Quikr, India’s largest online and mobile classifieds portal, announced today that it has raised $32 million in series E financing, led by New York City-based private equity giant Warburg Pincus. The company’s existing investors, which include Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and eBay, also participated in the funding.

The investment is Quikr’s fifth and largest financing to date, following an $8 million raise in May 2011, led by Nokia Growth Partners, Norwest and eBay. The latest capital infusion brings Quikr’s total funding to $46 million.

Quikr was known as Kijiji (of www.kijiji.in) until a re-branding in 2008, when the company decided it wanted to adopt a name that more readily reflected ease of use and speed, with a slightly more universal (and vowel-less Web 2.0) feel. Apparently “Kijiji” didn’t inspire that. No idea why.

Kidding aside, the company was set squarely on the long-term goal of becoming a fast, easy-to-use consumer-focused platform for the Indian community, and in turn providing it with a resource by which to buy, sell and rent in any category. And, since its launch in 2008 (and its re-branding shortly thereafter), the Mumbai-based startup has grown into a sizable platform, which is now used by some 17 million people and businesses each month — across more than 83 cities — and offers listings on everything from real estate to electronics.

Today, more than 50 percent of the Indian population is under the age of 25, which equates to an enormous number of savvy web and mobile adopters. As a result, many see huge opportunity in Indian eCommerce, especially that which is targeted at a younger audience. Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley investors have been paying more and more attention to the startup ecosystem in India, the growing web penetration, and adoption of mobile devices.

What’s more, as demonstrated by this sizable investment in Quikr, not to mention the $40 million round that Bessemer, Nexus and others sank into fast-growing Indian eCommerce and deals company, Snapdeals, American investors aren’t afraid to send their money abroad.

For more, check out Quikr at home here.

Back in in 1999, just as Ebay was coming into bloom, William Gibson wrote a piece on his experiences buying expensive watches online. He called the article My Obsession and it details his youth as a picker in the 1970s.

He writes:

This “job,” if it can be called a job, is all but dead these days because of some of the basic properties of the new market. Barring those folks on American Pickers who find items that will eventually hang in a TGI Friday’s, the potential for making a lucrative trade in a post-Internet world by finding and selling odd items is nearly nil. First, a picker depends on arbitrage. Arbitrage depends on incomplete information on someone’s part or, in the case of collectable, desire.

Second, a picker is facing down an army of folks who, in a sense, refuse to allow their items to be picked for fear that somewhere, somehow they will find out that their Garbage Pail Kid collection is worth something. After all, a listing on eBay is nearly free and a listing on Craigslist is free. The cost, then, in finding someone to take your items off of your hands at a premium price is only time. And obviously no one has any of that. So the cards moulder and the old watches sit in drawers and the Beanie Babies slump over themselves like rotten potatoes and pickers are stuck sifting through detritus at best.

The golden geek example of this impetus is the Mile High Comics story. In 1977, a friend called the owner of Mile High Comics to explain that a realtor had contacted him about getting rid of some junk at the home of Edgar Church in Boulder. After a bit of back and forth, the owner went to see the comics and found a trove – literally a house full – of old books, posters, magazines, and comics that spanned back to the birth of Superman and the Golden Age of comics. In short, he picked his way into a long and happy career.

All that is gone now, and there is definitely a side effect that, for better or worse. The Internet is changing the way we look at nostalgia and history. Take for example the recent efforts by George Mason University professor T. Mills Kelly’s class, Lying About The Past. Kelly and his students essentially propagate hoaxes, using the tools of social media to spread lies about history. They have, in fact, successfully posted fake listings in Wikipedia and by faking primary material they were able to fool a number of people over the years.

Kelly and his class recently tried to fool Reddit with some fake newspaper clippings about murders in New York, suggesting that Jack the Ripper visited New York to do his dirty work. The resulting post – bolstered by some ginned up newspaper clippings and a short backstory, was quickly dismantled. The same impetus to hunt for the best price for a piece of nostalgia has been reversed here to slam the lid on a piece of flim-flammery.

Rob Beschizza notes on BoingBoing that Reddit is specifically tuned to sense when information is, perhaps, too good. He wrote:

They are, in a way, like collectors who can see through a 20th century Chinese reproduction of a Spanish conquistador sword simply based on immersion in the market. They are intrinsically skeptical and, as such, can’t be taken easily.

Sure, things slip through just as they might at an antiques shop where a rare painting is hanging next to a mangy deer’s head or when an entire crate of early Archie comics lies next to a box of romance novels at a yard sale. But the Internet has killed the casual picker and created a new breed of meta-curators – folks who are able to see through and comment upon the collections of others without, often, having first hand experience on the topic. Some would call them trolls and others would call them obsessives. I’d just call them Internet users.

Harnessing this instinct is what all of these social creation sites are about. A market cannot exist without a group of people interested in selling and an equal number – or more – interested in buying. Sites like Reddit are the last refuge of the intellectual picker and, while there is no way for us to find a #1 issue of Mad Magazine at the thrift shop anymore, there is a way to separate the intellectual wheat from the chaff using the picker’s instinct online.

eBay was one of the first e-commerce giants to launch an iPad app following the device’s debut in 2010. As we’ve heard many times, mobile commerce is a huge growth area for eBay and the company is placing some pretty big bets on the mobile shopping experience. Today, the company, which says that its mobile apps have reached 80 million downloads, is debuting version 2.0 of its flagship iPad app, Buy and Sell with eBay, which has ramped up personalization, customization, image quality and more.

One of the major improvements in the app is a visual redesign of the home screen. Now you can completely customize your home screen with your most recent product searches or sales, which can be added, deleted or moved around based on user preferences. Additionally, first time users of the app will login and find their “My eBay Items” already populated to the home screen.

With the redesign, eBay wanted to eliminate the need for users to click to different pages to search, bid, buy, or pay for items. For buyers, users can access daily deals, eBay’s popular items, recent searches and their favorite categories from the homepage.

Users can choose to browse through results from multiple views, flip through multiple images and purchase from the homepage itself. Search has also been improved, allowing users to access advanced search to target results to listings based on budget, category, condition, size, color, or style

Sellers can research sale trends, list items, and make sale, as well as scan an item using the
barcode scanner to pre-populate a listing from the homepage Sellers can also now revise their listings directly from the iPad app.

eBay mobile VP Steve Yankovich tells us that the redesign focuses on ramping up customization and discovery, especially in the homescreen experience. “It’s about picking best way to browse and discover products,” he explains. “This is a dashboard that creates jumping points for everything the buyer or seller cares about.”

Last year, eBay acquired Magento, developer of an open-source e-commerce platform for around $180 million. Magento became part of X.commerce, a combined open platform business from eBay and PayPal. A year after the acquisition was announced, Magento co-founder and CTO Yoav Kutner has left eBay. While fellow Magento co-founder Roy Rubin sent Kutner off with a warm farewell, Kutner doesn’t have such nice things to say about eBay and X.commerce, according to this post on Quora.

In response to the question of why he left eBay, Kutner responded (Kutner confirmed to us that he posted this response): I will answer and give much more information over the next few weeks as to the reasons I had to leave Magento. As for now I can say that (very) short term I would not be worried about the ‘open’ part of Magento, but as I have learned eBay and the folks at X.commerce don’t really understand the meaning of open and have a hard time explaining and defining it to them selves and to others. As such, long term, it would be very interesting to see if Magento will continue to stay open in the manor the people behind Magento and I meant it to be.

