India's first and largest managed marketplace ShopClues launched the latest in its impressive string of seller initiatives today. Constantly looking at ways to help its merchants enhance their business, the marketplace has rolled out AdZone, a self-service solution that helps merchants promote products using native and custom ads on ShopClues.
The platform has been created in partnership with C1X, a leading online advertising technology firm. The seller-bidding platform to advertise, execute and manage product campaigns was unveiled by ShopClues.
AdZone is a dedicated sellers' platform where merchants looking to advertise their products on ShopClues can enter a bidding process to initiate their campaign. Minimum budget for a campaign is Rs. 1,000 while the minimum bids vary for different categories.
The product ads will be displayed in the category and sub-category pages, thus ensuring top slots and resulting in high orders. While the 'native' ads category makes a featured ad appear at the top of product listings, 'custom' ads will incorporate multi-banner ads displayed at the top of the website. The campaign created can be seen on desktop as well as on the mobile app/site.
"This platform will immensely boost the visibility of products and maximize product views, thereby helping vendors to increase their business with us. The bidding system ensures transparency, while our differential bidding mechanism for products is essential for retailers advertising varied products. With AdZone, ShopClues further emboldens its commitment to assisting its large and growing merchant community at every step in their growth as our partners," said Co-founder and CBO ShopClues, Radhika Aggarwal.
"At ShopClues, we're driven by a passion for innovation. Keeping in mind our merchant-first approach, we have attempted to create a technology to help our ever-increasing merchant base sell efficiently. AdZone caters to their need for pushing the envelope of achievement with ShopClues and staying ahead in a highly competitive market. We anticipate a very positive response from our seller community to our latest initiative," said VP-Products ShopClues, Arun Goel.
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With only an active ShopClues merchant account as a pre-requisite, it is extremely convenient to create a marketing campaign on AdZone.
Furthermore, performance of the ad campaign can be tracked and managed via the Store Manager on the AdZone dashboard. It displays the impressions, product clicks and sales on a seller's campaign, which is essential as the seller is charged on a cost-per-click model, wherein they can also use their ShopClues credits to make payments.
The money is automatically deducted from the seller's budget. As a launch promotion, ShopClues is providing sellers complimentary credits when they create their first campaign. Going forward, merchants will be able to bid for keyword searches on Shopclues as well as make their ads visible on other online platforms.
"We ran a pilot with about 300 merchants on the AdZone platform, and the results were extremely positive. We ran over 1000 ad campaigns over a 10 day period, and our merchants saw a healthy return on their investment," added Arun.