Exciting Commerce // Unlimited

Woot! in Asia

Sites like Woot! which started as an US phenomenon are finding popularity now not only in Europe (iBOOD) and Australia (Zazz!) but most recently also in Asia.

ZuunBo ("Too good to be true") is a Woot!-like shopping concept launched in Singapore:

"Zuunbo is a first-of-its-kind shopping website that offers one new deal everyday.

We offer enticing products that appeal to the shop-a-holic in every girl. Every product is cherry-picked by us and specially priced for our members only.

Shopping at zuunbo is for members only. Join us today to enjoy great deals from Apple, Topshop, Zara, Nine West and more."

In the meantime you can also find a Woot! in South Korea:

According to their product calendar they launched their site in July 2007.

Originally two posts in German(1,2) by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Vente du Diable: The French Deep Discounter for Refurbished Consumer Electronics

Due to market typical narrow margins, consumer electronics are only in special cases interesting for private shopping clubs.  Vente du Diable has a unique approach to sell refurbished goods as described by La-Vente-Privée.fr (FR/EN) :

“Vente du Diable sells end-of-stock brand name high tech products at 30 – 70% of original price! ... The  products come directly from the manufacturer through an exclusive distribution channel.”

The shopping club was launched in 2006 by e-commerce firm Ckado from Toulouse.  Ckado already has an online shop for clearance goods in operation.  In comments to Journal du Net, founder Stéphane Contrepois describes the background (FR/EN):

“The lifespan of high tech products in the catalogue of a manufacturer is between 4 to 5 months.  But when a product line matures, the manufacturer waits 3 to 6 months for the wholesalers and distributers to destock the merchandise.”

Vente du Diable enables manufacturers to clear out old merchandise up to 6 months earlier than the current sales process.  Returned merchandise on the other hand, continues to be cleared out by Ckado.

Four months after launch, Vente du Diable booked more than 57,000 registered members, in the meantime it counts more than 200.000 members.  The shopping club scores as the best niche market closed membership shopping service in France.  Further expansion within Europe is planned.

To differentiate themselves, the shopping club set up its own community (case study-PDF).  Ckado, financed with 1.2 million Euros, organized a sales promotion last November in Second Life.

Originally posted in German by Stephan Randler, translated by Jason Soo.

The Future of Social Shopping

Here is the one social shopping article to print out and frame: "Social Shopping and The Game of Life" by Adam Michelson.  It’s so far the best commentary on the topic to be found.

Conceptually, most social shopping services are still stuck in the pre-Facebook years of 2005 and 2006.  Time for an abrupt wake up call:

"Most of the current social shopping ideas are lame. They are mostly derivations of either virally allowing users to put links, or very simple widgets, on social sites, or they are copycat social networking sites with some basic ecommerce built in."

"These ideas are laudable as at least they are attempting new retail concepts, but they feel like mashups of ecommerce and social networking, hoping that 1 and 1 will be 2."

What is necessary now, according to Michelson’s concept, is a strong shift of social aspects into the foreground.  Also imperative are appropriate metrics which can be used to measure such social aspects.

"Once these and other core social shopping behaviors are understood, then all site features should map directly to them.”

“Today a retailer is not going to add functionality that does not directly drive conversion, decrease abandonment, increase traffic or define brand. “

“So why add social capabilities that does not monetize or directly map to pre-defined social behavior metrics? The value of the network must be derived to appropriately prioritize features.“

Michelson advocates benchmarks that would better represent social relationships and allow social growth to be measured.

"Social metrics should be defined and measured such as the:

• Velocity of social network growth
• Value of customers measured by how they help grow the network
• Network conversion rate defined as how many people invited ultimately participate and buy."

In principle, he’s not opening up a new can of worms (“The Viral Numbers Game: How To Measure Viral Success?”).

Michelson underlines the current dilemma with two key statements:

"Using 1.0 ecommerce information architecture and product management tools for a 2.0 social shopping site will create a site that is suboptimal in both ecommerce and social capabilities. 1 plus 1 will equal .5."

"A truly valuable customer is not only loyal for their purchases, but they also are evangelists that help to grow the network. We need analytical tools to show this social network value."

Maybe this is the key: the “social network value” of a customer which is calculated from both networking capacity and buying behavior.

What Michelson describes is not only for classical social shopping sites valid, but also for shopping clubs  (like Vente-Privée, Gilt Groupe, etc.) and live shopping sites (like Woot!, Midnightbox, etc.).  All of these shopping concepts live on their socially driven attractiveness.

Related posts:

• The Viral Numbers Game: How To Measure Viral Success?

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Exciting Times: Working on an Internet Operating System

"I believe that we're collectively working on an Internet Operating System, and that it will ultimately look more like Unix than it looks like Windows." - Tim O'Reilly

"I believe that we're collectively working on an Internet Operating System, and that it will ultimately look more like Unix than it looks like Windows." - Tim O'Reilly

IrateMonkey: How to facebookify T-Shirt Contests

How can you bring t-shirt design contests - such as the likes of Threadless, Shirt.Woot!, LaFraise and a good dozen others - into the Facebook world?  IrateMonkey is throwing in their effort now:

The Facebook integration turns out to be pretty loose.  Designers are supposed to get their Facebook friends to vote for their designs.  Further interaction between users on the Facebook platform is not possible.

