#blkdot

Looking to show your products off even more on Tumblr? BlkDot now supports animated gifs! Bring your products to life and sell directly on Tumblr where people are already inspired by your work.

PERFECT CARDIGAN by Costello Tagliapietra Tumblr launch

Forward thinking! Designers Jeffrey Costello + Robert Tagliapietra have officially relaunched their website on a new platform! Going for a more interactive consumer experience, they decided to move their site + Ecommerce  to Tumblr (our favorite social) as their selling platform.  For the occasion, the Duo introduced their unisex Perfect Cardigan campaign shot by Michael Beauplet which captures…

Sergio Rossi Jeweled Satin Circle Sandals

Towering pair in luxurious satin dressed up with Swarovski crystal-coated discs for extra sparkle. - Self-covered heel, 4¼” (110mm) - Swarovski crystal-coated satin upper - Adjustable ankle straps - Leather lining and sole - Padded insole - Made in Italy

By Andrew Birmingham

Tumblr’s audience is young, affluent, engaged — and different. It is also worth a billion dollars to Yahoo!, assuming the company can translate its community’s enthusiasm into commerce at scale.

Much has been made of Tumblr’s relatively nascent advertising business and too much has probably been made of all that adult content; after all, it’s not like Google, YouTube, Pinterest and Twitter are TSFW.

What is missing from the current analysis is the opportunity for Tumblr — which is still only an adolescent relative to other social networks — to build an ecosystem based on transactional commerce .

(Source: A Tumblr Snapshot Source: globalwebindex.net. Note these figures predate the Yahoo! acquisition)

There are no markets around the world where Tumblr’s active user base exceeds ten per cent of the Internet population, for instance.

So the opportunity is there for the taking, and the first movers are already evolving into their second iterations.

Which-50 this week interviewed Dan Coe, Founder and CEO of BlkDot, an Oregon based commerce outfit which has developed a novel transactional engine for the Tumblr community. With this early engagement Coe is able to offer some unique insights for companies considering the Tumblr platform.

He told Which-50 "We learned a massive amount from our first evolution of the platform." One of the most important discoveries, he said, is that it’s not all about the Tumblr theme — that is, the front-end which users select for their site, from a range of free and paid templates, when they sign up.

Coe says "brands get hung up on the UX and the look of their theme when content strategy is as, if not more, important." That’s because once someone follows your Tumblr, they may never go back to your theme. "Your content is fed into their dashboard where users spend 70 per cent of their time."

The company fed this lesson back into its product development late last year, then relaunched its platform in January 2013 with a renewed focus on integration with the Tumblr dashboard and mobile app. "This is where our platform really excels and differentiates itself.”

BlkDot’s mission is simple: commerce on Tumblr. "It lets everyone from individuals to large brands sell stuff right on Tumblr — on their theme, dashboard, and Tumblr’s mobile app. The company started the commerce platform because it recognised the potential for a brand new way to buy and sell in an environment that is full of inspiration," says Coe.

(Dan Coe, Founder and CEO of BlkDot)

“We think commerce is a huge opportunity for Tumblr. And we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t distract from Tumblr’s goal of empowering creators to make their best work. It just complements it by letting people buy things when they’re inspired."

Blkdot — as the name suggests — works by putting easily-recognisable black “buy” dots on shoppable posts, from which customers can simply add to their cart and check out.

The trick is to do this with a simplified process that doesn’t distract from their Tumblr experience, according to Coe. "Social commerce moves incredibly fast," he says. "Products that do best are ones that create urgency and require little or no research — so limited quantity, exclusives, and effective price points.

“We take 3 per cent of sales and 2.9 per cent + 30 cents per transaction goes to our payment processor, Stripe."

Tumblr does not take a cut of Blkdot's action, which is a little surprising. However, Coe says the relationship is still mutually beneficial. "The more valuable Tumblr becomes as a brand-building and commerce platform, the more brands will invest in advertising to scale their effort."

Blkdot also offers Enterprise Services for brands that are looking for advice on how to best engage the Tumblr audience, want a custom theme, or technical integration with their e-commerce systems.

