Swedish Portal Refocuses on E-Commerce

After three years on the Net, The Swedish Post’s portal Torget.se has a new face and platform, with a new focus on trade and e-commerce.

Nearly three years after its launch and after investing nearly 200 million kronor (approx. $25 million), the site Torget has transformed newspaper-looking site to a trading site.

The first editor in chief, Mattias Hansson, had a newspaper background, and the site reflected that. The people in charge today have more background in economy and trade. This is an example of a recent trend–from trying to survive on advertising to the transformation to e-commerce.

“The goal is not to maximize the number of visitors, but to get our visitors to order more products and to build a better relationship to them. We know that there is resistance against giving away personal information, but we want to move towards better relations and hope to do so step by step,” said Ann Jonsson Lindstrom, the manager-in-chief at Torget.

The platform of the new site is based on StoryServer, for personalization regarding the shops and news services. With more dialogue from its visitors, Torget can customize offers and information for each visitor.

Torget hopes to draw new traffic with the help of different campaigns and contests.

About 40 percent of the Swedish surfers in February visited at least one shopping site, which accounts for more than 1 million surfers during the month. Torget wants to be one of the top players in this field. To its owners’ (Swedish Post) delight, more sales also means more transportation for their core business as the leading transportation company through the network of Postal Offices in the country.

Torget’s site has over 720 individual shops and an average of 200,000 visitors each day with more than 125,000 registered members. The site is also one of the 10 most popular sites in Sweden.