Social Commerce Platform Overview: Gigya – From Widgets to Complete Social Identity Management

Brands have awakened to the fact that social media engagement is no longer optional, but an essential part of how business is done today. Since its founding in Tel Aviv, Israel in 2006, the now Mountain View, CA-based company Gigya has been on the forefront of the shift from social media as an add-on via widgets and plugins for social registration and sharing to complete social identify management. The company understands that social media is serious business and is driven by one simple goal – to make websites social.

To achieve that goal, Gigya provides a number of tools that: enable social registration to unify user identities, drive word of mouth traffic from social networks to bring in new customers, and power social engagement to deepen relationships with existing customers. It also provides an analytics dashboard to help brands make sense of social media’s effect on ROI.

However, it is Gigya’s main product – the recently released Identity Management Platform – that sets it apart from competitors such as Slide, ClearSpring and WidgetBox. The comprehensive platform encompasses all of Gigya’s other products and is designed to provide businesses with complete, permission-based access to users’ social and on-site behavior data. The technology captures social data – profile, social graph, interest graph, and behavior graph data – that users authorize a site to access when they authenticate using a social identity.

Gigya Clients

Gigya’s clients cross five channels: Media & Entertainment, News & Publishing, Consumer Brands, eCommerce, and Travel & Hospitality. Brands include all major television broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, NBC – as well as many cable channels – MTV and TNT, for example. Consumer brands are well represented thanks to brands like Verizon, Rubbermaid, Nokia, The Home Depot and Kohl’s. From an eCommerce standpoint, Gigya’s shortlist includes Dell, American Eagle and iStockphoto.

Relationship to Social Commerce

As you can see from the client list, Gigya is not merely a social commerce platform. However, with the creation of its Social Recommendations plugin, the company has directly addressed retailer’s needs.

According to March 29, 2011 blog post, Gigya offers a “comprehensive suite of social plugins that are fully integrated with the top social networks and with leading ecommerce platforms.” The plugin integrates “customer reactions, ratings & reviews, sharing, social recommendations and social login,” stated the post.

The Social Recommendations plugin offers the following features:

• Customer “Reactions” plugin gives shoppers new ways to express how they feel about their favorite items;
• Supports standard and customizable buttons to reflect the brand’s personality;
• Enables customers to share to multiple networks in a single click, without ever leaving the retailer’s site;
• Drives referral traffic and new customers;
• Prompt visitors to share products post-checkout;
• Share wish lists or ask a friends opinion on a product;
• Pull user activity from ratings, reviews, and other tagged actions and display it on any page on the site;
• Adds a social dimension while surfacing popular products, drawing people deeper into the site.

Benefits to Retailers

The post suggests that retailers can benefit from the use of Social Recommendations in the following ways:

• New customers from shopper word of mouth activity;
• Increased conversion rates from adding more customer feedback and by linking ratings and reviews to other social activity;
• Simplified implementation and analytics: only Gigya ties everything together in a comprehensive package, delivering a superior user experience as well as unified reporting on customer activity across all points of social engagement.

While the plugins are available to any retailer on any ecommerce platform, Gigya has created platform integrations specifically for ATG, Demandware and Magento customers.

A number of brands have integrated the plugin into their respective ecommerce sites, including: CruiseNow, Giantnerd, Home Depot, and Pleasant Holidays.

Here are some screen shots from Giantnerd’s version of the plugin:

Pricing Model

Gigya’s pricing starts at around $20,000 per year for its social plugins, depending on the number of plugins the site chooses to implement.

Company Information

Funding

Gigya has received approximately $29.5 million in venture funding from the following resources: Benchmark Capital, First Round Capital, Mayfield Fund and DAG Ventures.

Leadership Team

• Patrick Salyer, CEO
• Eyal Magen, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Office
• Rooly Eliezerov, Co-founder and President
• Raviv Pavel, Vice President, R&D
• Brian Sullivan, Vice President, Client Services
• Alan Tarkowski, Vice President, Sales
• Limor Wilks, Vice President, Finance

Office Locations

World Headquarters
1975 Landings Drive
Mountain View, CA, 94043
+1.650.353.7230

Tel Aviv Office
132 Begin Road
Azrieli Towers (Round), 20th Floor
Tel Aviv, Israel 67021
+972.73.7852400