The ROI of social media is something of a black box for many e-commerce companies, but New York-based startup Olapic is beginning to change that. The company, which allows brands to collect user-generated photos from services like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to display on their own website, is now offering an analytics suite to help retailers and brands understand what content works and how… → Read More
Airbrite, a Y Combinator-backed e-commerce startup, is debuting its first product today called Celery (its name a play on the world “sell”). Celery is designed to be a “pre-commerce” store builder – or, in other words, it allows anyone to start selling ahead of having a product to ship. That means sellers can start taking credit cards now, then charge when their… → Read More
Fresh off its $2 million in Series A funding, in-app mobile payments platform ZooZ is announcing a new product today: in-ad payments. Yes, that’s right, “ad” not “app.” The big idea here is to streamline the checkout process for consumers by addressing some of the challenges with e-commerce on mobile’s small screen, and now connecting that process to mobile… → Read More
Elena Fesenko grew up in the fashion industry. Her mother worked as a buyer for Bloomingdale’s, and she herself spent time both as a fashion design student and model. Now Fesenko has translated her experience and passion for fashion into MIKA, a new startup which showcases complete outfits featuring a mix of high-end and contemporary apparel and accessories. Shoppers can buy these looks in… → Read More
ThredUP, the online children’s clothes consignment shop, is today launching into a new vertical with the debut of a store for women’s secondhand clothing. The move, which puts the service up against competitors like Poshmark and Threadflip, follows its expansion into junior clothing announced at the beginning of the year. The women’s site had previously launched into beta in… → Read More
Because sometimes it’s the companies you don’t hear about constantly. FastSpring, founded in 2005 as an all-in-one e-commerce solution for companies selling desktop software and downloadable games before heading into the Software-as-a-Service space in 2011, has received a significant but undisclosed new equity investment from L.A.-based Pylon Capital. This is the first outside funding the… → Read More
China’s e-commerce market racked up a whopping 1.3 trillion RMB ($190 billion USD) worth of transactions in 2012, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) (linked article is in Chinese), an increase of 66.5 percent over 2011′s total. Last year, 242 million Internet users purchased goods online, and e-commerce transactions accounted for 6.1 percent… → Read More
The Hunt, a site that helps you find items to buy from photos posted on Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and elsewhere, is today announcing $700,000 in additional funding, on top of the $2 million it had previously raised from Javelin Venture Partners and others. The new round involves several high-profile investors including Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary’s (Madonna’s manager) A-Grade Investments, … → Read More
Ribbon, the AngelPad-backed payments startup that introduces a simpler checkout experience when buying from merchants online or via social media, is today rolling out two big new features: support for YouTube payments and a new Twitter “in-stream” payment option that lets you buy without ever clicking away from Twitter.com. The company has also reduced its fees in order to be more competitive with… → Read More
Lightbank has invested $650,000 in its own Founder-in-Residence Josh Hernandez’s new startup, Walk.by, a platform for bringing local merchants into the e-commerce world by way of smartphones. The company is today announcing the release of its consumer-facing iPhone app which lets shoppers browse and follow offline retailers, the brands they carry, as well as very specific items, like “brown… → Read More
Recent TechStars Boston grad Fashion Project has a different take on the second-hand apparel market. It operates an online store where women can donate their high-end designer items, and others can re-purchase them for less than retail, knowing that the majority of sales are donated directly to charity. The company has now attracted the interest of investors, too, and days ago closed on $1.8… → Read More
Online retailer Grand St. hopes to solve all that, by providing a marketplace to makers, helping to throw a spotlight on interesting gadgets that might otherwise fly under the radar. And to do that, the company has raised a seed round of funding worth $1.3 million. → Read More
Bespoke Post, a subscription-based e-commerce startup offering a hilariously titled “Box of Awesome” (no, not that one - Bespoke Post is for grown-ups), is today announcing having closed on $850,000 in seed funding, led by Warby Parker and Bonobos investor, Great Oaks VC. Also participating in the round, which actually closed last fall, were 500 Startups, Brad Harrison Ventures, 1-800 Flowers’… → Read More
ShopInterest, the 500 Startups-backed e-commerce site that lets you sell from your Pinterest boards, is announcing plans to extend its beta period by six more months while it gets its SMB-focused selling solution off the ground. In addition, the company has launched an affiliate marketing program called the “ShopInterest Sales Network,” which allows sellers’ items to be sold through third-parties. → Read More
Editor’s note: Mike Jones is CEO of Science, Inc., a Los Angeles-based technology studio.
