Continuing to transform the paper greeting card industry, GreetingCardUniverse.com (GCUniverse) announces the Greeting Card Seller widget, the first Facebook Application enabling artists, photographers and their devotees to earn money by selling paper greeting cards featuring their artwork on Facebook. By empowering Facebook members to monetize their profile pages, GCUniverse has created a new distribution channel for paper greeting cards and ecards, with gift cards soon to follow.
In less than 10 months, propelled by its growing community of artists, GCUniverse has quickly become the largest online paper greeting card store, boasting over 17,500 original “direct from the artist” cards, spanning 623 categories from over 560 freelance artists.
Paul Love, President of GCUniverse, states, “Our intention is to make Facebook an even more valuable service for its members by enabling its artistic community to promote and sell greeting cards featuring their art or photography directly to other Facebook members, just like MySpace has done for musicians by providing them with a storefront utility for selling their songs directly to fans.”
Over the past year, changes in Facebook policies and services have resulted in rapid growth outside of the college demographic, and a member base in excess of 43 million people. Facebook estimates that by the end of 2007, 75% of all members will be adults over 25 years of age. This segment makes up the typical greeting card buyers within US households, 90% of which buy on average 30 paper greeting cards per year (according to the Greeting Card Association) and contribute to the estimated $90B gift card market.
Excited about the e-commerce opportunities, many GCUniverse artists have already added the Greeting Card Seller widget to their Facebook profile page, and earn $1.00 for each of their cards sold. According to Eugenia Bacon, a popular GCUniverse artist, “It took less than two minutes to set up, and I have complete control over which cards are displayed on my widget, making it easy to promote appropriate cards throughout the year.” Several of these widgets can be viewed at http://www.greetingcarduniverse.com/community/widget_sellers.asp.
“Although the Greeting Card Seller widget was created with artists in mind, many non-artists are using it to add interest to their profiles, earning money is an added bonus,” Mindy Rosso, VP of Marketing at GCUniverse, continues. “For example, if you’re a Pug lover, you can enjoy featuring and making money by offering Pug themed greeting cards. With nearly 18,000 cards to choose from, just about everyone can find cards that hit their sweet spot.”
About GreetingCardUniverse.com
Greeting Card Universe is a division of BigDates.com, Inc., which also operates BigDates Solutions (www.BigDates-Solutions.com), the leading provider of Reminder Service Solutions powering the reminder services for: BigDates.com, Birthday-Reminders.com, and licensing partners Barnes & Noble.com (NYSE:BKS), Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK), Lillian Vernon, and others.
Contacts:
Mindy Rosso, VP Marketing, 925-866-4110 ext. 1110
Fax:
866-581-2040
Mindy.Rosso@BigDates.com