The Magento e-commerce platform, basically enables merchants and brands to have control over the look, content, SEO, digital marketing and functionality of their online storefronts. Originally, Magento was a product developed and marketed by Varien, a decade-old e-commerce software and consultancy company. When eBay invested in the e-commerce platform in March 2010 was Magento effectively incorporated as a stand-alone venture. As we reported last year, there was some discontent from Magento employees around stock and equity.

Last Fall, eBay debuted X.commerce, which featured a “fabric” that stitched the eBay, PayPal, GSI Commerce and Magento platforms together with other partners to create new experiences for retailers and their customers. At the time, eBay had more than 200,000 developers building off the two platforms, plus the 450,000 Magento developers that were added via the acquisition.

Magento also launched an app store for its extensions. Developers could create applications on top of Magento, and retailers could use this functionality in their online storefronts via the app store.

We spoke to Kutner on the phone, and he reiterated that eBay is struggling with what open source means. “They are not an open source company, so defining this has been a bit of a struggle.” And while he doesn’t think eBay would discontinue Magento as an open source platform, he says eBay still has not figured out the “fabric” component of X.commerce, over a year after the acquisition

As for why he left, Kutner says the execs that coordinated the deal at eBay and PayPal were no longer with the company, and the vision of why to buy Magento and what to do with it was lost when they left. “I’m hopeful they will figure it out,” he added.

eBay released this statement when we inquired about Kutner’s views: X.commerce & Magento are fundamentally believers in open source and an open ecosystem, including our Magento Community and Enterprise editions. Beyond our ongoing efforts, we are committed to releasing a major upgrade in Magento 2 in late 2012/early 2013. Additionally, our X.commerce Fabric is generally available and is also released in an open format. “Open” for X.commerce means that source code is available to anyone to modify and customize in their environment. “Open” can also mean that beyond being able to take a copy, developers in the ecosystem can modify the primary source code and help accelerate the overall progress of Magento.

While it’s important to remember that this is just one perspective, Kutner’s account doesn’t paint a rosy picture for the state of Magento in eBay’s family or for X.commerce. Last week, it was revealed that X.commerce CTO Neal Sample was leaving eBay to join American Express. PayPal also recently lost product VP Sam Shrauger as well as Alyssa Cutright (who joined Square).

Update: It appears the Quora post was taken down by Kutner. We have a screenshot, which we’ve embedded below.

eBay has sold off one of its properties today, real estate listings site Rent.com. The buyer is Primedia, which helps people find apartments, houses for rent or new homes for sale through websites, mobile and print publications. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

eBay originally bought Rent.com for $415 million in 2004. At the time, Rent.com fit in with eBay’s classifieds and listings business. Obviously, as the company as shifted towards a focus on e-commerce; classifieds, and real estate listings in particular, are no longer of major interest to eBay. Rent.com also partnered with eBay to help build a new shipping platform for eBay Motors.

Rent.com will be added to Primedia’s other apartment and rental home resources, which include the web properties ApartmentGuide.com, Rentals.com and RentalHouses.com. Primedia was actually just acquired by private investment firm TPG Capital for $525 million last year.

There’s been lots of debate about whether mobile apps or the web have the upper hand when it comes to making content for smartphones, and when it comes to using it. Some interesting insights from Nielsen out today on how in the case of mobile shopping, for now the main audience in the U.S. seems to be much more interested in using the mobile web over store-specific apps.

The research, which took into account data from some 5,000 Android and iOS smartphones in the U.S., doesn’t spell out how much money is actually spent on mobile web versus apps. And it looks like at least in the period covered by the research — which included the holiday shopping season — the results may have been particularly skewed by the sheer force of Amazon.

Nielsen notes that combining both mobile web and apps, the top five retailers’ sites — Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Target and Walmart — reached 60 percent of smartphone users. But as you can see in the table above, apps appeared to attract half as many users as mobile web sites did each month.

Nielsen also notes, for what it’s worth, that men are more likely to use apps than women, who opt for mobile web sites. And more men than women visited Best Buy on mobile, while Target and Walmart attracted more mobile women. eBay and Amazon, it seems transcend these lines, attracting both in equal measures.

But as you can see from the table below, it seems like the market had something of an Amazon effect on it: Amazon’s own mobile website had a disproportionate amount of traffic compared to the others. That could have contributed to the overall picture of apps having less usage than the mobile web sites:

But whether retailers are using apps or mobile web (or ideally both) to target users, there seems to be another, probably more important message about the state of mobile shopping, and what retailers should be focussing on fixing:

In the case of both apps and web, while users spiked during the holiday season, that was not sustained by any of them: “By January, active reach was back to October 2011 levels,” notes John Burbank, president of strategic initiatives at Nielsen.

Over the holidays, eBay and PayPal both pushed the term ‘couch commerce,’, in which consumers use their tablets and mobile phones from the comfort of their couches. In fact, eBay launched a new feature of its iPad app called Watch With eBay, which allowed users to shop a selection of items on the marketplace related to what they are currently watching on TV. Today, eBay is separating out the feature into a standalone, free iPad app.

The Watch With eBay app surfaces merchandise related to what consumers are watching on television, from the latest fashion trends at red carpet awards shows to sports memorabilia, to DVDs, signed autographs and other items related to favorite shows and actors.

As eBay says, a reported 86 percent of mobile Internet surfers use their smartphones and tablets as their “second screens” simultaneously while watching their favorite shows. While many consumers look to eBay with a specific intent for an item, eBay believes there is tremendous potential in engaging people when they are not necessarily on a shopping mission.

The app itself includes a program guide consumers can use to access content related to their favorite television shows in real-time with the ability to curate content by category. Users tap “Watch with eBay” and type in their zip code, cable provider, channel and the program they are currently watching; and using show and event-specific key word searches, the app will surface relevant merchandise from the more than 300 million listings available on the eBay marketplace.

Consumers can browse or choose to eliminate a keyword to pull up the most relevant listings. For example, a New York Yankees fan watching a Yankees vs. Red Sox game can filter out “Red Sox” and view listings only for the Yankees.

Another feature called eBay Celebrity gives users an inside look at featured celebrities’ favorite items, and eBay will curate shopping results related to the celebrity picks and provides the option to donate to a benefiting charity at check out. Some celebrities will interact with consumers through original content, video and message boards.

As eBay mobile VP Steve Yankovich tells us, “apps on TV don’t work. It’s about providing a second screen experience.” He feels the app’s ability to add product discovery to the TV watching experience will attract a lot of consumers. Already he says, Watch With eBay on the marketplace’s standalone app has become a popular feature among users.

When Groupon was gearing up for its IPO last year, there was a lot of talk about whether the company would be able to sustain its business on a diet that mainly consisted of daily deals. Today, a little sign of what Groupon might be cooking up for its next course.

Over in Germany, Groupon has launched a new site, Groupon Deals, an Amazon-like storefront that sells a range of goods, from boots to bodysuits.

Like Groupon’s mainstay-daily deals, the products are being sold at big discounts, of up to 70 percent on some items. Unlike the daily deals, these products do not have timeouts on buying them.

