Irish e-commerce service OWJO has arrived, a portable online store letting people sell on any platform, such as Facebook, MySpace or any other website.
It has been constructed by designer David Johnston since 2006, with €1.5m invested into the company. The company has been growing, with plans to expand its staff to 15, increasing its customer support.
Johnston spoke of how it can be implemented on numerous mediums, which helps make OWJO stand out.
“The unique thing about OWJO, which distinguishes us from everybody else, is that we allow you to sell on Facebook, but we also allow you to sell on MySpace or your own homepage or on a publisher’s site,” said Johnston.
“For example, for anywhere where you have an advertisement, you could place your OWJO there.”
OWJO lets customers pay for the product within the service, as opposed to redirecting them away from fanpages and websites during the sale. Johnston noted that its design model removed a lot of the barriers that stop customers from following through with a purchase.
“The problem is, is that when you are on these sites, and you see an advertisement, you’ve to click off to another site and that results in cart abandonment, which can be very high,” he said.
“With our competitors, you fill a shopping cart on Facebook and you jump off elsewhere to pay for it.”
The service only earns money when sales are made and keeps the percentage of earnings low, at 7pc.
“The reason why our percentage is so low is that the whole idea behind OWJO is to help the people who create items or content sell directly to their fans or their audience, that those people are rewarded for their efforts,” said Johnston.
As a result, OWJO has received a large variety of adopters. Irish sports store Elverys use it to sell on social networks.
The radio station Phantom FM uses it, too, and Johnston noted that journalist Joe Jackson uses the service to sell interviews he conducted with people such as Richard Harris and Neil Diamond.
The service was recently used to sell unseen Thin Lizzy artwork from the creator’s Facebook account.