Content and commerce have always had a symbiotic relationship that many traditional content providers tried to separate. The slow adoption of all that the digital revolution has to offer – curation, aggregation, social, and automation – has also hobbled many traditional content providers. → Read More
A new gifting startup called Aggregift is launching an entirely new way to purchase goods on Amazon. The company, which has been quietly running its beta tests with a few thousand users over the past several months, allows users to initiate crowdfunding campaigns for gifts, which involve posting the call for contributions to the recipient’s Facebook Timeline. → Read More
London-based Ethical Community, which has now rebranded as Eco Market, is an online eco-friendly marketplace – or something of an “Etsy for Eco,” if you will. The company recently launched a completely redesigned platform to accompany its name change, is adding more social features, including a Pinterest-like user interface, and has also taken in additional investment. → Read More
Retail giant Target’s newly announced ”Target Retail Accelerator” isn’t really an accelerator – it’s more a sponsored contest taking place at SXSW in Austin. Developers who participate in the event will have a chance to create retail-focused mobile apps or mobile websites, with seven finalists receiving $10,000 for their ideas, and one grand-prize winner scoring a larger prize of $75,000. But… → Read More
ShopSavvy, the mobile application best known for its barcode-scanning and price comparison features, is today moving into personalized deals, through a new relationship with Capital One. The app will now show Capital One deals to any of the app’s users, provided they first add their Capital One credit card to ShopSavvy’s mobile wallet. In addition to the discount the deal provides, users will also… → Read More
Only a month after its expansion into juniors, online and mobile clothing consignment service thredUP is now expanding into women’s apparel. This is the company’s first step out of the kids’ clothes market, representing a shift for the brand which has previously targeted parents — primarily moms. → Read More
JackThreads, the Thrillist-owned men’s shopping community, is seeing some insane mobile growth and conversion rates. But it has also found something surprising: some of its customers have been discovering the company for the first time on mobile. They never shopped the site on the web. The company isn’t even sure yet who these people are, or why they’re connecting with the brand on mobile, but… → Read More
Diapers.com, the Amazon-owned e-commerce site targeting parents with new babies, is today launching a native app on the iPad, after seeing its mobile traffic increase more than 100 percent year-over-year. In December 2012, the company found that 40 percent of the website’s visitors came to shop via a smartphone or tablet. → Read More
Google continues to enhance its business in e-commerce and providing a portal for users to search and find things to buy alongside ads for those products. Today it was announced that Google has bought Channel Intelligence, a provider of technology to companies to enable customers to buy their products online, for $125 million in an all-cash deal. → Read More
The recently launched, AngelPad-backed payments startup called Ribbon is today introducing new functionality that allows users to buy from merchants and other sellers directly in the Facebook News Feed. In addition, the company is confirming the close of its $1.6 million seed round, led by Tim Draper’s Draper Associates. Participating in the round were Siemer Ventures, Emil Michael (Klout… → Read More
According to new figures released today from mobile commerce startup Branding Brand, mobile commerce over the 2012 holiday season saw major gains, with visits to m-commerce websites up 109 percent year-over-year, page views up by 116 percent, conversions up 30 percent, and sales up by a whopping 171 percent. → Read More
Design-focused e-commerce site Fab.com has been having a good year (and a half), and thanks to the massive 100-plus page slideshow the company has now shared, it has the figures to prove it. According to Fab’s latest, the site reached 10 million members in 2012, and sold 4.3 million products across 26 countries. → Read More
Pretty Penny is a newly launched couponing startup, targeting a young, female audience – specifically the fashionistas and professionals who do a lot of their shopping online. The company, currently operating in bootstrap mode, offers its users a browser add-on that identifies the retail website a user is visiting, searches for relevant coupons and offers, and then presents those in a clean and… → Read More
Online and mobile digital cash network Dwolla is breaking down one of the barriers to entry to using its service with today’s introduction of a new “guest checkout” feature for online merchants. The option will allow non-Dwolla users to pay with Dwolla on e-commerce websites, possibly even getting a discount on the item or service being purchased in the process. → Read More
First Round Capital, a VC firm which has numerous investments in the e-commerce space, is today supporting its portfolio companies with the launch of a collective site where visitors can browse its startups’ holiday shopping discounts and deals. At the site, gifts.firstround.com, visitors can grab discount codes and other deals for popular brands like Fab.com, One Kings Lane, Birchbox, Modcloth… → Read More
The numbers keep rolling in: mobile commerce startup Branding Brand released new reports detailing holiday shopping sales on mobile, but unlike the other e-commerce reports which came out over the holidays, this one only includes data on commerce sites where the experience has been specifically tailored for smartphones. It also only looks at smartphones, to be clear, and doesn’t lump tablets… → Read More
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