Athlon Sports and Moontoast Score with Group Buying on Facebook

NASHVILLE, Tenn., March 23, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Athlon Sports, publisher of the nation's largest college sports magazine, has found a new way to increase sales in key markets. Working with its college network, Athlon is launching a group-buying campaign with a series of school-specific storefronts using Moontoast's Distributed Store – right on the schools' Facebook pages.

Moontoast's Distributed Store lets brands promote and sell products directly from their Facebook page, website, or partner's website. Now, with the new group-buying feature, fans can also participate in group buys – without leaving Facebook or the brand's website. The group-buying feature makes it easy for brands to harness the "power of the crowd" which helps offers go viral increasing new customer acquisition. Unlike other group-buying providers, with Moontoast the brand retains control of the offer presentation, margins, and customer list. To see all of the schools involved with the Athlon Custom Covers program visit: http://customcovers.athlonsports.com/.

The campaign uses the school pride of fans, alumni, students, and faculty to boost sales of Athlon Sports' publications covering college sports. The campaign targets schools that do not typically appear on Athlon magazine covers. Schools that want to see their own team on the cover, can do a group buy for a special, "custom covers" print run. Fans make individual purchases right from Facebook, and the Moontoast Distributed Store aggregates those orders into a single buy for the supplemental print run.

To-date, close to fifty colleges across nine conferences have signed up to participate in the program. Schools like Duke, Army, Mississippi, Michigan State, Purdue, Stanford and Texas A&M have stores ready to launch on their Facebook fan pages.

"We've run similar campaigns with some success in the past," says Athlon chief product officer, Bryce Wells. "But being able to launch them as group buys on Facebook improves the old model and helps us experiment in untapped markets without a lot of risk." About the Moontoast Distributed Store, he adds, "The implementation is simple, and once we're up and running, the administration tools save us a ton of time."

The combination of rabid college sports fans, Facebook, and Moontoast's social commerce platform creates a powerful engine to drive sales of Athlon's products. Blair Heavey, Moontoast CEO says, "Social commerce facilitates the integration of sales transactions directly into the social stream. With the addition of group buying, brands are able to truly leverage the viral and community aspects of social commerce – taking things to the next level."

Innovative publishers like Athlon are working with smart technology partners to crack the social commerce code – finding new and better ways to monetize social networks. For Athlon Sports, Moontoast's Distributed Store, with its group-buying feature, is the perfect solution for reaching untapped markets. Its direct-to-fan engagement and easy implementation build on the authenticity of the fan-to -team relationship, opening up new revenue opportunities.

ABOUT MOONTOAST

Moontoast  is a social commerce company based in Boston and Nashville. Today, our products, which include Facebook commerce, distributed stores, and commerce communities, empower artists, brands and individuals to open the doors to a world of new audience-building and revenue-generating opportunities. For more information, visit us at www.moontoast.com, or check out Moontoast Impulse™ at www.fanimpulse.com.

SOURCE Moontoast