Brain Alliance And Sanoma Launch Aggregated Sales Service Brain.fi
Writing this as the presentation is still on going at stage here in the launch event. Brain Alliance, a Finnish PHP-oriented software and web development house has in co-operation with Sanoma, the largest media organisation in Finland, launched Brain.fi. Brain.fi is a service that enables e-commerce store owners to also sell their goods through the largest bidding sites in Finland - Huuto.net and Keltainenporssi.fi.
The service is open from today. Brain.fi is an online service that essentially pushes existing e-commerce sites' goods to these two bidding sites, which also happen to be among the largest in Finland. For small e-commerce sites this is a very welcome move to find more customers in a way at the site where the customers currently spend their time.
Brain.fi makes its revenue from commission. The commission is 2,9% of the total sales value to the store owner. Earlier in the launch event, Mikko Lehmuskoski from Sanoma, stated that Huuto.net receives 500 000 shoppers weekly to their site and they do an overall 7 million search queries for products. Currently, only 10% of the goods in Huuto.net belong to professional sellers.
Currently, Brain.fi does not support automated importing of goods from existing stores, except for the Composer store of Soprano. This is under development for other platforms. Plans are to include importing of data through Excel-spreadsheets or APIs from existing stores.
Interesting aspect of the store is also that the service has been protected by European level IP regulation and mechanisms, which only tells that Brain.fi will expand to other countries in Europe as well. Also, other stores will be added to the list in the future on top of current Huuto.net and Keltainenporssi.fi.
This launch comes at an interesting time for a new addition to the Brain Alliance team. Taneli Tikka, a renown Finnish serial entrepreneur, has joined the Nasdaq OMX listed company as the executive in charge of the web services. Brain.fi among other services of Brain Alliance will now be under the guidance of Taneli Tikka.
There is a lot of action is currently in the e-commerce space and it seems that most of the efforts are towards aggregated design and offering of goods. The industry has been extremely fragmented and all these will most likely work towards the best of all parties included, consumers and store owners.
Couple of things about this (I represent the company that built it):
1) it's entirely different from Fruugo (this question has come up a few times): Fruugo is a destination site (that tries to attract an audience, and market itself). This Brain.fi is not a destination site at all; instead it works though the biggest online sales hot spots out there.
2) It's a "Multi-posting engine" that posts the products of any merchant to multiple active markets all over the place, and then manages the backend; like payments and delivery of products. The future versions are roadmapped to include a lot more marketplaces, this launch version includes 2.
3) This is a shift in the mentality of online marketing and webshop sales; not relying on sheer luck and masses in attracting the audiences; but instead going in a concrete way to where the customers already are. Reversed view, a bit, from the traditional.