According to the site, Groupon Deals offers consumers a “complete shopping experience,” although at the moment, the selection of goods on offer is pretty small. That points to this being a local experiment more than anything else for now.

But even so, it is already starting to market the service in some form: A reader tells us that offers from Groupon Deals started appearing in his Facebook feed earlier today.

It is unclear at this point whether this is something that Groupon is planning on offering only in Germany, or whether it intends to roll out similar storefronts in other regions, which currently serve 33 million active users.

We have contacted Groupon to ask questions and will update this post as we learn more. Update: Groupon’s director of communications, Julie Mossler, said in an email: “We’re testing a new site design for Germany and based on customer and merchant feedback we’ll evaluate how to move forward.”

Extending out its services to a more conventional model of selling goods online is not exactly disruptive and cutting-edge, but it is probably also a natural move for Groupon: the company already has extensive relationships with retailers and brands for its time-based daily deals, which cover not only events and services, but a range of physical products, too. Each product on the site comes with a list of “supplier details”: that might mean Groupon has a platform for third parties to upload products for sale.

It also puts Groupon even more directly in competition with the likes of more established players like Amazon and eBay, to mention nothing of more local online retailing operations.

International is a division where Groupon is focusing hard, but at a price. In the company’s Q4 earnings reported last week, Groupon reported a loss of $350 million, with $137 million of that attributable to international expansion costs.

Groupon’s European operation was kick-started back in May 2010, when it bought Germany-based competitor Citydeal for an undisclosed sum. At that time Citydeal was already active in several European markets.

Personal recommendations have always been a part of ecommerce, but there has been little innovation since Amazon introduced retail and product personalization 10 years ago. But with the increasing mountains of data at digital retailers’ fingertips, ecommerce is about to get even more personal.

The fact is that right now there is little iteration from personalized ecommerce beyond what is taking place on Amazon. So you’ll see suggestions of what other shoppers who bought a certain item also purchased, or recommendations to similar items to what you have purchased, but there is a whole world of social data, and even more-in-depth purchase data that can be mined by retailers to help increase sales.

Kleiner Perkins partner Aileen Lee agrees with me, “In the future, the best  retail sites will know you much better and show you things that are much more relevant.” Lee has helped lead investments in a number of e-commerce companies including Offermatic, One Kings Lane, Plum District, Rent the Runway, and Trendyol and held operating roles at The Gap and North Face.

“We are just at the beginning of a revolution of e-commerce, and existing retailers are going to have to get better at personalizing the experience for consumers,” Lee says.

“Personalization was really important in enabling Amazon to differentiate itself and grow in past ten years,” David Selinger, CEO and co-founder of RichRelevance. Selinger also was Amazon’s Manager, Consumer Behavior Research and helped build some of the site’s personalization features a number of years ago. “Personalization will be the differentiating factor in e-commerce and digital commerce going forward, especially for multichannel retailers and new entrants online.”

Amazon and Netflix represent the first wave of personalization. I believe that we are going to enter into the next wave of a more personalized e-commerce experience as retailers and e-commerce sites move towards mining data to improve sales and conversions.

It’s highly likely that you have helped boost Amazon and Netflix’s conversion rates on movies, books, or other products thanks to personalized suggestions of items that you may like based on your previous purchase data, other consumers’ purchase history and more. In fact, it’s so seamlessly baked into the user experience for both companies, that I tend to not even notice how impactful personalization is on what I purchase.

That’s not to say that Amazon is the only retailer experimenting with personalization. eBay has also been personalizing the marketplace experience with recommendations of similarly viewed or bought items for some time, and is looking to expand personalization efforts with PayPal. And with the recent acquisition of Hunch, we know eBay is going to ramp up data mining.

Recently, I started to receive emails from Gilt Groupe that suggested similar earring to like those those I had added to my wait-list on the e-commerce site. The company also sends personalized email notifications on sales that are tailored to each customer. Gilt, who declined to comment for this piece, seems to realize that personalization is going to be a key product driver for the site in the future. And brick and mortar retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue, and many others are also starting to jump on the personalized email bandwagon.

The Challenges

The best way begin understanding the opportunity of personalization in the future is to realize the immense challenge that retailers face when approaching personalization. As DJ Patil, Data Scientist in Residence at Greylock Partners, explains, “When you go to Nordstrom you have a shopping assistant helps direct you, basically says ‘I’m here to help, what do you need and here’s where to find this.’ No online retailer has quite nailed that,” he explains.

For most retailers, the toughest hurdle is to have enough data on an individual to actually help personalize the experience. For the majority of buyers who purchase from a specific site once every few months, or even less frequently, a retailer may have no real sense of direction on how to present similar products.

Getting these data points is the biggest challenge that retailers face. But retailers do have significant data for the small amount of regular, routine customers for an e-commerce site, including clicks, purchase history, shopping cart information, shares and Likes, and more. Retailers face challenges on how to store and organize this data, and then turn this into personal recommendations

And data comes in various forms. There’s implicit data (which is gained from your everyday actions on a retailer’s site) and explicit data (which you offer to sites via surveys or quizzes). While retailers are doing more with the implicit data (i.e. reminding you when you left items in your shopping cart); no one has yet mastered the art of capturing that precious explicit data.

Google’s Boutiques.com tried its hand at this, as a search engine and fashion site which allowed users to receive personalized clothes and accessory recommendations based on preferences and actions. But Google subsequently shut the portal down last September.

Asking for users to fill out surveys of what they love or like perhaps isn’t the ticket to drawing explicit data, such as brands you love, colors, styles and more. As Patil explains, retailers who ask for this information need to present this as more of a conversation as opposed to replicating the feel of a doctor’s appointment where you are filling out your life history via forms.

Getting these signals from consumers is very difficult from a UI and user experience stand point, he says. His advice to retailers is to find a way to replicate how a store owner or shop keeper would engage you in a conversation when walking into a store and looking for something open-ended, such as a birthday gift. One way to do this is to present a personalized item suggestion but ask the consumer (in a Pandora-like fashion) if the recommendation sucks and how they can make the shopper’s life better “People want to help the system and love to correct things,” Patil says.

And similar to Pandora, people become more invested in a platform that knows their preferences and will be more likely to return.

There’s also the issue of finding the balance between providing serendipity in terms of discovery and personalization. Retailers still want their sites to be this Pandora’s box of discovering items, literally, but personalization can cut down on this discovery process. So retailers need to both anticipate what consumers may want to purchase on the site but also provide items that consumers will be able to feel like they ‘discovered’ on the site.

Patil draws an interesting comparison with how grocery stores have been able to structure their layouts to provide serendipity and useful discovery. “When you go to the supermarket, the stores know you are definitely going to milk aisle, so they often put it in the back of the store, so you can find serendipitous stuff on the way. Online retailers need to replicate that on e-commerce sites.” In the end, the goal is to be able to deliver personalization without being predictable.

At a macro level, retailers also face challenges in finding talent to sort this big data. The difference between doing data personalization well are radical shifts financially for retailers, Selinger explains. The engineers who are able to parse these massive amounts of data are hard to come by, and expensive.

Social

Social data (i.e. the Facebook Likes of products, what products people are recommending on Facebook or Twitter) is going to be a big part of personalization for retailers in the future. Already plenty of retailers are using Facebook social plugins and Connect integrations to leverage Facebook data to show visitors what friends bought or shared, what products relate to their Likes, and which friends they might want to invite.

