HyperShop Review
Hypershop is a popular Silicon Valley based ecommerce site with a focus on consumer tech and phone accessories, offering everything from Apple Watch charging cases to virtual reality headsets. Hypershop is the online retail front for the Sanho Corporation, designing, manufacturing and marketing their own cutting edge IT products with a focus on Apple accessories, portable power and storage.
Hypershop and The Sanho Corporation, headed by Daniel Chin, are market leaders in tech accessory innovation and most notably are responsible for the iStick, the world's first USB flash drive with anintegrated Apple Lightning connector.
Who Are Hyper?
Hyper was launched in late 2006 by founder and CEO Daniel Chin. Chin found his origins in the development of Singapore-based EastGear Pte Ltd, a distributor of digital photo accessories, memory cards, rechargeable batteries and GPS products.
EastGear was founded in 2003 and by 2005 was employing over 70 people was a testament to Chin’s business acumen, notably closing to S$1 million revenue in just 4 days of the Singapore consumer electronics fair 2005.
In late 2005 Chin uprooted himself from Singapore, setting up The Sanho Corporation in the heart of Silicon Valley, California. Sanho focuses on creating consumer electronic products under the HYPER brand name. HYPER produces mainly portable power devices (HyperJuice), portable storage (HyperDrive), mobile accessories (HyperShield) and cables (HyperThin).
HYPER's notable products include HyperDrive memory card backup devices.
In 2014 Hyper gained international press attention by creating one of the most successful Kickstarter tech projects to date. Hyper launched the iStick Kickstarter campaign in May 2014, describing the iStick as the developed the world's first USB flash drive with integrated Apple MFi Lightning connector.
The iStick was created to be able to link directly to the (at the time) latest iPhone, iPad and iPod touch models.
The Kickstarter campaign was met with phenomenal success- within just three hours of launching the campaign the iStick reached its US$100,000 funding target. Within 24 hours Chin achieved over 250% of his funding goal, and at the end of 31 days over 7490 backers committed to a final funding amount of $1,100,629.00.
Chin, quoted after the success of the Kickstarter campaign, stated “I believe people recognised the usefulness of the iStick enough to want to support it and be one of the first to get it. We expected the response to be big, so we made every effort to ensure that as many people as possible knew about our Kickstarter campaign.”
Chin has leveraged the success of the iStick campaign to greatly increase the success and size of the Sanho Corporation and Hyper, which now employs over 20 people in US, Europe and Asia, as well as a network of distributors in more than 50 countries.
The Sanho Corporation now has an annual turnover of over US$5 million and is one of Kickstarter’s greatest success stories.
The Hypershop Experience
The Hypershop site is slick and well presented, responsive and agile, and scales well from PC to tablet to phone. The format pulls no punches- arriving customers are confronted immediately with a wide selection of the technological goodies available on Hypershop. Filtering through results is managed with a simple drop-down system, categorizing items by type of product, the devices accessories are available for, and sale items.
Hypershop offers peripherals for almost every single iteration of iPhone, Macbook, iPad and Apple Watch ever created- even legacy series- you’d be hard pressed to find another online outlet with such a diverse range of accessories for Apple hardware.
The aforementioned iStick USB drive is one of the top sellers on Hypestore, but we’ll take a moment to detail some of the other innovative items available. Following up the iStick in second place is the Amber Apple Watch Charging Case & USB Power Bank. This attractive case both protects your Apple Watch when not in use, but has the added convenience of charging the watch while it’s neatly tucked away.
The Charging Case can charge an Apple Watch up to eight times in one charge, and also has the capacity to charge another usb device (such as the iphone) at the same time.
The Charging case is available in 4 Apple Watch matching colors of Silver, Gold, Rose Gold & Space Gray, and an associated free iOS app allows consumers to monitor everything from power bank status to receive notifications. The Charging case is priced at $59.95 USD.
Another top seller item from Hypershop finds its origins in a crowdsourcing success story. The iPin is the world's smallest laser presenter for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. So small it fits almost completely inside the headphone minijack, the iPin raised over US$10,000 from 247 backers on popular crowdfunding site Indiegogo.
The iPin, when combined with the free iPin app, can wirelessly control presentation slides on your computer right from your phone. The iPin is seriously cool- It's so cool that even Steve Wozniak, co founder of Apple, never goes anywhere without his.
Battery free and powered directly by the iPhone, the iPin is the world’s smallest laser pointer and has an equally tiny price- the iPin sells for just $49.95 USD with a bonus free BTtogo Bluetooth Adapter worth $29.95.
The Hypershop Hype
Overall Hypershop enjoys almost entirely positive reviews across most ecommerce review sites, and provides a constant stream of customer testimonials for their customer service and sales efficiency. Hypershop offers free deliver within the United States for all orders over $75USD, and flat rate $10USD shipping worldwide for all orders up to $150 USD.
Hypershop has recently celebrated its 10th year of business and it’s easy to see why- with a streamlined, easy to navigate website with a simple sales interface offering all of the bells and whistles, most of the peripherals Hypershop offer are of a quality on par with Apple original accessories.
Captained by an ecommerce veteran from the early days of online retail, Hypershop has carved out for itself a firm position in the competitive environment of tech accessories, and shows no sign of letting up. We’re looking forward to seeing what new innovative accessories Hypershop has coming up in Q4 2016.