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
The iPad seems to have dominated online shopping from tablets, according to an IBM report, and in fact won out over all other devices in mobile e-commerce. Arguably, that’s because it offers more of a full-web experience, and is more pleasant for browsing standard online retailer sites than a smartphone. But tablet-based shopping continues to be a less than optimal experience. → Read More
Commerce Sciences, the Palo Alto-based e-commerce startup backed by $1.8 million in seed funding from Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Genesis Partners, and others, is rolling out a feature called one-click personalization which allows online retailers to customize the shopping experience to individual website visitors. → Read More
The United States Postal Service (USPS) just informed the Postal Regulatory Commission that it plans to launch an experimental same-day delivery service called Metro Post. The USPS says this test is specifically designed for e-commerce companies and will initially focus on a single (currently undisclosed) metropolitan area. The market test for Metro Post is scheduled to begin around November 12… → Read More
Editor’s note: Sergio Monsalve is a Partner at Norwest Venture Partners where he is focused on early and growth investments in the digital media, mobile, and social areas. Follow him on Twitter.
E-commerce is one of the fastest-growing sectors in technology and is poised to get even hotter, with sales expected to double between 2010 and 2015, according to eMarketer. So how can discerning… → Read More
Editor’s note: Boris Wertz is the founder of version one ventures, and has invested in more than 35 early-stage consumer Internet and mobile companies, including Chloe & Isabel, Julep, and Indochino. Follow him on his blog and Twitter.
There has been more e-commerce innovation during the past year than there has been during the last decade. First, flash-sale and daily-deal sites brought a… → Read More
Fresh off the heels of a $1.2 million round of funding, the furniture-focused e-commerce site Deal Décor is today announcing its official nationwide launch. The company, which we once referred to as a “Groupon for Furniture,” to be fair, isn’t really a rip-off of the Groupon business model. That is, it’s not about using group-buying to promote merchant coupons. Instead, it’s about using… → Read More
Editor’s note: Navin Chaddha is a Managing Director at Mayfield Fund, a global early-stage venture capital firm with over $3 billion under management, whose portfolio companies leverage the drivers of cloud/SaaS, mobile, social, energytech and big data. Some current Mayfield Fund investments include Appcelerator, Fab, Marketo, Poshmark, Solarcity, and Zimride.
The U.S. e-commerce… → Read More
Editor’s note: Nasir Jones is co-founder of 12Society and a multi-platinum recording artist. Follow him at NasirJones.com and on Twitter: @Nas.
On July 24, I found out that my newest album hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. This isn’t my first time around the block, but it’s one of the most satisfying. I started as a hungry MC from QB, but now I am trying to give back to the hip hop… → Read More
Gyft, a new mobile application launching at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, allows you to buy, save and redeem gift cards using your mobile phone. Unlike the numerous mobile gifting applications currently available, Gyft isn’t attempting to carve out a spot for itself in the new “social gifting” market; it’s taking the existing $100 billion market for physical gift cards and moving it to the phone. As… → Read More
Crane & Canopy is a newly launched online home goods store that’s benefiting from the power of the Internet to flatten the traditional supply chain and save on costs. Like many of the new arrivals in the e-commerce space, the company isn’t hiding the same old business model from the brick-and-mortar era behind a shiny new front-end. It’s getting rid of all the extra people and processes in… → Read More
AnyVivo, a startup that launched this spring out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 program, has a pretty big mission: It wants to be the e-commerce hub for all living things. You might think that Amazon sells everything, and you’re almost right — but AnyVivo wants to pick up exactly where it leaves off, at pets and plants.
The company is starting by selling jellyfish — and things are going so… → Read More
![mobile_cloud_MRG[1]](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/mobile_cloud_mrg1.jpg?w=76)
Liftopia, the startup offering consumers discounts on ski tickets and other snow-related activities, is today launching a new e-commerce platform for the ticket sellers themselves called “Cloud Store by Liftopia.” The service will be offered for free to any mountain resort for use on their own websites (including mobile), starting first in North America, then followed by resorts in Europe. Once… → Read More
The stealthy consumer Internet startup Dashlane, which had raised a $5 million Series A back in September, is today coming out of hiding with the launch of its public release. The company is offering a personal data assistant that aims to speed up access to websites through password-saving and online form-filling features, but, as hinted earlier, there’s more to it than that.
There are two key… → Read More
Today, Google is announcing a partnership with a NY-based company called Signpost, which will now run deals on the Google Offers website and in subscriber emails. Signpost, which has $1 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Spark Capital and other angels, has been flying under the radar in the local deals space. The company recently tripled its employee base and now claims revenue has been… → Read More
Amid the increased speculation surrounding Silicon Valley darling Pinterest’s forthcoming revenue model, competitor Fancy, a social photo-clipping service popular among the style-conscious set, has been quietly working on revenue ideas of its own. Previously, the service was doling out coupon code to users who “fancy’d” images belonging to specific merchants, but today, the site is diving… → Read More
According to the end-of-season benchmarks from Compuware’s web performance division, Apple.com was among the top three best-performing retail websites during the 2011 holiday season. Meanwhile, Amazon made the list for the top m-commerce sites.
The sites were ranked from November 21st through Christmas Day using Compuware’s Gomez Performance Index which compares how U.S. retailers’ sites… → Read More
New data from Compuware finds conclusive proof of the popularity of iPads as a shopping device. The firm took a look at the website traffic for 70 U.S. retailers’ delivered to an iPhone or iPad over the start of the holiday shopping season (November 14th through Cyber Monday). On Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, specifically, there were peaks in traffic with a high of 6,475,354 iPad… → Read More
Proximiant just launched a new service that provides digital receipts to customers of brick-and-mortar merchants. Like Square, the service involves the use of a low-cost hardware dongle that’s given away for free. But unlike Square, Proximiant leverages NFC (near field communication) to send the receipt from the cash register to the mobile phone. → Read More
In what is sure to be the start of a very big trend, JCPenny is announcing their new Facebook application that allows Facebook users to browse and purchase items directly from JC Penny’s Facebook page. Users will be able to browse and search JC Penny’s catalog, as well as “like” products and purchases. I’m not sure I see the point of “liking” your purchase of a new pair of boots, but then again I… → Read More
Shopping online has become standard to most people on the web. While browsing through the thousands of available e-commerce sites can be a tedious and time consuming task, meta shopping sites aim to take the hassle out of a potentially very long search for the best, cheapest and most adequate product out there.
Imagine you could access all of a product’s distributed and decentralized information… → Read More
Cyber Monday might have turned out to be better than expected. Online retailers saw a 13.7 percent increase in sales compared to last year, and 24.1 percent more than on Black Friday 2009. The latest data comes from Coremetrics, a Web analytics service used by more than 500 retailers including Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Office Depot… → Read More
Guest post: We’ve given Europe’s tech video bloggers a mission to hunt down European startups every Friday and get them to give an elevator pitch. We’ll be rotating this slot with other contributors around Europe as well, so if you’ve got a video blog about tech startups, get in touch. Thanks to Tiburon TV for this post. → Read More
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