The problem with this data is that much of it is unstructured, and there is really no one who has effectively nailed social personalization in the commerce arena the way Amazon was able to do with data from purchase behavior. Blippy attempted to socialize purchases, but it failed. Amazon also allows you to connect to Facebook to access your friends’ Likes and recommendations but I find this UI to be clunky, and not very useful.

Selinger thinks that mining social data for ecommerce may lose steam before it takes off, drawing the comparison to email. “In 2007, if you were to walk into VC’s office with an idea about ecommerce and email, you would have been sent out the door,” Selinger says. But he explains that while there is an inherent enterprise value in this social data, it will take a long time to take off, similar to the way it took awhile for personalized email and commerce models to enter the market. “When someone figures out how to do it and do it well, it will grow really quickly,” he maintains.

The challenge for retailers is making sense of the Facebook news feed — i.e. streamlining recommendations, attaching brands and tags to this data and then serving this to shoppers in a useful, personalized format. Basically, your social network can become your Consumer Reports.

The challenge for the data mining community, explains Patil, is actually figuring out the intent in much of the unstructured data that is posted about retail products and brands on Facebook. And it’s important to keep in mind that some of this data from Facebook users is private.

This past week, Facebook partnered up with sixty different startups to add their “stories” to Facebook Timeline, through apps that span different verticals from Food, Fashion to Travel. Part of this involved adding new actions (in addition to ‘like’) to Timeline story options. That includes the verbs ‘bought’ and ‘want.’

There is tremendous potential in developers and retailers being able to mine this data from ‘boughts’ and wants’ as opposed to the open-ended ‘like.’ You can see details on what social shopping mall Payvment is doing with the new protocols here, but basically, the ability to add these targeted buttons could be game-changing for social discovery in e-commerce.

Privacy

Echoing Lee’s thoughts, Patil is confident that there will be a new wave of personalization and e-commerce. But without data, there is no personalization. So consumers both on Facebook as well as on retail sites will have to be more willing to give up key data like purchase history, Likes and other social actions, and even location in order to get a more personalized shopping experience on retail sites.

The key will be getting consumers to understand that more data will improve their shopping experience, and making the choice of opting-in a no brainer.

Selinger agrees that privacy is going to be an important issue in the next tranche of personalization innovation. “Now more than ever, consumers are more cognizant of what’s happening with their data,” he says. But what retailers have in the favor is a strong foundation of privacy practices, because these companies have had to protect consumer financial and credit card data for time. Selinger believes that retailers will be very thoughtful about privacy and data sharing going forward.

Perhaps sites like Blippy and Boutiques.com were ahead of their time when it came to consumers willingly handing over the keys to their shopping and payment preferences. I envision a day when there will be an app that reads all of your purchase history via your email account and then serves you recommendations based on this data. There are some companies who are already parsing through receipts in your inbox to organize purchases, so why not take this a step further.

And these personalization strategies that are being adopted by retailers are already trickling down to other kinds of sites beyond e-commerce as well. In the same way that ecommerce sites are trying to maximize sales and profits with this data, content sites are also using social and other data to add relevance to their platforms.

So shoppers, be prepared to give up your data. In the coming year, we’re going to see many more retail sites ramping up data-driven discovery. And e-commerce sites who aren’t thinking about how to mine social and other forms of data are probably going to be left in the dust by the Amazons and Netflix’s of the next wave of personalization.

eBay just reported fourth quarter and fiscal year 2011 earnings today, which were above analysts expectations. eBay posted revenue of $3.4 billion, up 35 percent from the same quarter in 2010. The company reported fourth quarter net income on a GAAP basis of $2.0 billion, or $1.51 per diluted share, and non-GAAP net income of $788.6 million, or $0.60 per diluted share. Net income was up 15 percent to $789 million. Analysts expected earnings per share of $0.57 on revenue of $3.32 billion.

eBay says the year-over-year increase in the fourth quarter GAAP earnings per diluted share was driven primarily by a gain on the sale of the company’s remaining investment in Skype. The year-over-year increase in the fourth quarter non-GAAP earnings per diluted share was driven primarily by strong top-line growth and improved productivity partially offset by a higher tax rate.

For the full year, revenue increased 27% to $11.7 billion, compared to 2010. The company generated net income on a GAAP basis of $3.2 billion, or $2.46 per diluted share, and non-GAAP net income of $2.7 billion, or $2.03 per diluted share.

eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe said this of the quarter: “We had a strong fourth quarter finish to an excellent year, increasing our confidence in our three-year outlook…Across eBay, PayPal, GSI and X.commerce, we have a robust portfolio of global commerce platforms and innovative mobile, local and social commerce technology assets. We are well-positioned to compete in the emerging new retail environment, and to help retailers of all sizes grow and engage their customers anytime, anywhere. We are a different eBay today, no longer just an ecommerce leader but a stronger, more diverse global commerce company shaping the future of shopping and payments.”

The company’s PayPal business continued to be the crown jewel in eBay’s earnings. PayPal ended the year with 106.3 million active registered accounts, a 13% increase year over year. On average, PayPal added a million new accounts every month in 2011.

PayPal revenue for the quarter increased 28% year over year driven primarily by continued merchant and consumer adoption as well as increased penetration on eBay. In the fourth quarter, revenue from PayPal’s international markets exceeded revenue from the U.S. for the first time. PayPal’s net total payment volume (TPV) grew 24% to $33.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011. PayPal brought in $1.2 billion for the quarter, up 29 percent.

The marketplace business also grew in the fourth quarter, up 16 percent year over year to $1.77 billion, due primarily to increased buying and selling on the platform as well as growth from acquisitions. Gross merchandise volume (GMV), excluding vehicles, increased 10 percent to $16.5 billion with sold items up 11% globally year over year. U.S. GMV, excluding vehicles, increased 10 percent year over year. International GMV, excluding vehicles, increased 9 percent year over year, driven primarily by growth in Europe and in Asia. The company’s GSI business contributed $363.6 million in revenue for the fourth quarter.

In terms of expectations, eBay expects net revenues in the range of $3.05 to $3.15 billion with GAAP earnings per diluted share in the range of $0.37 – $0.38 and non-GAAP earnings per diluted share in the range of $0.50 – $0.51 for the first quarter 2012.

For eBay, 2011 was really the year of mobile and local. Via both acquisitions and strategic product launches, the company pushed mobile payments in both its marketplaces and PayPal businesses. PayPal surpassed its expectation of $3.5 billion in mobile payments in 2011, reaching $4 billion for the year. And eBay reached $5 billion in mobile GMV (gross merchandise volume) in 2011.

The company is projecting that eBay would reach $8 billion in mobile GMV in 2012, and PayPal will reach $7 billion in transactions in 2012.

With Donahoe at the helm of both eBay and PayPal, it should be interesting to see how 2012 shapes up for the e-commerce giant. We know that PayPal is debuting an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems that is currently being tested on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. And we could also see a new PayPal CEO as well.

We’ll be covering the earnings call below, so stay tuned.

EARNINGS CALL:

Donahoe says that the company has a strong fourth quarter. “2011 marked an inflection point for shopping; Online and offline retail are rapidly blending into a seamless multichannel world.”

