As you may know, finding the idea of stockly was a long iterative process, here are a few iterations we’ve been through 👇
After launching our price comparison website dedicated to sneakers (the Sneaker Guy), we quickly realised that monetising an affiliation business would be extremely hard and also had a lot of problems, even at scale:
1️⃣ customer acquisition costs had only been growing overtime and acquisition was now trusted by google and fb, which was making extremely challenging to generate affiliation margins.
2️⃣ You can’t control conversion as you redirect the user to another website on which you have no grasp.
3️⃣ You can’t control the payout (it’s nearly impossible to ensure that the retailer who you are sending the user to will really pay you)
Still, the consumer pain was real: finding your product online with the right size/model/color and at the right price was ridiculously hard.
So we searched for different angles.
One iteration was to put an iPad inside places where our audience was. We thought:
“when you wait for your turn to pay or retrieve your order in a physical shop, you are bored, you have nothing to do, while you are in the middle of your shopping vibe”
💡👉 let’s offer a selection of sneakers and shoes on an iPad at the counter to allow people to continue shopping while they wait !!
So we’ve put a tweaked version of our price comparison website on a tablet on the counter of a few shops to try to test the traction of such idea.
One was Sneakers & Chill, with the amazing Romain Louisy, who hosted our tablet on his counter for a few months in his shop, rue d'Aboukir in Paris.
The usage was catastrophic 😂
Almost no one was making a single research on the app.
Then we kept talking with dozens of shops and after a few iterations, we ended up thinking: “ok maybe we should animate it more, by providing a tool to the salesperson in the sneaker shop, so that they can sell stuff that they don’t have in stock. We could use the same iPad but put it in the hands of the salesperson in the shop, and when the customer asks for something that’s not available in the shop’s inventory, they can order it from the app on the iPad, and make it delivered at their home”.
We had a tiny bit more traction but MANY operational problems:
- it was hard to train the sales rep (and the staff was changing all the time)
- the customers were worried to pay now and not go home directly with the products in their hands. We were clearly changing the order flow expected by the consumer.
We kept iterating like this, talking to our market, knocking at every door and trying to understand retailers' pains.
It was extremely hard mentally, as no one gave a sh*t about us and it was very hard to obtain even 2 minutes of attention of any sales rep or shop owner.