt retailer and design platform Springleap is super-excited about the 2010 FIFA World Cup and can’t wait to help give the South African clothing industry and artists the exposure they deserve!

The T-shirt shows off the winning design from their Football Fever themed competition. Here’s what ShampooWarrior had to say about his design: “Let us be proud of our cultures. The bursting of colours in my design represents the cultures of Africa.”

Springleap produces 100 percent South African products and hosts a buzzing community consisting of 90 percent South African users. The year 2010 holds many surprises for Springleap registered users. Look out for more football themed competitions and great specials for the community to take advantage of. To get involved or to win cash prizes from Springleap, simply visit www.springleap.com, register and start voting and designing. For more information, e-mail marketing@springleap.com.

Taken from pg 87, People Magazine, January 2010
Written by Lauren van Onselen