PayPal is generating excitement about it’s in-store offerings. For retailers, this will give them opportunities to not only engage consumers at checkout but throughout the shopping experience. We will be launching a pilot to 50 Home Depot Stores in San Francisco this week.

Donahoe: We’ve added more new users to eBay in the fourth quarter than we’ve had in the past few years.

In light of Scott Thompson’s recent departure, Donahoe says the PayPal management team has never been stronger. He says Thompson’s departure was a surprise, but he wishes him well. “I feel better about this leadership team than any time in the company’s history.”

At his CES keynote yesterday evening, eBay CEO (and new interim PayPal CEO) John Donahoe revealed a number of new mobile payments forecasts for both eBay and PayPal. As we heard from PayPal VP David Marcus a few days ago, PayPal surpassed its expectation of $3.5 billion in mobile payments in 2011, reaching $4 billion for the year. Donahoe said in his keynote that eBay reached $5 billion in mobile GMV (gross merchandise volume) in 2011, doubling 2010′s GMV.

He also projected yesterday that eBay would reach $8 billion in mobile GMV in 2012, and PayPal will reach $7 billion in transactions in 2012. eBay Mobile currently has more than 65 million downloads of eBay’s mobile applications across platforms. And more than 890,000 new eBay shoppers made their first eBay purchase through the company’s mobile apps in 2011, a 113% increase year over year.

Donahoe also announced a new strategic partner in eBay’s RedLaser barcode scanning app—Best Buy. The app was updated last fall to include integration from PayPal and Milo to give users the ability to buy now for either in-store pick-up or home delivery later. Yesterday, Best Buy was revealed at as RedLaser’s newest partner (joining Toys R Us).

As online retail sales continue to soar, brick and mortar stores are seeing margins dissipate. Online holiday sales are expected to grow 15 percent to $37.6 billion this season while retail sales in physical stores are only expected to increase by 3.8 percent to $469.1 billion. Best Buy recently reported a 29 percent drop in profits because of discounts and sales of top grossing electronics. The fact is that the electronics retailer was probably forced into offering deeply discounted deals in order to compete with e-commerce giant Amazon. And it doesn’t help that Amazon is now offering discounts to consumers on any product purchased via its price comparison mobile app, another huge blow to physical retailers.

Brick and mortar retailers need to figure out a way to compete with Amazon and other e-commerce giants that doesn’t eat into margins. Deals and coupons simply aren’t enought. And as former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson has said, retail isn’t broken, stores are. So how are retail stores going to survive? While mobile may be the technology e-commerce companies are using to jab physical stores, it is also the technology that may save these stores. Personalization and data are the two key factors that could save retail stores; and the vehicle by which these technologies can be utilized is via the mobile phone.

Why Mobile?

2011 has been pegged as the year of mobile shopping by both technology companies and retailers. Now more than ever consumers are carrying around phones that enable them to access apps, discounts, price comparison information, payments mechanisms and more. comScore recently reported that two-thirds of all smartphone owners performed some sort of shopping activity on their phones, including comparing products and prices, searching for coupons, taking product pictures or locating a retail store.

In fact, slightly more than one in three purchasers used their smartphone to make a purchase while in a store. When they enter retail stores, these consumers are carrying their mobile phones and using these devices.

E-commerce companies have been quick to capitalize on this trend while brick and mortar retailers have not caught on in quite the same way. As mentioned above, Amazon is incentivizing customers to use its PriceCheck mobile app. Customers can walk into a brick-and-mortar retailer, use the app to scan the barcodes of a desired product, and access Amazon’s prices for that product. More often than not, Amazon’s prices are lower, and if a customer places the item into the app’s virtual basket, a 5% discount will be applied to the product within 24 hours. Price Check app users can use the discount on up to three products.

Simply offering coupons aren’t going to be able to combat Amazon’s tactics, because not only are these deals going to eat into retailer margins but these incentives can’t necessarily bring shopper back to a store repeatedly.

Brick and mortar stores need to figure out not only how to drive traffic, but also how to increase the purchase amount and conversion rates, create loyalty and return customers and more.

Cyriac Roeding, founder of location-based mobile shopping app Shopkick believes that the mobile phone is key to the future of commerce for stores. In case you aren’t familiar, Shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free Android or iPhone app on their phone walks into a participating store. Once a Shopkick Signal is detected, the app delivers reward points called “kickbucks” to the user for walking into a retail store, trying on clothes, scanning a barcode and other actions. These rewards can be used towards purchases.

Rodeing says that the role of the physical store will change in the future. What online stores cannot offer (which brick and mortar outlets need to realize) is the one-on-one personalization and personal treatment that a physical store with employees can. And in-store shopping brings immediate gratification because a customer can take home the item with them as soon as the purchase is complete.

And mobile is how you bring personalization back to the in-store purchase experience. The challenge, he explains, is to make this experience worth the consumer’s time and money.

eBay is also trying to help physical retailers drive traffic into stores via its Red Laser barcode scanning apps, which now integrate in-store listings, prices and availability from Milo. As eBay’s Jack Abraham (who founded Milo) says, brick and mortar retailers need to be where their customers are, and that decision-making is now happening on phones.

“There are clearly companies that are positioning themselves as destroying brick and mortar retailers but we’re positioning ourselves to be an ally for the retailers,” he says. eBay recently launched a new campaign, where consumers who spend $100 at Toys “R” Us, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Aeropostale using PayPal, will get a $10 voucher to spend in store.

How To Personalize The Experience: Data!

How brick and mortar stores are going to be able to personalize and make the in-store shopping experience unique is through data, in my opinion. It’s no longer about creating a mobile web site or offering coupons; the experience centralizes around making customers feel as if they are being treated like a VIP just by walking into a store. And how brick and mortar stores are going to do that is the same way Amazon was able to create a business out of personalized e-commerce.

Some retailers are attempting to use video and heatmaps to try to see how people shop, what they are buying and more. But this data is limiting because while stores can figure out what is working when it comes to placement, advertising, and marketing of products in-store, retailers still don’t know who is buying and how to get them to return.

Personalization really gets interesting with transaction data. Shopkick recently teamed up with Visa to allow consumers a way to receive rewards points for retailers at the point of sale when they use their Visa credit cards. This is part of closing the redemption loop. The redemption loop starts when a consumer sees an ad or an offer for a merchant, and is completed when the consumer makes a purchase and that purchase can be tracked back to the offer. Thus far startups, tech companies and credit card companies have started to use transaction data as a way to close the redemption loop and drive future purchases but this is relatively new to brick and mortar retailers.

With the Shopkick deal, brick and mortar retailers could see what items a consumer purchased and deliver discounts, and special offers based on purchase behavior. And this can be delivered via the mobile phone.

Of course, this would all have to be an opt-in experience for shoppers considering the privacy implications. But many consumers use the personalized experience of Amazon when buying books, electronics and others items, so why not replicate this in the physical world?

This means more partnerships with credit card companies like Visa, MasterCard and American Express. Online payments giant PayPal also sees this as a huge opportunity for physical stores. PayPal announced an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems that is currently being tested on a ‘friends and family’ basis in a national retailer in two markets.