This is a very different way of thinking about Tumblr — but like a lot of sound ideas, it is grounded in predictability. When people congregate, commerce happens and markets form. Forcing the issue, or trying to direct the crowd, can often be counterproductive.

Tumblr’s wafer-thin advertising revenues — and the resistance of its audience to the kind of intrusive marketing and data aggregation which is starting to blow back on companies like Facebook — attract much commentary. The company only generated $US13 million last year in advertising revenue, although it is forecasting $US100 million this year.

Still, skepticism remains. Stock watcher Trefis, which says it combines MIT engineering smarts with Wall Street analysis, outlined three things it said Yahoo needed to do to realize a return on its investment:

It needs to overcome Tumblrs’ resistance to ads. Trefis argues that "display ads might not fit well with many of Tumblr’s users, who are accustomed to the ad-free Tumblr interface," and that Yahoo! will need to move carefully to avoid a backlash. "However, if Yahoo! can come up with a strategy that will monetise the platform without high attrition rate of users, Tumblr could add millions of dollars to Yahoo!’s top line”;

Monetising Tumblr content will be difficult. Tumblr is a micro-blogging site that does not own any of its page views, says Trefis. Instead, bloggers own and share their views on this platform. "Yahoo! thus will have to come up with a strategy to appease these bloggers to display ads across their web pages." And, as most of Tumblr’s content is user generated, Trefis argues that it "… lacks the brand image associated with premium content available on some other web sites such as NYT, Yahoo and AOL." Actually, Which-50 suspects Tumblr’s audience regards that first point about ownership as a positive and the second issue about premium content as simply wrong;

Yahoo! needs to protect Tumblr’s turf. "We believe that the barriers to entry in this industry are extremely low and Yahoo! will have to figure out Tumblr’s competitive advantage if it wants to protect its $US1.1 billion investment." Having itself displaced Blogger and Wordpress, this final point is hard to argue.

But missing from the analysis is potentially the biggest opportunity of all: for Tumblr to develop at scale, and hold in trust, a vast creative marketplace of consumers who have grown accustomed to rapid, plentiful and low-cost transactions thanks to their daily experience on services like Apple’s iTunes Store and Google’s Play.

With 46 per cent of its audience aged between 16 and 24, the micro-blogging social network has one of the youngest active user bases on social media, according to Globalwebindex.net. And it is this audience which gives brands good reason to think about selling and advertising on Tumblr, according to Coe. "Young people see Facebook as a utility and a way to keep up with their family and college professors. Twitter is how they communicate with friends."

“They’re flocking to Tumblr as a way to connect around their interests — the things they care about and for self expression" says Coe. He also makes the point that Pinterest has already proven that connecting around interests — especially visually — can be a strong driver of sales.

He argues that Tumblr is a good fit for three main reasons: the focus on fashion, art, and culture inspires its audience and keeps them highly engaged; it presents a unique opportunity to reach 18–34 year olds who are typically challenging for marketers to nail down; "and, finally, it gives companies a lot of control over the user experience.

“Brands often express reservations about posting product images on Tumblr until we show them the data. Posts with product are typically the most popular and most engaged. It’s not about whether a post is commercial or not — it’s more about whether it’s authentic and a good fit for the audience. Post your products but do it in an interesting way."

Despite the initial skepticism of the audience towards the Yahoo! acquisition, the Blkdot founder says it has been business as usual since the deal was done. That gels with Which-50’s reading of the community — they are savvy enough to wait and see the cut of Yahoo!’s jib, but so far they are cutting CEO Marissa Mayer a lot of slack.

Mayer has made it clear that Tumblr is free to strike out in its own direction and that Yahoo!’s scale and technology stack will be used to amplify the Tumblr experience, not crush it under foot.

“It was really clear that Tumblr will not be rolled in and will keep its character … It has brought a lot of attention to Tumblr and has brought the platform to a lot of people’s attention," says Coe.

He believes Tumblr will certainly be monetised by advertising, but he adds: "We see an alternate path that blends advertising and commerce to create what could be the most interesting marketplace on the planet, and one that’s driven directly by brands, artists and entrepreneurs."