Reading Leena Rao’s recent article on Techcrunch about the personalization revolution, you get the sense that the tech world is waiting for a bus that isn’t coming. Rao quotes well-known industry experts and luminaries describing what needs to happen for e-commerce to finally realize the promise of personalized shopping, a future where online retailers predict what you’ll want to buy before you know yourself.
Ironically, Rao and her pundits are missing the zooming racecar that’s speeding by them as they wait for the personalization bus to arrive. That racecar is Pinterest and the new breed of startups marking the beginning of what I call the “Curated Web.” → Read More
Y Combinator alum Curebit, an online customer referral platform that leverages social media for “word-of-mouth” advertising, has just raised $1.2 million in funding. The investors include 500 Startups, Karl Jacob, Auren Hoffman, Dharmesh Shah, Gordon Tucker, Alex Lloyd of Accelerator Ventures, and others.
The funding will be used for continued product development and a slight expansion to the team involving three new hires (two developers, one designer) to the company’s now five-person outfit. → Read More
Social networks could one day revolutionize how we get shopping recommendations, but not yet. Instead, tablets are causing the biggest shakeup in ecommerce. 80.2% of 1000 holiday shoppers said no, personal connections on Facebook or another social networking site did not influence their shopping decisions. Other findings of Baynote‘s annual study include that 48.6% of tablet owners made a purchase through their big mobile device, and that email was the channel with the most useful promotions. → Read More
Maxymiser, a company that helps improve website effectiveness through the use of A/B and multivariate testing, personalization and optimizations, has raised $12 million from new investors Investor Growth Capital alongside investment from its Series A investors, Pentech Ventures.
The funding will be used to help Maxymiser expand its business, with a special emphasis on North American R&D. → Read More
Doing some online shopping but don’t want the package shipped to your house? Maybe you won’t be home, or worry about packages left on your doorstep. Or maybe the package is a gift for someone in your household? Here’s a cool idea: pick up your online orders at a local store instead. That’s the premise of the young startup called Kinek, which has partnered with a number of brick-and-mortar stores across the U.S. and Canada to serve as “KinekPoints” – secure locations where you can pick up your deliveries.
Now, the company is releasing its first iPhone application, allowing you to find nearby KinekPoints, check their hours, get directions, track packages and receive push notifications when the package has arrived. → Read More
Not many startups can lay claim to being part of two recognizable accelerators at the same time, but 72Lux would be one of those exceptions. The New York City-based luxury eCommerce startup was selected as a member of 500 Startups’ third batch of companies this October and was also chosen to participate in the fourth “vintage” of NYC accelerator, First Growth Venture Networks, at about the same time. → Read More
Many websites include Facebook integrations in hopes of offering quick sharing or personalization that can increase referral traffic, conversions, and page views. 56% of users who view a Facebook authentication step will accept it, according to a new study by Sociable Labs. That means users aren’t actually as scared of the Facebook authorization flow’s privacy implications as some might assume. The real hurdle is getting users to click the Facebook integration buttons in the first place. → Read More
It’s always heartening to see an experiment in disintermediated content succeed and it couldn’t have happened to a better guy. Louis CK began selling his one-hour comedy special on his own website for $5 a pop last Sunday and, as of today, he’s reporting he’s made over $500,000 from 110,000 downloads. This is a profit of over $200,000 on a concert that cost him about $170,000 to film and edit (most of that paid with ticket sales) and a website that cost $32,000 to build (which suggests that I’m in the wrong line of work. Carlos Mencia: Call me. I know HTML).
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European e-commerce payments provider Klarna just raised a huge, pre-IPO round of $155 million. The round was led by General Atlantic and Yuri Milner’s DST Global. Sequoia Capital led its last $9 million round in May, 2010. (Update: Sequoia did not invest in this round). At that time, Sequoia partner Michael Moritz (he of Google, PayPal, and Yahoo fame) joined the board.
