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ShopWindoz Launches Shop-Platform For Micro-Brands

Christmas is coming and just in time shopping sites sprout like mushrooms these days. One of the cutest of them is Berlin based ShopWindoz which launched two days ago.

screenshot shopwindoz

ShopWindoz lets you create a shop with a few mouseclicks. Currently the site is free, they will start to charge €10 per month and a commision of 5% per sale sometime next year. You can add and sell as many products as you want and design the shop to your liking, but a lot of sites let you that and quite a few white label solutions are around for running a shop on your own.

The idea of ShopWindoz is to focus on niche products offside the mainstream (tees, music, poster, comics, shirts, skateboards, jewelery, vintage, …) and on independant brands. The value proposition is that one micro-brand alone is a monadic island but together they are strong:

ShopWindoz is not one shop, but many. The platform makes them strong. All shops together make a unique environment which benefits everyone. The more interesting shops participate, the better becomes the site, the more visitors will be attracted, the better the chances for each individual shop.

The features and info-aesthetics of ShopWindoz resemble user driven / web2.0-ish sites a lot. There are a lot of feeds: feeds for new shops, feeds for new products, feeds for new items in a shop and so on. Horizontally divided layout, tags and tagclouds everywhere, ratings, comments, the way paging is implemented, the default icon of users’ avatars, etc. will make a lot of people immediately feel right at home.

screenshot shopwindoz

ShopWindoz has some room for improvement – Exciting Commerce misses a unified shopping cart, faceted search (e.g. by price range) across the site or social features which connect the shoppers and let them add value to the platform are missing – but overall the site is a refreshing and good looking newcomer in the German shoposhpere.

screenshot shopwindoz

Company blog: Blog
Company twitter: shopwindoz

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)
☍ 28.11.2007 # shopping marketplace