Applications shops "Vkontakte". Frankly and without cuts. our story

Not so long ago, the social network "Vkontakte" announced the launch of its own payment system and the possibility of connecting to it third-party online stores. Then it led us to the idea: what if we rethink the idea of ​​an online store and present it in a completely new light? Take a spherical horse in a vacuum, a certain closed world (Vkontakte network) and try to sell something to this audience. This world is closed (closed from the outside, the truth is no longer the same as before), so our tools will be only internal services of the social network.


Description of the idea

So, what we have is: there is an application service — we replace the store’s website, we have our own advertising platform (Vkontakte targeting advertisement) —– we replace Yandex.Direct, banners, etc., there are groups — we replace blogs and forums with them; private messages - we replace them with ICQ, e-mail, etc. As a result, we have an audience gathered in one place and all the tools to extract something from work with this audience. An additional advantage is that the seller is now not an impersonal website in the Internet space, but quite specific people (any visitor of Vkontakte sees under the store application links to our real, open profiles, our photos, notes, etc.) - to some extent, this adds +1 to the store confidence indicator.
Having expressed this idea in the notes of Vlad Tsyplukhin ( invladis ) about the Vkontakte payment system and having received its approval, we set to work. How is this different from the countless groups of shops "Vkontakte"? Firstly, we do not go against the system and use Vkontakte services only for their intended purpose (the groups are only for communication), secondly, the functionality of the groups is not the most convenient for the store, whereas in the application you can use all modern web sites. technologies, thirdly, we do not work with cash; we accept only the Vkontakte payment system - this is an additional safety net for buyers, because an additional regulator is now interfering with the buyer-seller relationship, which can accept timely ra to unscrupulous vendors.
Well, now buns. Unlike regular online stores, you no longer care about search rankings, SEO, etc. - you do not need it. Developing a good application store is much easier to develop a good online store - developers need to be creative only above the actual product presentation; they are no longer concerned about the beauty of the site’s headings, filling the columns and basement. Unlike ordinary online stores, you do not need to hook your audience, who ran away to different parts of the network - everything is here, besides, they spend most of their time here.
Solid buns and savings - how can everything be so good? Yes, you are right, there are downsides. Payment system "Vkontakte" is still quite young, unusual for users. Somewhat scattered, chaotic documentation makes development difficult. The possibility of accepting payment in rubles in applications was introduced only a few days ago (before, applications could only be paid with votes), so the software part sometimes fails.
')
Implementation of the idea

Not everyone knows that many modern suppliers give the opportunity to work directly from the warehouse - you just have to create a virtual storefront and start trading. So did we. One of the difficulties of working with a supplier was the absence of a catalog format convenient for export / import. The entire catalog is presented in the form of an ordinary HTML tablet, and the type of clothing, brand name, model, size and color are in the same field - we had to develop a parser that parsed this line on the shelves, while taking into account typos (for example, in our supplier’s catalog, black the color is denoted as black, and blk, and blck).
Since we are in the social network ITshnikov, I’ll stop at the parser’s work a little more in detail so that you don’t have a taste of PR from the read topic. Most habrayusers are more experienced programmers than me, so you will have the opportunity to criticize the algorithms.

Parser

Take for example the usual line of names from the catalog and see how it can be disassembled according to the parameters we need.

is laid AWK10072 Robbins Black / Light Green M

We will proceed as follows: using regular expressions, we cut off elements that have sufficient characteristics so that they can be uniquely attributed to certain characteristics (for example, the name of the type of clothing consists only of Russian letters, a space and a dot; the supplier’s code can consist only of capital Latin letters and numbers, with a total length of 3 to 9 characters), then in the remainder we select colors (more on this below) and size, and in the dry residue we get the name of the clothing model.
The first thing that catches the eye is the name of the type of clothing / shoes - it is the only one in the line that consists solely of Russian letters. As a “sub-pattern” for extracting the type of clothing, we will use the following pattern: ([-- \.]*) .
Then we see the supplier code (in our example, this is AWK10072). We have already found out that the supplier code can consist only of Latin characters and numbers, and the total duration can be from 3 to 9 characters. By the way, the vendor code may not be, so do not forget about the “zero or one coincidence” quantifier. As a result, we get this subpattern: ([A-Z0-9]{3,9})? . Using preg_match and these patterns, we retrieve the type of clothing and supplier code.
Now from the original line we have the following:

