My favorite (and only) Brother-in-Law forwarded me an article posted today on www.techcrunch.com. It seems that there is a new Foodie website — Foodoro. According to the story…
Foodoro is an online marketplace for specialty artisanal foods. The site allows foodies to ship items like sesame nut spice chocolate and Mountain Jasmine Green Pearl Tea, to themselves or friends and family. The site offers a variety of hard-to-find food items from 54 vendors across the country, ranging from California cheese makers to Nebraskan buffalo farms to rice grown in the Philippines.
Foodoro’s concept is fairly similar in concept to a TechStars
‘ startup we reported on last year, Foodzie. Like Foodzie, Foodoro aims to be an online hub for artisanal food makers, exposing these vendors to a greater audience of food aficionados than they would get from their own sites or selling solely to specialty food stores. Foodoro takes a 15 percent commission on each transaction whereas Foodzie takes a 20 percent commission on transactions. Both Foodoro and Foodzie leave distribution up to the vendors, allowing the marketplaces to it focus on the transactions, which can be helpful to the vendors who aren’t familiar with e-commerce.
However, Foodoro is doing some pretty nifty things to help these small food vendors incorporate e-commerce into their own sites. Foodoro provides the vendors with an e-commerce widget that they can embed on their sites to allow customers to easily buy the product. Foodoro is also trying to engage the food blogging community by implementing an affiliate program (like Amazon’s) that lets food bloggers earn a percentage on traffic they refer to back to Foodoro (the bloggers can also embed a widget of a product they are writing about in their blogs).
Pretty cool, huh? Reminds me a little of an Etsy for food vendors and growers.
So my first impressions?
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Navigation is still a little weird. When you land on the home page, the products are listed across the top, but there’s no real tag-line or marketing effort that clearly communicates the purpose of the site. You need to scroll to the bottom to read the “about” section. For a “first day” launch, I would be screaming my concept loud and proud.
- The article above mentions widgets for bloggers, but I was not able to locate these.
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The products definitely lean toward the high-end of spending… but there is a unique variety of products — from liveabalones ($5 to $10 each, depending on size) to Osetra caviar ($107.10 for 1oz to $683.10 for 7oz).
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Right now it’s all food products. I think it would be really cool if they eventually added in hand-crafted food preparation tools as well.
What do you guys think? I also took a look at the Foodzie site… and sort of liked the layout better. However, that said… today is the first day that Foodoro is live, so I guess I should give them at least a little bit of time to get all the kinks worked out. 🙂
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