The opt-in offering will include location-based offers, making payments accessible from any device and offering more payments flexibility to customers after they’ve checked out. Users will have the ability to access realtime store inventory, receive in-store offers, and real-time location-based advertising from stores. While exact details are still unclear, it sounds like PayPal will use location and transaction data to help in-store retailers improve the experience for consumers.

PayPal is partnering with a at least 20 known top-tier retailers, which will be unveiled in 2012. We hear about the initial retailer as soon as this year.

PayPal’s Anuj Nayar tells me candidly that retailers are desperate for this offering. “The fact is that most retailers have no idea about customers until they are leaving the store and that comes down to data.” He says PayPal is working with in-store retailers to create a suite of tools and technologies that help use technologies to level the playing field when it comes to data.

One thing that is clear is that retailers need to jump on the mobile, personalization and data bandwagon very soon. Online retailers are only getting more aggressive (i.e. Amazon), and it’s only a matter of time before online retailers start to ramp up their existing personalization offers even more.

Roeding says that physical retailers who doesn’t focus on mobile in the next six months are going to face a major problem in the next year. But it goes beyond just created a dedicated site and mobile app. Brick and mortar retailers need to find a way to be in as many mobile applications as possible, such as ShopKick, PayPal, and eBay, where potential customers are deciding what to buy and where.

Abraham echoes these thoughts, explaining that retailers need to be part of search results, especially in mobile search results. “If they don’t, they risk getting lost in the age of the post-pc era,” he says. eBay is building out its own predictive data capabilities with the recent acquisition of Hunch, and we can expect more data-focused features to be rolled out soon.

As for which brick and mortar retailer is going to be the first catch on the mobile and data wave when it comes to in-store shopping, my bets are on Wal-mart. The retailer has been particularly aggressive on the technology front, buying social and mobile ad targeting company OneRiot, and social media startup Kosmix. Wal-mart is already experimenting with a number of in-store mobile services, including things like NFC, barcode scanning and in-store geo-fencing.

There’s no doubt that 2012 could be a pivotal year for brick and mortar stores. But they need to act fast and start providing a unique experience for customers or risk being left in the dust by Amazon.

A little over a year after its subsidiary PayPal bought a minority stake in German software company BilLSAFE, eBay this morning announced that it has acquired the provider of purchase-on-invoice technology in full.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Headquartered in Kleinmachnow, BillSAFE works with merchants all across Germany, giving them a way to let shoppers purchase items after receiving them, by means of an invoice.

The company, which was founded in 2006, is said to boast over 15 million accounts in Germany.

PayPal / eBay says it believes the addition of BILLSAFE as a payment option will provide a “comprehensive payment service for merchants and consumers” and in a statement claims that purchase on invoice is already the most popular form of payment in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

eBay adds that it does not expect the acquisition of BillSAFE to have a material impact on its most recent financial guidance.

It’s no secret that eBay is pushing mobile in a big way. Especially during this holiday shopping season, the e-commerce giant is seeing record mobile engagement. And today, eBay is announcing that more than 1 million listings are now made every week through eBay mobile.

That means that now more than ever, eBay’s marketplace sellers are uploading items they want to sell via mobile devices. Last year, eBay consolidated its buying and selling iPhone apps, allowing seller to quickly take photos of items and post them on eBay from the same app that buyers browser items on.

eBay is also publishing a new video series, called eBay MoneyMakers, which will feature families who turned to eBay to make money in tough economic situations.

Online commerce giant eBay this morning ran a Cyber Monday deal for a white Apple iPad 2 WiFi 16GB, selling the popular tablet for $449 or exactly $50 off the MSRP (+ free shipping). Turns out a lot of people figured that was a great deal.

And they were right, too. After all, Apple only discounted the iPad 2 16GB with $41 on Black Friday, so you would indeed have been better off waiting until today and buying it on eBay … if you could get your hands on it quickly enough.

An eBay rep tells me that the iPad 2 was on sale for a mere two hours before it was sold out. At that price, people picked up four iPad 2 tablets per minute (or about 480 in total) during that time.

There were other deals on eBay that were worth breaking out your wallet for. The company sold a Microsoft Xbox 360 250GB Kinect Bundle for $259.99 – all 1,500 of those on sale were gone in 20 minutes (or 75 bundles sold per minute).

eBay also sold a HP 3105m laptop for $199.99, and sold nearly three units per minute to sell out the notebook PC in just over three hours.

It also knocked a whopping 58 percent off a RIM BlackBerry PlayBook 32GB ($249), but it hasn’t sold out yet today – which I guess says a lot more about the tablet than it does about eBay.

As we heard earlier today, Thanksgiving proved to be a lucrative day for online retailers. IBM reported online Thanksgiving 2011 sales were up 39 percent over Thanksgiving 2010, with mobile shopping on the rise. eBay and PayPal are seeing similar trends. PayPal Mobile just announced a 511 percent increase in global mobile payment volume when compared to Thanksgiving 2010.

On Thanksgiving in the U.S., consumers shopped on mobile via PayPal most frequently between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. PST. Around the world, consumers shopped on mobile most frequently between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. PST.

There was a more than three-fold (350 percent) increase in the number of global customers shopping through PayPal mobile on Thanksgiving 2011 compared to last year. These shoppers were mainly located in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago.

eBay says that the amount shoppers in the U.S. that bought and spent via eBay Mobile more than doubled this Thanksgiving over last year. GSI Commerce saw a more than three-fold (345 percent) increase in U.S. mobile sales this Thanksgiving compared to 2010. And Searches through the local product listings platform Milo increased 557 percent percent over Thanksgiving Day 2010.

For eBay, the busiest eBay Mobile shopping hour on Thanksgiving was between 6 and 7 p.m. PST. The five most popular categories shopped via eBay Mobile, excluding vehicles (by number of sold items) were Clothing, Shoes & Accessories; Cell Phones & PDAs; Jewelry & Watches; Collectibles and Toys & Hobbies.

In electronics, the top purchases items yesterday were iPhone Accessories, the black Apple iPhone 4 (16GB), and the Apple iPod Touch 4th Generation (8GB).

The dramatic rise in payment volume via mobile phones isn’t particularly surprising considering all the hype around mobile shopping this holiday season. But a 500 percent increase in payment volume for PayPal is still impressive for mobile shopping and we haven’t even seen the full numbers for Black Friday or Cyber Monday yet.

So far, things look positive for Black Friday, eBay says that as of 11 a.m. PST, PayPal is already seeing a more than six-fold increase (538 percent) in global mobile payment volume on Black Friday 2011 compared to the same time period on Black Friday 2010.

According to IBM, the number of consumers using a mobile device on Black Friday to visit a retailer’s site is holding firm at 17.37 percent and the number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase remains is at 9.73 percent. The iPhone currently leads all mobile device traffic at 6.77 percent, followed by Android at 5.37 percent and iPad at 4.6 percent.

Already IBM says that afternoon results show that Black Friday 2011 online sales are 20 percent higher for the same time period over Black Friday 2010. Black Friday 2011 online sales eclipsed Thanksgiving sales at 2:20pm PST this afternoon, says IBM.