A better effort is the Threadless Plus application.  Users can not only present their Threadless collections, but can also far better interact with each other.

The direct comparison between the two applications reveal what a big difference it makes if an app is designed from the site operator’s point of view (IrateMonkey) or from the Facebook user’s point of view.

Any other appraisals or opinions on the applications?

Related posts:

• In Facebook: Social Commerce is the New Black

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Is Facebook Morphing Into a WebOS?

Facebook keeps on changing, from social network to social toolbox.  The navigation bar and search box move to the top.  The applications, too:

"Clicking on the 'Applications' dropdown will allow you to access all of your applications."

More on the preview site.

While the reporters at Facebook’s re-design discussion focussed primarily on the new tab structure, All Facebook blogger Nick O’Neill, upon considering the screenshots, speculated on a similar track as we did:

"When I saw the images that I posted last night, the first thing that I thought to myself is that Facebook is creating a social toolbar that theoretically can be used anywhere on the web while browsing."

What Facebook really is, is becoming more and more difficult to define.  Is it a social network, a social toolbox, a web browser, or even all at once, a new kind of web “Windows” (with Outlook, Explorer and myriad of applications and programs)?

Finally we seem to get an idea how the long expected WebOS could look and feel.

A worthwhile read is the All Facebook blog to the design discussion ("Facebook Leaves More Questions Than Answers")

Update: Techcrunch also discovered Hints of a Facebook Operating System In New Design

(via und via)

Originally posted in German in two (1, 2) parts by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide for 2008

A must-have for statistics fans is the annual edition of the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

The 2008 edition is hot off the presses with its list of the top 500 American online retailers rated according to revenue volume.

The top 10 are available online: market leader Amazon grew another 40%.  Apple, after a 2-fold increase of its revenue, jumped from number 15 to number 7 and bumped SonyStyle out of the Top 10 elite.

A few statistical highlights:

• In 2007, fully 21 companies recorded online retail sales of $1 billion or more compared to just 17 the prior year.

• While the specialty/non-apparel segment sector grew fastest online with a 47% growth rate in 2007, the runner-up was not far behind. Online jewelers grew their combined sales by 36% to just over $1 billion from $772 million in 2007.

• The merchants in the largest category (in terms of numbers of merchants) in the Top 500 Guide—apparel/accessories—continued to show that shoppers have no qualms with buying fashions online. Combined 2007 web sales for this group rose by 24% to $12.4 billion.

More in their press release:

"The Top 500 Guide includes 148 e-retail businesses that are owned or operated by store-based retail chains, 82 by catalog and direct-marketing firms, 51 by consumer branded manufacturers and 219 by web-only retailers."

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Threadless Introduces Limited Edition Prints

Affordable shirts are nice, but at some point Threadless needs to increase its pricepoint and therefore introduce some pricier items. Now they are expanding into – who would have thought – limited edition prints.

More on the Threadless Fan Blog:

"It looks like Threadless is expanding their product line beyond the traditional t-shirt by taking a page out of the recipe book of the comic book industry."

There you can find a few other thoughts on the future of Threadless.

Related posts:

• Threadless Founder is the Next to Yield to Professional CEO

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Talk Market and the Online Video Shopping Experience

A few unusual video shopping efforts have recently popped up that create a different kind of video shopping experience.  Although not necessarily the paradigm for the future, they show with some originality how moving pictures can go beyond simple product presentation and in the best case, help drive networking between sellers and buyers.

In common is their platform approach.  Niche and specialty retailers are gathered together on a common video shopping platform.

• An "interesting" start is The Talk Market, which the New York Times E-Commerce Report introduced in detail last March ("A D.I.Y. Approach to Making a Web Commercial").  In the best case informative but in general in a long winded kind of way, sellers present themselves and their products with video on the platform.  As with YouTube, the videos can be bound to your own website.

• Shopflick recently launched with a slightly different approach.  Techcrunch gave a pretty detailed report on this site while it was still in private beta.   On Shopflick, sellers can not only publicize individual product videos (as with Talk Market), but it also allows for individualized shops to be set up complete with video teasers.

• The most unusual approach is from ShangBy, also covered by Techcrunch.  ShangBy, like the others, is a showcase for small shops.  But here there’s a real feeling of live shopping.  Not only is ShangBy-TV delivered as a livefeed, but individual dealers can also produce shows at regular time slots to introduce new products and then directly be available for Q&A.

Its worthwhile to ask why its even necessary to have special video sales platforms when classic platforms such as YouTube (for recorded video) or Justin.tv (for livestreams) provide similar solutions which can also be easily integrated into shops and shopping sites. 

Sometimes it's the fans who find new ways to create a different kind of video shopping experience - like the daily Woot-TV ("Every night, quarter-to-Woot"). The latter example also shows where almost all video platforms fall too short at the moment – coming up with original ideas for shows that are fun to watch.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Threadless Founder is the Next to Yield to Professional CEO

Money Talks.  When the patience of a VC runs thin, you can practically bank on strong suggestions that it’s time for an experienced CEO.

