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Introducing Nuokka; a social-media mall that makes shopping as simple as scrolling

Published Mon Nov 23 2020

Nuokka, a new social network for shopping, aims to reinvent online retail by enabling true multi-merchant buying, social-media browsing, and merchant/consumer communities.

Self-styled online mall Nuokka is a new social network designed specifically for shopping, where MSMEs (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises) can advertise and sell their products with no barriers to entry. As a social network, it values building relationships between merchants and their customers by allowing shoppers to follow the shops and subjects they enjoy using “tags”, resulting in the personalisation of the Nuokka feed of merchant posts. Merchants sign-up and advertise their products free of charge, showing them in an Instagram-like stream of image and video posts. Shoppers can then browse that stream, choosing to directly purchase featured products from one or multiple merchants through one in-app checkout—or simply add them to a wishlist. Nuokka only charges a 5% fee on a successful sale. Nuokka bridges the gap between ecommerce platforms such as Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, and Ebay; the new breed of social media platforms who are attempting to integrate shopping features, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; and the growing number of small “marketplace” websites that collate links to merchant sites in the hope of providing community findability.

“The traditional shopping or ‘ecommerce’ experience is dated and no longer fit for purpose,” says Tim Huegdon, creator of Nuokka and alumnus of internet brands such as Amazon, Betfair, and Yahoo. “Shoppers don’t want to search and browse one shop at a time. Neither do they want to wade through single product pages, category pages, and complex navigation trees. The way we engage with the internet has changed, and shopping needs to catch up. Our aim is to become the first place shoppers come to when they’re looking for products that suit their lifestyle. We’re going to do that through the power of tagging, and the personalisation and communities it inevitably creates.”

Nuokka delivers on its claim to be a social network for shopping by mixing ecommerce features like product catalogues, wish lists, shopping carts, and a single multi-merchant checkout with social-media features like a feed of image and video posts, tagging, and follows. Consumers don’t have to leave the app to buy products, and they can buy from many merchants at once. Searching and browsing is easier still thanks to tags; these app-wide shared labels which merchants can use to classify themselves and their products with any subject they like. People still want to shop local, find eco products, or follow the latest trend. Merchants using tags such as “Borough Market” or “organic”—which are then followed by shoppers—create their own communities. This is an important shift in online shopping interactions.

In addition to breaking the mold for online shopping, Nuokka has been developed as a Progressive Web App (or PWA for short). This next-generation web technology, also being adopted by other companies (such as Twitter, Uber, Tinder, Pinterest, and Spotify to name a few), allows the app to avoid having to be hosted and distributed by traditional app stores. You can instantly download Nuokka as a standalone app from https://app.nuokka.com via Safari on iOS (share and “add to home”), and Google Chrome on most other smartphones and desktop (“Install Nuokka” via the menus). This removal of the app store middlemen means updates and fixes can be released much faster, and any costs from app store listing and management do not need to be passed on to users.

About Nuokka

Nuokka is a web-based application that allows buying and selling of products in a social-media stream of posts. They are a small family-owned microbusiness, based in Western Australia, founded by Tim Huegdon, an English expat with a software development pedigree that includes Amazon Prime Video, Betfair, and Yahoo!, as well as various technology startups.

To contact us about this press release, or for any other questions, please email support@nuokka.com.