The new round almost certainly puts Klarna’s valuation within spitting distance of Europe’s billion-dollar tech club. → Read More
Mobile is growing as a medium for ecommerce, with users sourcing deals from their phones and tablets before visiting physical stores according to a new study by Usablenet, The company which powers mobile sites for 100 top U.S. retailers including JCPenney, Aeropostale, and REI tracked 180 million page views and 1 million mobile users over Thanksgiving and Black Friday. It saw mobile traffic to its clients was up 60% from the same period last year, with Thanksgiving sending more traffic than the following day. Usablenet also found that iOS devices accounted for 42% of the traffic, trumping Android, and trouncing the tiny traffic from Windows and Nokia devices. → Read More
Fire sales turned into a firestorm for Walmart this morning as the company’s web servers buckled under Black Friday traffic. Shoppers from around the country waited until the middle of the night for sales only to experience broken checkout pages, emptied shopping carts, and login errors. This caused their desired items to go out of stock before they could buy them, leading to mass frustration and ill will towards the discount store chain. Meanwhile at its physical stores, 20 people were pepper sprayed by a fellow customer, and 2 people were shot outside separate locations. Walmart will need to sort out its servers in preparation for the upcoming Cybermonday blitz or it risks losing customers to Amazon. → Read More
Ecommerce sites should consider how they can personalize their sites using Facebook data, as a new study shows 50% of visitors to ecommerce sites are currently logged in to Facebook. Using Facebook social plugins and Connect integrations, sites can 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 study was conducted by Sociable Labs, which helps websites implement social functionality, and looked at 456 million visits to over a dozen ecommerce sites catering to different demographic → Read More
We’ve all built up a ton of connections through networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now there’s a way to greedily exchange that social capital for real-world dollars. Shopcade is a new affiliate ecommerce platform where users create a personal store and feature products from a catalog of 40 million item. They can then blast store links to their social networks and earn affiliate kick-backs when their products sell. When used for good, Shopcade helps people structure the shopping recommendations they give friends to aid product discovery, and give to charity. But when used for evil, Shopcade incentivizes social network users to spam their friends.
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Walmart is launching an updated iPhone application and a new iPad app, in an effort to better connect customers’ offline and online shopping experiences. The iPhone app in particular brings a number of new features, including voice-enabled shopping list creation, barcode scanning and integrated manufacturers’ coupons, while the iPad app offers the ability to find items both online and at the local store.
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Ecommerce in China is ready to take off and, more important, it’s ready to reach great heights on its own terms. Lu Dong of La Mui, Haifeng Ye of Mbaobao, and Fangfang Wu of Greenbox are three ecommerce pioneers who are, as we speak, redefining online sales in China.
“China is ready for ecommerce,” said Lu Dong. “People are moving to buying almost anything online.”
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For all the excitement around commerce these days, there have been only a few really big changes in the last 100 years. Sears pioneered the mail-order catalog, chains like Walmart consolidated big box retail, and Amazon brought inventory online. After more than 10 years of growth, e-commerce only accounts for about 8% of total commerce in the US. Clearly, we have a long way to go in moving more commerce online. I believe the next evolution in e-commerce—what some refer to as “social commerce”—will use customer identity and data to better personalize and serve customers well beyond what Amazon has done to date.
Commerce, both offline and online, has historically been largely anonymous and impersonal. Offline, customers walk into stores, see the exact same merchandise, are greeted by employees who don’t recognize them, and are all bound to the same terms and conditions on the back of every purchase receipt. Online, the pen and paper of the old mail-order catalog were replaced with drop-down menus and search boxes. Amazon and other sites emerged to provide customers with anything they were looking for at low prices. As disruptive as the online catalog has been, the success of these online stores is measured by three and four letter acronyms: LTV “lifetime value” and COCA “cost of customer acquisition.” However, a shopping experience cannot be summarized entirely by metrics. → Read More
Launching today is Perth-based Cardnap, a site that lets you search for the best deals on gift cards. Cardnap wants to be what Hipmunk is for airline search, in that the startup is employing a user-friendly UI to make browsing and filtering your gift card results a non-teeth-grinding experience.
Cardnap not only lets you search for discounted gift cards, it allows you to resell your own, too. No doubt you have a few Pets.com gift cards lying around, and while Cardnap will probably turn you down on that one, you can resell your gift cards and get most of your money back. (The site offers returns as high as 92 percent.) → Read More
Can you see the difference between these two shirts? One is an off-the-shelf Zegna men’s dress shirt that sells at Neiman Marcus for $395. The other is a custom-fitted shirt from men’s clothier startup J. Hilburn made from exactly the same material, but it only costs $99. And it’s made to measure.
J. Hilburn, which is based in Dallas, Texas, cuts out the retailer and its mark-up. The startup is a direct-to-consumer manufacturer, just like Dell Computer, but for fancy men’s dress shirts.
It was founded in 2007 and started selling shirts a year later. By last year, the company brought in $8 million in revenues, up from $3.25 million in 2009, says CEO Hil Davis, a former Wall Street retail analyst. He projects the company to make $20 million in revenues this year. What’s incredible is that until today, the company didn’t sell its clothes online. → Read More
Right about now, as college students across the country start to go back to school for the Spring semester, things are starting to pick up at Chegg’s 600,000 square foot warehouse in Shepherdsville, Kentucky. The warehouse sits right next to the main UPS shipping hub and across from a Zappos warehouse.
The textbook rental company sees its busiest times peak twice a year at the beginning of each college semester. Books from last semester come in around Christmas and new ones start going out by New Year’s. “To me,” says CEO Dan Rosensweig, “watching the ball drop is just inverting the rental tracker.” The books that come in need to be inspected, sometimes repaired, and shipped out again for the next batch of student textbook renters. The warehouse has the capability to ship nearly 17,000 books an hour. “On our biggest day hundreds of thousands of books are processed,” says Rosensweig. → Read More
