Feature Story: 5 Questions With Bob Schober
Bob Schober is president of Cartfly, a kind of social networking approach to e-commerce. Cartfly recently teamed up with PerfSpot, a growing social networking site with more than 4 million users. Cartfly's viral technology allows e-commerce stores to be embedded just like a YouTube video. Cartfly charges a transaction fee per sale but
creating a Cartfly store is free and can be done in minutes. All users need is a valid PayPal email address and inventory to sell. We caught up to Schober and asked him a few questions.
Q: Tell us briefly how Cartfly works.
A: Cartfly offers a free "traveling" store, with a shopping cart, that you can cut and paste anywhere on the web. Basically you can turn anywhere you hang out online – whether it is your blog, your favorite social network or your website – into a sales portal.
Q: What kind of products can I put in my storefront using Cartfly?
A: You can sell whatever you want as long as it abides by our terms of service. We have bands selling tickets, CDs, T-shirts, we have a ton of photographers, artists and models selling prints and paintings. We have everything from skateboard shops to clothing companies. We have one guy on there selling fossils and another selling used auto parts. There is an electronics store where you can get cell phones or iPods as well.
Q: Your partnership with PerfSpot allows Cartfly stores to be easily added to PerfSpot's 4 million users on their social network. Are you targeting other networks?
A: Yes. We have built our application to be extremely modular. PerfSpot was most surprised that they integrated our platform in their administrative section within a couple of hours. Why spend months and tens of thousands of dollars on development, when you can integrate us so easily with a total turnkey application. We also can do a revenue share, and most importantly, our partners can brand the stores that they offer to their customers with their own company logo. So as with our PerfSpot integration, you will see stores out there that are in people's blogs and websites that have the PerfSpot banner.
Q: If users can set up the Cartfly widget on their sites for free, where is your revenue coming from?
A: It is free to set up. There are no listing fees, setup fees or annual fees. We take 3 percent of the total of whatever is sold. So if a band sells a CD for 10 bucks, then we would receive 30 cents.
We will also be offering a Premium Cartfly account, where our merchants will receive their own merchant account with immediate approval. Our primary goal is to empower the merchant.
Q: With Web 2.0 technologies sprouting up like weeds, what do you think is the future of e-commerce?
A: I think it will be in peer-to-peer or business-to-business sales. There are millions of bands, artists, photographers, models, etc., that have something to sell and we offer them the ability to quickly and painlessly reach their immediate demographic. Typically in e-commerce, your goal is to drive people to your website or store; Cartfly empowers our merchants by giving them the toolset to take their store to the world.
