Social Commerce - a Massively Distributed Party Platform

Pampered Chef (PC) thrives on 'house parties", where thousands of creators host cooking parties for a dozen friends. Parties involve social interaction and recipes, and feature demonstrations of PC kitchen products. When the pandemic hit, house parties went to zero. At first, PC tried to duplicate the party with Facebook groups and videos, but that created friction because the PC hosts had to jump through many hoops, videos were canceled arbitrarily, and “party advertisements” were being flagged as spam. Worse yet, PC had almost no insight into metrics around participation or audience reach, nor any smooth path from the video party to Ecommerce sales.

The solution was to natively bring the entire video hosting, broadcast and marketing platforms, and analytics into the PC website while allowing it to interact with established social networks like Facebook. On paper, this looked like a huge undertaking. Enter Interplay: with the ability to wrap connectors around exposed APIs from the video platform, in-house systems, and a scalable cloud-based data architecture, we were able to deploy an entire social commerce 2.0 demo-and-sell platform in a matter of 27 weeks.

This social commerce solution involved the following:

• Creation of 180 API wrapper connections to allow drag-and-drop connectivity between services via Interplay
• Integration of 17 third-party services
• Connect with a party scheduling platform
• Integrate these with PC’s existing database of thousands of cooks, creators, and chefs
• Push the entire thing out to Pampered Chef’s production website with an easy-to-enroll, easy-to-broadcast party hosting system