- “Soldering iron” is the best principle for an online store. You need to sell right where you’ve hooked the person—rather than leading them to your store’s website, losing conversion along the way. ☹️
- It turns out, the store doesn’t need a “main” website! It needs a hundred websites that it can plug into different places—so they can sell different products in different ways and look different.
- But manually creating hundreds of such websites is unrealistic; you need special platforms for that. Here’s a good example of such a pla
Project Essence
Fermàt promises to help online stores “turn clicks into conversions.” The problem is that people who click on ads and land on the store’s website too often end up not making any purchases. Similarly, those who visit the site somewhat consciously but fail to find what they want to buy in 1-2 clicks.
To increase conversions, the startup suggests that stores create special landing pages for advertising campaigns and modify the appearance of the main store website using the platform’s widget library.
The site or landing page created in this way will look “trendy and youthful” 😉 Using widgets, short videos can be placed on the site, and the appearance of product description pages, shopping carts, and checkout can be modified.
From one main website of an online store, an unlimited number of mini-sites for different product categories, different audience segments, which can also serve as landing pages for various ads, can be created.
The startup claims that with the Fermàt platform, a brand can create 20 or more such mini-stores in just 1 day.
The platform allows creating “video stores” where the regular functionality of an online store (product search, viewing descriptions, adding to cart, and checkout) is overlaid directly on top of videos.
The mini-stores created on the platform can be embedded inside website pages. Thus, a brand, for example, can create a content website and place blocks on its pages to view and buy products described on the page—without the need to go to the main online store website.
In the same way, mini-stores embedded in their blogs can be created not only by the brands themselves but also by third-party influencers. In this case, an influencer can place their own videos on the pages of such a mini-store, talking about the brand’s products—so that their subscribers are more eager to buy these products based on their recommendations.
Judging by the success stories of the startup’s clients, such an approach works. Success story headlines talk about a 20–51% increase in return on investment in advertising, a 20–46% reduction in the cost of achieving a target action (including purchases), and an 85% increase in average order value.
The total audience of stores and influencers using the Fermàt platform is 50 million people. 1 million of them are active buyers, who have already purchased goods worth $500 million. At the same time, the startup itself has only 22 employees.
I first wrote about Fermàt in the fall of 2022 when it raised $12 million in investments in its very first round. Now it has raised a second round of investments of $17 million.
What’s Interesting
The last time I wrote about Fermàt, I was intrigued by the concept of “distributed commerce.”
Traditionally, online stores have always tried to drive traffic to their website—both through advertising and through influencer marketing integrations. This decreased purchase conversions for two main reasons:
Firstly, any “extra” click inherently reduces conversions. Secondly, many users experienced cognitive dissonance between the appearance of where they were before (on social media, on an influencer’s blog) and the appearance of a traditional online store. And because of this mismatch, they quickly left the store’s website. “Distributed commerce” is the general term for technologies that allow users to make purchases right where they saw the product (for example, on an influencer’s blog), without having to navigate to the online store’s website.
When using such technologies, there are no extra clicks, and cognitive dissonance does not arise—naturally increasing purchase conversions.
The previous version of the Fermàt website was entirely dedicated to the methodology of distributed sales through influencers. The same slogan still remains on the startup’s description page.
However, the startup has now slightly changed and expanded its positioning. It now states that its platform allows online stores to create a “unique shopping experience”—and it’s not necessarily done through and on influencer websites. The option to use influencers remains only as one block on the main Fermàt website.
The first cynical conclusion is that sales through partners are a separate headache that most sellers do not want to deal with.
That’s why Fermàt has shifted its focus and stopped emphasizing sales through influencers. Now, it suggests that the same methods and techniques for advertising products and improving conversions be applied by the online stores themselves—using their platform to modify their main website or create multiple landing pages and mini-sites for promoting and selling their products.
The second conclusion is that old online store websites and old landing pages are no longer effective.
The new generation of buyers needs websites that look different—something more fun and engaging in the style of social networks, TikTok, and other similar sites.
I wrote about this trend a couple of weeks ago in a review of the startup Heyflow, which made a platform for creating engaging sequences of steps that lead site visitors to perform a target action. This startup raised $22 million in investments.
The startup Fibr, which I wrote about last summer, raised $2 million for a landing page builder for ads—so that each ad could lead to its landing page, which would look more like the place where the person clicked on that ad.
Y Combinator graduate startup Viddy, which I wrote about last fall, is also a landing page builder. But its feature is that it’s designed to create video pages where the functionality of an online store is overlaid on top of videos.
The third conclusion is that the concept of the “main website” of an online store also seems to be a thing of the past.
People are all different. They can be hooked on stores in completely different places. So why bring them all to the same website in the end—which always looks the same, and the user’s path through it is tailored to some one behavioral pattern?
Yes, of course, you can make clever platforms for personalizing websites. But why complicate the task? 😉 If you can create a platform that allows you to quickly and easily churn out any number of completely different websites that sell the same products—but in different ways and different styles.
Where to Run
It seems that it’s not just Fermàt’s positioning that has changed, but the concept of “distributed sales” in general.
Previously, this term only referred to adjusting the shopping experience for the websites of third-party partners—such as influencers. Now, the idea is that an online store should tailor the shopping experience to different types of customers and different ad placements—creating multiple different websites for this purpose. Mostly their own, rather than exclusively partner ones.
Thus, the potential direction of movement is the creation of platforms for distributed sales in the new understanding of this term, which would allow for the creation and optimization of such a multitude of websites.
Today’s Fermàt has already transitioned from the old understanding of distributed sales to the new—having received feedback from its clients and stepping on the appropriate rakes.
This has made their platform an excellent starting point for further experimentation in this direction—so as not to start from scratch. Therefore, it’s a worthy example that can be copied to start moving in this direction further.
About the Company
Fermàt
Website: fermatcommerce.com
Latest round: $17M, March 13, 2024
Total investments: $29M, rounds: 2