Startup from Kyrgyzstan makes it easy to add social features to your online store

It’s easier than ever to start your own online store. In Europe and the US, Shopify has taken much of the small-time merchant class by storm, allowing users to easily set up online storefronts. Shopping online is also an increasingly social activity. We ask friends for recommendations, read reviews from previous buyers, and share wishlists when our birthdays and holidays roll around.

Online stores that can drive engagement with these social features gain a powerful edge on their competitors. But for the time being, Shopify and similar sites don’t package those features into their service. They require the store owner to either create their own or find a third party to do the work for them.

One of those third parties is SocialShopWave (now known as Growave), a young bootstrapped startup from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The company offers a full suite of social commerce features that can be easily plugged into an online store, including social login, wishlists, reviews, sharing to social networks, and friend recommendations. Right now, Growave only supports Shopify stores, but founder Eldar Galiev says he and his team of five are working on a universal cross-platform solution.

To make it as easy as possible for store owners, Growave comes with tutorials. Each feature is overlaid onto the existing store’s layout. Buttons are added to follow fellow customers and “like” items. Customers get their own profile pages and can log in with Facebook or Twitter. Each product gets a clean, modern-looking reviews page. All of this is controlled from a single dashboard, which lets the shop owner easily customize and toggle the features he or she wants.

The purpose, says Galiev, is for merchants to know their customers better, engage with them, and earn their trust and loyalty. So far, Growave is active on 500 stores, including these two, for example.

A free tier is available with limited features for up to 2,500 monthly visits, with three more tiers ranging up to US$99 per month.

Somewhere in Central Asia

Growave team. Eldar Galiev pictured 2nd from left.

Prior to Growave, Galiev worked six years at another company called Hire-Experts, which provides themes, add-ons, and mobile apps for social networks.

Bishkek isn’t exactly a hotbed of startups. Galiev says there are very few, and this makes it difficult to get mentoring, advice, and investment. Galiev says he read many articles about startups in the early days of his company, but he still made many mistakes that could have been avoided along the way. “We don’t have such advantages like startups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere,” he says.

His biggest mistake was trying to do too much too soon. Originally, Growave was meant to be a universal plugin for any online store that could also perform data mining and analytics for the store owner. With just a five-person team and a tiny budget, the task quickly overwhelmed them. Galiev made the tough decision to narrow down his vision onto a single market. Shopify was exploding at the time, so he jumped on the opportunity. He launched SocialShopWave in September 2014.

Now that Growave has a product on the market with real traction and paying customers, Eldar and his team are picking up where they left off. A universal version that can expand beyond Shopify is on the way, and data mining and analytics will come after that. Those data capabilities will allow Growave to personalize shopping experiences – think product recommendations.