Sephora Partners with Social Shopping Company Blippy

Blippy, a leading social shopping company, announced a partnership with beauty retailer Sephora to launch an online social shopping community for Sephora customers. Customers can use the service to talk about the products they're buying, discover trending products and write product reviews to share with others.

"Blippy's integration with Sephora.com allows our customers to more easily communicate with each other and talk about the products they're buying," said Julie Bornstein, senior vice president of Sephora Direct. "Blippy provides the ability for our customers to ask each other questions, get tips and share recommendations."

"Sephora is a trailblazer. They embraced social networking early on, which led to Sephora's significant presence on sites like Facebook—where they have over 900,000 fans and growing—Twitter, and YouTube," said Philip Kaplan, co-founder of Blippy. "Social networking is becoming an increasingly important way for online retailers to delight their customers and be more successful. We're thrilled to be working with Sephora."

Blippy is a community where people write reviews, share recommendations and discover new products. Here's how it works: A Sephora customer visits www.blippy.com/sephora and signs up. Each time that customer buys something from Sephora, they will be asked by Blippy whether or not they'd like to share it and write a review. These reviews appear on Blippy, with many users opting to automatically share their reviews with friends on Facebook and Twitter, using Blippy's syndication features. Neither Blippy nor Sephora will share purchase information without explicit prior approval from each participating customer.

As of mid-October, 2010, Blippy users have shared 2.6 million purchases totaling more than $65 million in sales, from more than 300,000 stores.

More in Digital/E-commerce