Multiply embraces E-commerce

Posted by New Media Philippines in Social Network Marketing Oct 29th, 2009 | no responses

As Friendster moves in on the Asian youth market, Multiply is zeroing in on the potential of e-commerce. In an announcement they recently published, they’ve updated their terms of service agreement to finally allow online selling on their platform. All you have to do is to tick a box on your panel that will identify you as an online seller or a premium seller. This is another indicator of the market segmentation that’s happening with social networks. Different networks for different purposes. It’s no longer a binary choice wherein if you’re in one network, you won’t really use the other sites available. Gotta love this industry!

Here’s the official announcement:

Until now, running a shop on Multiply has technically been a violation of our terms of service. As long as you didn’t spam anyone though, we simply looked the other way and let you go about your business. I know that this policy didn’t exactly give you all a lot of comfort, so I’m happy to announce that we’ve updated our terms of service to reflect the fact that running a shop on Multiply is now an officially endorsed activity.

If you would like to run a shop on Multiply, all you have to do is identify yourself as an online seller. To do this, click on “my account” at the top of any page and then on “My Account Info”. In the Account Type field just check the box to indicate that your account is an online shop. That’s it! Once you make this change, you’ll see “Online Seller” appear below your headshot on your site (or “Premium Seller” if you have a Premium account).

Please help us spread the word on this. You will need to check this box in order to continue to run your shop on Multiply, but we understand that it will take time for everyone to get the message.

Also, please continue to be mindful of our spam policy. Sending unsolicited personal messages, or posting to groups, for the purpose of promoting your shop is considered spam and could result in the cancellation of your account.

Being officially supported and having the ability to identify yourself as an online seller is a great first step, but we have more to come. In the near future we’ll start adding features designed explicitly for you to help you better run your business on Multiply. The reason for this group is to allow you to help guide us in those efforts.

For now, thanks for your continued support of Multiply and I’ll be back in touch soon with many, many questions.

With their decision to support online shopping, it’s safe to say that we will be seeing more localized features that will make selling online easier for the average Filipino. The possibilities are just endless and I’m really excited to see what’s coming.

Another interesting thing in the announcement is that they mentioned premium sellers. This is probably how Multiply will monetize the program. Sellers might have to pay a subscription rate and they can enjoy more features versus the normal shoppers.

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