ShopClues launches seller-bidding platform AdZone

AdZone is a self-service solution to help merchants promote their products using native and custom ads for advertising, executing, and managing product campaigns on ShopClues.

ShopClues, which claims to be India's first and largest managed marketplace, has in collaboration with C1X, a leading online advertising technology firm, launched its seller-bidding platform AdZone on July 20. AdZone is a self-service solution, which will help merchants promote their products using native and custom ads for advertising, executing, and managing product campaigns on ShopClues.

As part of the offering, merchants who are interested in advertising their products on ShopClues, can enter a bidding process to initiate their campaign on AdZone, a platform dedicated to sellers. The minimum budget for a campaign is Rs 1,000, while the minimum bids vary for different categories. Also, the product ads will be displayed in the category and sub-category pages, thus ensuring top slots and high orders as part of the offering.

A one-and-a-half minute long YouTube video has also been released on the occasion which explains in detail the functioning of AdZone as a seller-bidding platform.

While the native ads category will help a featured advertisement appear at the top of product listings, custom ads will incorporate multi-banner adverts to be displayed at the top of the website. The campaign created will be visible on both the desktop, as well as on the mobile app and website.

Commenting on the initiative, Radhika Aggarwal, co-founder and chief business officer, ShopClues, says, "The platform will immensely boost the visibility of products and maximise product views, thereby helping vendors to increase their business with us. The bidding system ensures transparency, while our differential bidding mechanism for products is essential for retailers advertising varied products. With AdZone, ShopClues further emboldens its commitment to assist its large and growing merchant community at every step."

Arun Goel, vice-president, products, ShopClues, adds, "At ShopClues, we're driven by a passion for innovation. Keeping in mind our merchant-first approach, we have attempted to create a technology to help our ever-increasing merchant base sell efficiently. AdZone caters to their need for pushing the envelope of achievement with ShopClues and staying ahead in a highly competitive market. We anticipate a very positive response to our latest initiative from our seller community. We ran a pilot with about 300 merchants on the AdZone platform, and the results were extremely positive. We ran over 1,000 ad campaigns over a 10-day period, and our merchants saw a healthy return on their investment."

The sellers need to have an active ShopClues merchant account as a pre-requisite, thus adding to the convenience of creating a marketing campaign on AdZone. Furthermore, performance of the ad campaign can be tracked and managed via the Store Manager feature on the AdZone dashboard which displays the impressions, product clicks, and sales on a seller's campaign, which is required as sellers are charged on a cost-per-click model, wherein they can also use their ShopClues credits to make payments while the money is automatically deducted from their budget.

As part of a promotional launch activity, ShopClues is giving complimentary credits to sellers as and when they create their first campaign. Later, merchants will be able to bid for keyword searches on ShopClues, as well as make their ads visible on other online platforms.

ShopClues, which was founded in July 2011 in Silicon Valley, claims to be India's first and the largest managed marketplace with more than 190 million monthly visitors on its website in addition to five crore listed products, and over 5,00,000 merchants. The company's co-founders are Sanjay Sethi and Radhika Aggarwal.