About “Where You Belong”
It all started as a little website in 1999 in Glasgow, Scotland.
That was when e-commerce only meant a few giant websites, all selling hundreds of products. There weren’t many small, local merchants online then, because most couldn’t afford or reasonably get their products up for sale on the Internet. And even if they could have, not enough customers would have found them to make it worth the cost and trouble to sell them online.
But we had a better idea: be the first online shopping network to move the UK's home town shopping locations online. We didn’t think that people should have to actually go to a place just to enjoy the benefits of doing commerce there, so we decided to focus on each individual destination city.
Eventually, “Where You Belong” evolved into a tool that local merchants, many with specialized one-of-a-kind of products, could use to post their merchandise online for an international market. And they could do it in a way that was accessible and affordable for both merchants and shoppers.
Our first online shop was Glasgow.com in 2005, with shopping, hospitality and local commerce offerings in Glasgow for both local and out-of-town shoppers. We knew we were onto something when the site surpassed our wildest expectations, attracting over 800,000 visitors a year.
Soon we offered seven more geo-targeted online shops up and down the Scottish coast, providing e-commerce in and for places like Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth and Inverness. By 2006, we had grown to 21 online shops. Our visitors and traffic continued to climb, attracting over 3,700,000 visitors in 2007.
Our first “Where You Belong” expansion outside of Scotland was to open some online locations from the north of England, where we, along with our vendors and affiliates, continued to grow and learn how to effectively conduct international e-commerce.
We took a giant leap forward in September and October 2008 with a three pronged international burst. First, we moved into the whole of the UK, purchasing and opening URLs such as cityname.com, cityname.com and cityname.com. Second, we purchased similar sites across European in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Norway, Holland, Sweden and others. And not to be outdone across the Atlantic, we invested in the USA and Canada online shopping market as the third prong, where we found we couldn’t buy traffic fast enough.
By the end of that month, “Where You Belong” had over 450 new or re-branded stores, including nearly 89 European online outlet stores and our first South American online store. We continue to introduce new products sites and geo-targeted networks, and to expand our shopping store network size at a dizzying pace.
How has “Where You Belong” succeeded when countless other online shopping stores have failed? Since our very beginning, we have followed websites trends and picked the right strategy. Along the way, we bought the domain names that work, and we continue to do so in new markets as we expand.
But most importantly, we listen, and we change.
We have listened to the market, our affiliates and customers. In turn, those voices have helped us know of what and when to change so that we can continually grow into a stronger Internet presence, providing a quality and stable service for our affiliates and customers.
“Where You Belong” is your local retailing online shopping location.