Amanda Pires of PayPal tell us that the holiday is proving to be the largest mobile holiday shopping season PayPal and eBay has ever seen. “The retailers that are taking advantage of mobile shopping are going to win. We expect mobile shopping to continue to be strong throughout the holiday season.”

eBay and PayPal are both pushing the term ‘couch commerce,’ in which consumers will be using their tablets and mobile phones from the comfort of their couches to shop this holiday shopping season. eBay is launching a new feature of its iPad app, which should help take couch commerce to another level.

A new “Watch with eBay” tab has been added to the e-commerce giant’s iPad app that allows users to shop a selection of items on the marketplace related to
what they are currently watching on TV.

Users tap “Watch with eBay” and type in their zip code, cable provider, channel and the program they are currently watching; and using show and event-specific key word searches, the app will surface relevant merchandise from the more than 200 million listings available on the eBay marketplace.

eBay says this is just the beginning. The company plans to partner with networks, stations, cable providers and studio to identify products featured in each scene of a movie or show.

eBay believes there’s huge potential in blending couch commerce with TV content. According to the company, 86 percent of mobile internet users are using their devices while watching TV. A quarter of these users are browsing content related to what they are watching.

In fact, eBay and PayPal are predicting the first mobile shopping spike this holiday season will take place after dinner on Thanksgiving Day, when people will head for the couch, armed with their smartphones and tablets.

Online holiday shopping reached record levels in 2010. And e-commerce spending is up this year. All signs point to consumers spending even more online this holiday season. I sat down with executives from Google, eBay, PayPal and ShopKick to discuss the trends that are expected to emerge in the e-commerce space over the next few months.  They center around mobile, tablets, and deals.

PayPal has more than doubled its mobile payments volume since the 2010 holiday shopping season, and we haven’t even hit the thick of this year’s rush. eBay is projecting $5 billion in mobile payments volume in 2010 and this number could increase in the next few months. And Google projects that 15 percent of total search on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving and one of the biggest shopping days of the year) will come from mobile devices. Tablet devices are now a part of the online shopping experience and retailers are taking note. Clearly, all signs point to the fact that this could be the breakout year for mobile shopping.

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile

All of the companies I spoke to unanimously agreed that this would be the year of mobile for the holiday shopping season. Steve Yankovich, head of eBay’s mobile business operations and development, says he expects this to be the biggest year for mobile sales for eBay yet. eBay has said that the company expects to see $5 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2011, and this will be partly buoyed by a strong mobile presence in November and December.

PayPal’s Senior Director for Mobile, Laura Chambers, echoes Yankovich’s forecasts and says that merchants are even preparing for the onslaught of traffic to their mobile sites. A number of big retailers, such as Armani Exchange, Guess and The Limited have recently put PayPal’s mobile express checkout as an option for payments on their mobile sites as a way to help the conversion process. “We are seeing strong investments by online retailers for mobile shopping this year,” she says.

Chambers says that last year, the peak day for mobile payments for PayPal was December 12, with $4.7 million in mobile payments volume. Now PayPal is seeing $10 million in mobile payments per day, and we haven’t even officially hit the holiday shopping period. Clearly, the mobile payments numbers could even triple from last year to this year.

While many consumers may shop on mobile for their holiday purchases, the usage of product search, barcode scanning, and other informative apps will also play a big part in this year’s mobile shopping. eBay’s RedLaser barcode scanning apps have seen scans go up 50 percent over the past year. If you aren’t familiar with how it works, RedLaser will scan the barcode of a physical product and show you where you can buy it on eBay’s properties and where it is available in local store locations around you (via Milo) and for how much. The app has been updated with PayPal functionality so that users can actually buy the product directly from the app.

Another shopping app developer who has high hopes for mobile this holiday season is ShopKick. Co-founder Cyriac Roeding says that this year will be the year of mobile for physical shopping. For background, Shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free Android or iPhone app on their phone walks into a store. Once a Shopkick Signal is detected, the app delivers reward points called “kickbucks” to the user for walking into a retail store, trying on clothes, scanning a barcode and other actions. Kickbucks can then be redeemed across all partner stores for gift card rewards or for Facebook Credits. User can also receive special discounts on specific products at partners stores like Macy’s, Best Buy or Target.

Roeding explains that the cell phone is the only interactive platform you carry with you in a physical store, and retailers are looking to use the platform to help drive transactions. Clearly, a mobile rewards app that offers in-store discounts can help do this. “The internet has caused brick and mortar retailers more trouble than benefit over the past fifteen years. Now retailers are catching on to how the internet can help retailers—that’s where mobile comes in.”

Sameer Samat, VP of Product Management for Google Commerce, tells me that the search giant is seeing a growing number of users are making buying decisions using their mobile phone. “We are definitely seeing m-commerce conversions growing and becoming bigger over time,” he says. “But users are also using their mobile phone to search for products and find local availability.”

Samat says that Google has seen a 200 percent growth in mobile product search usage and Google Shopper app downloads over the past year. Shopper, which is available for iOS and Android, allows you to find product prices, reviews, specs, local inventory of products at nearby stores, and more.

As we mentioned above, Google is forecasting that 15 percent of total search on Black Friday. will come from mobile. “There’s no doubt that users are now making buying decisions using their mobile phone,” says Samat. “And we are seeing m-commerce conversions growing and becoming bigger over time.”

Tablets

As tablets have grown to be the go-to browsing device, the iPad, and other devices are also becoming a way to shop. And retailers are catching on to this trend. According to a National Retail Federation study, 20 percent of retailers have invested in tablet device apps this holiday season.

With this in mind, Google debuted Catalogs in August, an app for tablet devices that includes 200 catalogs from major brands including Anthropologie, Bare Escentuals, Bergdorf Goodman, Crate and Barrel, L.L. Bean, Lands’ End, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Pottery Barn, Saks Fifth Avenue, Sephora, Sundance, Tea Collection, Urban Outfitters and Williams-Sonoma.

The app is more than just a browsing experience. When consumers find an item they’d like to purchase, they can tap to find it in a store nearby or tap “Buy on Website” to visit the merchant online.

Google’s Samat says that “the tablet is the ultimate leanback experience and we see that playing a big role in holiday shopping as a replacement for the mail order catalogs you used to browse through.”

PayPal calls it ‘couch commerce’ and believes that tablet commerce will have a record year. PayPal recently reported that consumers who own both a tablet and a smartphone are significantly more likely (63%) to indicate increased overall spending on mobile purchases, versus owners of smartphones only (29%). Owners of both a tablet and a smartphone buy nearly twice as often as those who only have smartphones and more than 40% of dual owners made more than 20 mobile purchases over the past year, compared to only 12% of smartphone-only owners.

Forrester just released a report predicting a 15 percent increase in online shopping sales this year to nearly $60 billion, partly due to the increase in consumer-use of tablet computers for shopping.

Beyond Black Friday And Cyber Monday

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are historically the top-high-grossing online shopping days during the holiday season. But execs expect to see high volumes of online shopping on other days thanks to an increase in mobile shopping and deals.

Yankovitch tells me that eBay expects revenue numbers to be well over numbers that eBay saw last year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but expects to see more activity at times when people aren’t traditionally shopping.

The day of Thanksgiving is one of those days, says Chambers. Because people will have their phone everywhere (including at the table), consumers are expected to make purchases on the fly, especially on Thanksgiving evening. In fact, PayPal is predicting that after dinner on Thanksgiving Day will be the first mobile shopping spike this holiday season.

