Sociable Labs launches with $7M

The social commerce company gets support from Battery and Javelin

Social commerce solutions provider Sociable Labs announced Wednesday that it has raised $7 million in a Series B round of funding led by Battery Ventures, with help from existing investor Javelin Venture Partners.  The company, which was in stealth mode until today, has also raised seed funding from fbFund.

Like so many other social marketing companies today, Sociable Labs helps its clients draw their customers from the rich stores of Facebook and Twitter.  Unlike other social marketing companies, Sociable Labs does this not by building fan pages or pushing for more likes, but by focusing on the brand’s own e-commerce site and encouraging users to share with their friends.

In other words, Sociable Labs eschews “soft” ROI like fans and likes in favor of “hard” ROI in the form of traditional e-commerce metrics, such as conversion rates, traffic, and sales.  Thus, the company focuses less on Facebook commerce and more on the consumer experience on the brand’s site, where the greatest sales uplift will occur.

“Our applications help consumers to do things like share what they’ve purchased with friends or identify which friends they should speak to before making a purchase,” CEO Nisan Gabbay told me.  “For example, you might be looking to run a 5K, and you want to see if any of your friends have also registered for that 5K.  Or you might be trying to figure out what hotel to book for a trip to Miami, and want to know where your friends have stayed.  These are the types of social commerce experiences we provide in a turnkey solution for retailers.”

And Sociable has the numbers to back it up.  The company’s ROI-guided approach has increased social sharing up to 20x, and conversion rates are 300% higher than Facebook fan traffic.

One of its core features is the company’s test-and-learn approach, which allows e-commerce companies to quickly deploy, test, and alter the design of its social applications to improve ROI.

Some big names are already using Sociable Labs, including Chegg, Rue La La, HauteLook, The Active Network, and Backcountry.com, among others.

“Sociable Labs has been a strong complement and accelerator of our existing social media strategy, harnessing the reach of our Active.com consumer audience and enabling users to share their event plans and fitness goals more easily with their social networks,” said Kristin Carroll, VP of Marketing at Active Network, in a statement.