(PRWEB UK) 5 November 2013
Founded in 2012 by retail entrepreneur, Julian Fisher, the business has already raised £400k seed round from private individuals and high wealth investors and is opening another round to be used to support further development of the service, as it looks to expand in to the US in the second half of 2014.
At its heart the Bubbles platform offers benefits to both the online shopper and the retailer. Its mission is to make the process of ‘best-fit’ product search easier and less time-consuming for consumers; whilst also providing an effective and lower cost way for retailers to generate sales and product interest.
For the online shopper, Bubbles has a unique shopping service delivering a faster, more personalised set of search results. Its unique personal shopping service (based around the concept of a ‘quest’) allows a shopper to enter search criteria that is used to collate, store and deliver best-fit results. This leaves the shopper free to get on with their lives - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFEKFBxmHq0.
In between visits to the platform, Bubbles stores up-to-date search results that have been custom-filtered by the user. This significantly reduces, the time and effort a shopper spends discarding irrelevant options and trying to recollect what and where products were previously viewed.
For retailers that understand the benefits of selling via a marketplace, the platform provides an an evolution in product retailing. Besides charging the lowest fees, Bubbles differs from its competitors by allowing retailers to take control over brand and targeted marketing messages. This ensures that retailers can still engender customer loyalty and build upon brand awareness - something that being part of larger marketplaces, like Amazon or eBay, does not offer.
“We know from published research that shoppers are spending quite a bit of time using online and mobile channels to research and shop for their purchases” says Fisher. “But due to the nature of most sites, consumers need to engage in multiple sessions, researching over a period of days, weeks or even months. In a nutshell, the problem shoppers face is being able to remember vast amounts of information to make the right decision.
Bubbles assists online shoppers with finding the right product but, is equally designed to drastically cut the amount of time a purchase takes - from initial research to transaction. It cleverly does this by compiling and filtering multiple search results while you carry on with every day life.”
To date, the platform has already seen 236 merchants sign-up, offering over 320,000 products. However, as the site continues to onboard the further 300+ retailers in the pipeline, the number of products offered will quickly rise to over 2 million.
Julian and his team is supported by an advisory board consisting, amongst others, of Robert Jarrett (Board Director at the British Independent Retailers Association BIRA) and Scott McGinley (eCommerce Director of Dalepak and formally of play.com.
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For more information, interview requests or opinion pieces, please contact:
Kirsty Jarvis
07966 291216
kirsty.jarvis(at)lookupbubbles(dot)com