Another popular day has been the second Sunday in December, which is one of the last days where people feel confident that items will be shipped in times for the holiday. And Chambers says across the board, Sunday is the biggest day for mobile shopping generally.

Deals

There’s no doubt that deals, coupons and discounts will be a large part of the online holiday shopping experience, especially with the current state of the economy. According to the recent Forrester report, 58 percent of Americans say they are more price-conscious today than they were a year ago and nearly half believe they find better values online.

“I really expect consumers to be deal hunting this season,” explains Chambers. She says that PayPal, which has historically offered special deals for the holiday shopping season, will be bulking up on more consumer deals this holiday season.

Samat says that Google has always seen a spike for queries like deals, coupons, and sales during the holiday time and fully expects to see an increase this year. “The consumer desire for a better deal will help give certain product decision tools a big bump,” he explains. “People may take more time this year to find the best possible price.”

Deals could also include lucrative holiday shipping offers. In 2010, 45 of the top 50 online retailers offered some sort of promotional deal between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, most of which were a type of shipping promotion. And in 2011, Shop.org anticipates that a record 92.5% of online retailers will offer free shipping and not just as a Cyber Monday promotion.

Clearly, there’s plenty of optimism from retailers, and tech companies regarding online spending and shopping this holiday season. And this holiday season is somewhat unique considering the big bet that retailers are making on newer technologies, such as mobile, geo-location, tablets, local product search and more. The big question is how consumers will react to and engage with these technologies over the next several weeks.  It could be a very mobile Christmas.

eBay reported third quarter earnings today, which were in-line with Wall Street expectations. Revenue for the third quarter increased 32% to $3 billion, compared to the same period of 2010. This was actually a record quarter for revenue, says the company. Net income on a GAAP basis was $490.5 million, or $0.37 per diluted share, and non-GAAP net income came in at $628.2 million, or $0.48 per diluted share, up 18 percent from 2010. Analysts expected $0.48 cents per share, and revenue was expected to hit $2.9 billion.

The company’s PayPal business continued to help buoy the company’s earnings. PayPal ended the quarter with 103 million active registered accounts, a 14% increase year over year. PayPal revenue increased 32% year over year driven primarily by increased penetration on eBay as well as continued merchant and consumer adoption. PayPal’s net total payment volume grew 31% to $29.3 billion in the third quarter of 2011 compared to the same period of last year. PayPal had its first billion dollar quarter last quarter but exceeded this, bringing in $1.1 billion in revenue, which is up over 30 percent from 2010. And PayPal expects to generate more than $3.5 billion in mobile TPV in 2011, up from $750 million in 2010.

The company’s Marketplaces business also grew, bringing in $1.7 billion in revenue, which is up 17 percent from the previous year. Gross merchandise volume (GMV) excluding vehicles increased by 16% year over year to $14.7 billion. U.S. GMV excluding vehicles increased 14% year over year, and nternational GMV excluding vehicles increased 18% year over year to $9.1 billion, reflecting solid growth in Europe, continued improved performance in Korea, as well as a positive impact from foreign exchange. eBay expects to generate almost $5 billion in mobile GMV in 2011, more than double mobile GMV in 2010.

The company’s GSI Commerce business, which was acquired earlier this year, contributed $202.6 million in revenue for the third quarter. GSI generated $608 million in global ecommerce (GeC) merchandise sales during the quarter.

The year-over-year increase in third quarter GAAP and non-GAAP earnings per diluted share was driven primarily by strong top-line growth, says eBay, and partially offset by continued investment in strategic initiatives and the impact of acquisitions.

eBay Inc. President and CEO John Donahoe, said in a statement, “Our company reported another strong quarter, with eBay, PayPal and GSI each performing well…Mobile commerce continues to accelerate as consumers change the way they shop and pay. We expect eBay mobile commerce to generate almost $5 billion in merchandise volume this year and PayPal mobile to exceed $3.5 billion in payment volume. Mobile is one way online and offline shopping are blending into a single commerce environment. We are focused on enabling commerce, helping consumers shop anytime, anywhere, and being the commerce partner of choice for retailers of all sizes.”

In the Fourth quarter, eBay expects revenues in the range of $3.2 to $3.35 billion million with GAAP earnings per diluted share in the range of $1.47 – $1.53 and non-GAAP earnings per diluted share in the range of $0.55 – $0.58. GAAP earnings per diluted share will include the gain from eBay’s sale of its remaining equity interest in Skype. For the full year, eBay expects revenue in the range of $11.5 to $11.6 billion with GAAP earnings per diluted share in the range of $2.42 – $2.48 and non-GAAP earnings per diluted share in the range of $1.98 – $2.01.

The company has had a pretty significant few weeks. Last week eBay debuted its brand new developer business tomorrow, X.commerce, which stitched together technologies from eBay, PayPal, Magento and GSI. The company also teamed up with Facebook to integrate the social network’s Open Graph into the Magento and GSI global commerce platforms. PayPal also revealed PayPal Access, a payments identity technology that would allow you to carry your payments identity to various retailers on the web.

Facebook Platform Marketing Chief Katie Burke Mitic just joined eBay’s board. PayPal is also expected to debut a new payments platform for merchants as well as in-store integrations.

EARNINGS CALL

Donahoe says that the company is focused on ‘enabling commerce,’ giving users a seamless experience across channels. “Retail must be technology enabled and consumer-led”

“We are at an inflection point in global commerce,” Donahoe added. “We believe we’ll see more change in how people shop and pay in next 3 years than in the last decade.”

PayPal’s mobile payments are expected to exceed $3.5 billion, five times what it was in 2010. PayPal’s technology will soon be extended to retailer point of sale locations. In Q4 these in-store innovations will be tested on a ‘friends and family’ basis in a national retailer in two markets.

eBay mobile MGV will be more than double from last year, to $5 billion. Consumers are making on average 3 purchases per second via the company’s mobile apps.

Mobile payments is a fundamentally risky thing, says the company, but PayPal is going to provide a great mobile payments solution that is secure.

Today, at eBay’s new developer conference, Innovate, CEO John Donahoe told reporters that the company plans to roll out image-recognition technology for its mobile offerings by the end of the year. Yes, that’s right. Images, get ready to be recognized.

While Donahoe did not specify which of eBay’s apps would benefit from this technology, as its suite of mobile apps is not exactly pushing into the millions, we’re hoping that most of them will make the cut. The image recognition integration will allow users of eBay’s mobile apps to snap photos of items they see in the real world on their mobile phones, at which point the apps will then match the photo with similar products currently on sale on eBay.com. This will be a huge addition for the eCommerce giant: Point, click, upload, and find the product you desire. Via image search.

According to the AP, eBay’s fashion section already offers a comparable feature that enables users to check out similar products to what they’re currently searching for on the site.

If this sounds familiar, you may be a user of Google Goggles, the magic app in which a user simply opens said app, captures the objects or text images they want to search for, and lets Google do the rest. Granted, Google Goggles isn’t perfect for every search. Looking for plants, cars, furniture, or apparel? Not so good. Which is why image recognition on eBay apps will do quite nicely.

Or, hey, if you’re lazy, you can always just drag an image into the Google search bar and let the search engine scramble to figure out just what it is. Or, perhaps you’re looking for wine? Talk to Vivino.