WaNeLo, the digital and socialized shopping centre

Wanelo has 11 million users and currently more than 350,000 pages of stores, ultimately offering access to more than 20 million products. 90% of Wanelo users are American women using their mobiles to log on to the service and 50% of users are aged between 18 and 24.

The biggest brands and retailers have pages on it. Urban Outfitters, a fashion brand, says that its Wanelo conversion rate is 4 times higher than on any other social media. Wanelo is in the top 10 of sources of traffic for the urbanoutfitters.com site. According to Steve Hartman, Urban Outfitters Director of Marketing: “that’s nearly as much as Google Search”.

To enhance the shopper experience, Wanelo has also launched its “buy” button (in November 2014) like its fellow operators Facebook and Twitter. The “buy” button generates a conversion rate 3 to 6 times higher on mobiles than a conventional m-commerce transaction. According to Wanelo CEO Deena Varshavskaya: “an active Wanelo user clicks the “buy” button 3 times a day on average. Proof indeed that users are there to buy”.

According to Wanelo, one third of people born in the Internet age no longer shop in shopping centres, whereas over half of them shop online 1 hour a day on average. The positioning of this site as a “retail therapy” shopping centre better meets their expectations. Visitors can follow brands, their friends or opinion formers in the same way as on Pinterest. And instead of pinning photos, they can save products in their profile and share them with their network.

Wanelo thus seems to have successfully reconciled social media and shopping by offering a retail therapy platform that also embraces the sharing paradigm of popular social media like Instagram or Pinterest. It seems indispensable for any fashion brand to feature on Wanelo in this age of social commerce. The strength of Wanelo lies in the fact that shopping is intrinsically in its DNA. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, it is a trend-spotting and shopping platform based on the community and offering ergonomics geared to mobile usage. Social commerce certainly has a brighter future on these new specialized shopping platforms than on long-established social media.