Partner Description:

ShopByBrands is a simple online advertising opportunity for brand name companies. It appeals to consumers, 90% of whom start shopping on the web on a search engine and become overwhelmed by the thousands of returned pages and the seemingly limitless shopping sites at their disposal. It appeals to brand advertisers who have minimal control of their brand impressions on search engines and on the newer social networks and community sites. As an interactive advertising professional with three large brand companies, I created shopbybrands.com, a patent pending website that eliminates these problems for consumers and advertisers alike.

ShopByBrands started out as a vertical search engine for virtually all brand name companies almost 10 years ago. Currently there is a website with about 3000 brand names where a user can find a brand name company’s official website, get a list of brands selling a particular product and create a personal page of their favorite brand links. To make the experience more robust for the consumer, I’m currently working with a developer to add brand templated pages to the site. With these, advertisers will be able to easily add their sub-domain links to such content as store locators and special promotions on their official web site, pages their customers would typically look for, as well as links to relevant third party sites, such as product forums and blogs. The goal is for a shopper to start at a single page for each brand with all the various touchpoints they need on that page to be able to make an informed and assured purchase. With this approach they avoid search engine clutter and hopscotching around the internet for information on different sites and they get much more.

However, I’ve recently discussed with a number of peers that since I must build audience while simultaneously persuading advertisers to complete the templates, it would be more efficient to use a web crawler to at least initially gather some of these links off the brand’s official sites and elsewhere. In addition, with the advent of social networks, the time is right to advance shopbybrands.com to encompass a social network element and a community and forum for all brand lovers and critics. A way to conference in a friend while shopping online, to get their input and opinion, is also a feature that could entice users to make a behavioral change to ShopByBrands.

As a result ShopByBrands is being somewhat redefined and reintroduced as a new way to shop online, called One-Start Shopping. Some consumers like to comparative shop and get input from product forums. Others like to go straight to their favorite etailer to find a competitive price and then to the product blogs. Still others are in it for the pure social aspects. One-Start Shopping has all the features to fit any consumers’ style and all right on the same page.

The goal is to have all of the current 3000 brand names and another 1000 on board and registered by 2012 and to have the number of impressions grow to 60M within the same timeframe. One-Start Shopping is a unique non-disruptive internet marketing platform…highly scalable yet not capital intensive. I have been investing my own time and money in this venture but to take advantage of the current evolutionary phase of the internet, I’m looking for a partner(s) that can provide the technical and start-up expertise needed to propel shopbybrands.com to a launch later this year. They would need to have at their disposal a web team that can build out and redesign the website to this next stage, as described above, in order to accommodate these upgrades and others as yet to be identified by this partnership. Remuneration would be ownership of a percentage of the company and not a salary or contract settlement. To pursue this opportunity further, please contact: Mary Lou Floyd, marylfloyd19@gmail.com, 201 867-2069.