Robbins Black / Light Green M

With flowers, everything is much more complicated. They do not have any unique characteristics by which they can be identified in the line. They can only be separated from the rest of the elements by reading and matching them completely. We pretend logic: we collect a list of all the colors in the catalog (hard manual work), and alternately sorting through the entire array (substituting the next color), we are looking for a match of the substring ( strpos() function) - if we find, we remember the color and delete it from the common line then we continue the search until we sort through all the colors.
But there are two problems: 1) some colors are indicated by phrases (for example, maybe the color is just Green, or maybe Light Green - we just need to search for the Light Green first and then just Green); 2) there are typos in the color names, as I already wrote (Black, Blk, Blck).
I solved the first problem by sorting the array by the length of its keys (that is, in the process of sorting the array, we first took elements with a longer color name). The second problem was solved clumsily: colors with misprints were also driven into variants of color names.
Further simple: using the function of finding the substring and its replacement ( strpos() and substr() ) we extract the colors and leave only the model name and size (in our case, this is Robbins M). By the way, regarding the functions of finding a substring, I can advise a special set of UTF-8 functions , although the set is more than heavy at work - the speed of parsing is reduced every 5.
The last stage is the extraction of size. It can be in alphabetic format (M, XL, S, S / XL) or in digital format (38, 40/42 or 8.5, 9, 10.5). Here we can again use regular expressions, so we create a pattern: ([XMLS,\.\/0-9]*) . Everything, now from the original line we have left only the name of the model. In such an uncomplicated way, we divided our porridge into flies and cutlets. If you have comments on the proposed algorithm - I will be glad to hear.

Next in the business part of the idea

Another big pebble in the garden of our supplier is the absence of photos from a significant part of the product from the catalog. We simply do not put such goods on sale - it is clear that no one will buy a cat in a bag.
The connection of the store to the Vkontakte payment system itself is relatively simple: we create and load an application that meets the requirements for store applications; we create a new store through a special interface , fill out the requisites, and then send a request; We bring 10 votes to our balance and send the application for moderation.
There will be a big pebble in the garden of Vkontakte LLC: you can read the conditions of the concluded agency agreement only after checking your store; accordingly, one very important fact, which will certainly affect your pricing policy (there is only a remark on it directly in the agency agreement), you will find out at the very last moment. Worst of all, this moment can negate your whole idea. At the same time, I cannot tell what the moment is, I cannot because of the confidentiality of the concluded agreement.
As a result, our app store looks like this:



The results of the first two days

After the test run of the store, we launched it into full-fledged work. All store advertising at the moment was expressed in inviting friends to the application, as well as creating a small advertising campaign with 10 votes returned after moderating the application. A nice bonus: if you advertise an application in a targeted VKontakte advertising, your budget doubles (accordingly, we received an advertising campaign with 20 votes).
Having established a bet on the recommended value of 0.43 votes for a unique transition, we received 69,370 hits, 47 unique transitions, the ratio of transitions to the show was 0.07%. The total budget lasted just 15 minutes.



For two days, 93 users have installed the application, of which about 25 profiles are fake. The number of unique views in the maximum reached 207 people, the ratio of men to women was 3 to 1, the average age of the audience was from 16 to 24 years.



Of the 70 people (the total number of those who installed minus fakes) who installed the application, 15 put a basket in the goods for a total of 62,000 rubles (this is two days). None of these baskets are currently paid.
There is an important point here: we understand that most of the orders will not actually be bought, that the goods are added to the basket for “curiosity sake”. But nevertheless, it was more important for us to prevent the moment when two or more customers buy the same product, which is in stock in one single copy. Therefore, we established the following scheme: the goods added to the basket are reserved for the buyer for 3 working days (a specific unit of the goods disappears from the price list for other buyers) - this should be enough even for any bank transfer; after three working days, the reservation is removed and the product goes back to the sale; while in the basket it remains as a “history of orders”.

Instead of a resume

In my opinion, the main reason for such a stupor of buyers is the exceptional novelty of the payment system (most people still simply do not know about it) and an ill-conceived personal balance replenishment interface (you will not find a direct link to top up your balance in your profile). After talking with representatives of other application stores, I learned that they have similar statistics - about 100 baskets of a little more than 10 paid bills.
The implementation of the Vkontakte payment system is very unusual - the payment system does not charge commission for its services (including when withdrawing money to the seller), there is already an opportunity to replenish the balance without a fee, plus there is an important point about which I wrote above, which is good for insuring buyers .
Will we be able to win in this “closed world”, in which advertising and the payment system have their own rules and laws, time will tell. There will be questions on the topic - ask in the comments, I will answer.

Actually link to our store .

UPD: opened the statistics of our application store. Now you can watch Habraeffekt online. Other results of Habraeffect: +120 baskets in less than a day, the total value of all baskets reached 500 thousand rubles, paid baskets - exactly zero (as of 14:25 MSK 01/06/2010)