NY start­up 72Lux has just launched Shop­pable, new online mar­ket­place that lets peo­ple make pur­chas­es from mul­ti­ple retail­ers in one place.

The evo­lu­tion of a shop­ping idea

Can­ny ecom­merce ana­lysts who’ve fol­lowed the ecom­merce plat­form from the begin­ning will be aware of its evo­lu­tion. Found­ed in 2011 by its now-CEO Heather Marie, 72Lux began life as a uni­ver­sal check­out ser­vice that allowed dig­i­tal pub­lish­ers to sell prod­ucts direct­ly from their own web­site, remov­ing the need for cus­tomers to nav­i­gate their way to the retailer’s site. The pub­lish­er gets a com­mis­sion for any sales from its own site, while the retail­er gets to mar­ket their prod­ucts on the publisher’s web­sites. This was “Shop­pable for Merchants”.

This month, Ms. Marie has devel­oped the scheme fur­ther with “Shop­pable for Con­sumers” which allows vis­i­tors to save items they’ve seen dur­ing their online brows­ing on a wish list if they don’t want to make an imme­di­ate pur­chase. And there’s rather a lot of brows­ing to be done: Shoppable.co fea­tures almost 3 mil­lion items from the retail­ers 72Lux part­ners with, rang­ing from gad­gets to beau­ty prod­ucts.

Dis­tinc­tive features

On vis­it­ing the Shop­pable site, our per­spic­u­ous ecom­merce ana­lyst will notice that there’s anoth­er new devel­op­ment: where­as pre­vi­ous­ly, shop­pers were only able to pur­chase items on the site that had been curat­ed for them at pub­lish­ers’ web­sites, from this week they can browse through the whole database.

Giv­en that there’s some­thing of a sur­feit of online wish lists out there which allow peo­ple to tag items they’d like to pur­chase lat­er, ecom­merce ana­lysts could be for­giv­en for won­der­ing what could pos­si­bly dis­tin­guish yet anoth­er one from the crowd. Accord­ing to Ms. Marie, none of the com­pe­ti­tion lets peo­ple com­plete their pur­chas­es from mul­ti­ple sites in one place. And Shop­pable even keeps track of wish list items for price changes or if the retailer’s inven­to­ry is run­ning low.

As she explains:

“Any­one can add a link to list. There’s no wish list com­pa­ny out there, includ­ing Ama­zon, that lets you check out with­in a sin­gle check­out for all the items on your wish list.”

Pub­lish­ers and blog­gers can use the prod­ucts avail­able in the Shop­pable cat­a­log to mon­e­tize their respec­tive web­sites as soon as they’ve signed up with the ser­vice (the prod­ucts can be sold on their sites via 72Lux’s unique, patent-pend­ing technology).