• At Spreadshirt, founder Lukasz Gadowski fairly soon handed over the reins to Jana Eggers and took a place on the Board of Directors.

• The time has now come for Threadless with Tom Ryan taking over as new CEO. Jake Nickell, former boss and founder shifts position to CSO (Chief Strategy Officer).

• After the VC injection in January, we can bet that Etsy will be ready for a management upgrade – at latest by mid 2009.

So far, the theory holds…

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo

HauteLook to Attract with Video Featurettes

The multi-million dollar investment in RueLaLa isn’t the first signal that online shopping clubs are spreading in the US. 

Since Fall 2007, Hautelook (“the hottest thing to hit the fashion business in years”) has been providing a shopping service with a bit of flair.  Fabsugar reports:

"HauteLook is a fashion club where you get access to behind the scenes designer videos, upcoming collection previews, and of course, major sales."

Hautelook wants to attract member interest by publishing video featurettes (approx. 4 minutes, filmed with camcorder).

Impressed with the shopping concept, beauty portal Temptalia reports:

"These exclusive streaming videos include backstage footage from brands fashion shows, interviews with the designers and snapshots from the brands upcoming collections."

Originally posted in German by Stephan Randler, translated by Jason Soo.

Shoplette and the Mobile Future of Social Shopping

Although somewhat in stagnation, we still occasionally see some innovative examples in the social shopping arena.

Shoplette is a Singaporean site which gives a glimpse as to how the mobile social shopping future could look like – once the telecom industry finally agrees on a common (open source) browser standard (or when iPhone simply takes over by force).

The Armchair Theorist has a terrific Shoplette review (“Twitter Meets Shopping") which leaves actually little left more to add.

The core idea is reminiscent of Shopalize (“What did you buy today?”), which currently isn’t available anymore.  The site design is similar to the original version of Zebo (which has since then had a facelift and now looks completely different).

Related articles:

• Social Commerce: Traffic and Usage Data from 17 Sites

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Mass Customization: Indochino Gets Funding from Burda

According to press reports, Burda Digital Ventures has invested a further $250,000 in the Canadian online custom tailored suit company Indochino:

"Their business model cuts out the factories and the middlemen. The tailors get a fair salary and the consumer gets a fair price -- and it creates a new supply chain for this type of business."

The Times Colonist (Victoria) article covers the background and ambitions of German media company Burda in Canada:

"Kyle Vucko and Heikal Gani, business students at the University of Victoria and founders of Indochino -- a web-based tailoring business that provides made-to-measure suits, shirts and outerwear at cut-rate prices -- got a $250,000 shot in the arm from Burda Digital Ventures, the venture capital arm of one of Germany's largest media companies.

The latest investment follows a $40,000 funding last year from Burda that helped Vucko and Gani launch the business and establish a toehold in Shanghai's famed garment district.

Their connection with the German media giant has Victoria roots, as Burda is majority owner of virtual book marketer Abebooks.com, purchasing the company from local founders in 2003.

Boris Wertz, former chief operating officer at Abebooks, leads Burda's Canadian investment arm and, with Abebooks CEO Hannes Blum and chief financial officer John Chase, took an early interest in Indochino and acted as mentors for the young entrepreneurs.

Well-known high-tech entrepreneur Eric Jordan, UVic's executive-in- residence, was also instrumental in guiding the founders of Indochino."

Co-Founder Kyle Vucko comments in the StartupNorth blog:

"We made a decision early to ‘Go Big’ with this company. We got successful angels in the etailing space (CEO/COO/CFO of AbeBooks), and got a first round of financing before incorporating the company back in March of last year.”

More in the press release and in the investor blog from Boris Wertz.

Burda is currently restructuring its investment activities.  A large part of Burda Digital Ventures will in the future be held by investment management company Acton Capital Partners.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Woot! Sales Update for the Month of April

Woot! continues to optimize its sales in April:

• Again, there were no Woot-offs during this month, apart from one just-for-fun April Fools Woot-off Day.

• Correspondingly, total revenues sank in comparison with last year (with 2 Woot-off days) by $700,000 to a level of $5.1 Million.

• Nothing to worry about, since the regular Woot! days improved 13%, rising from $151,000 to $170,000 per day.

• The top seller in April was - you guessed it - a Dyson vacuum cleaner, although a different model than the one offered in January and March. It brought in almost $700,000.

The Shirt.Woot! business is also developing superbly:

• Since the t-shirt team raised the limits for Derby designs to 2,000 pieces, Shirt.Woot! was able to sell out on 11 of 12 days.

• Success on the weekdays continue to be strongly erratic.

• All-in-all Shirt.Woot! registered a new monthly record (with its revenue from first day sales).

Related Articles:

• How Woot! Pushes Itself to the Limit

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

In Facebook: Social Commerce is the New Black

Will Slide and RockYou someday follow the footsteps of Amazon and eBay?  The challenge seems to be obvious:

"Social commerce is where (the business is) headed. Companies that have mined enough social graph data and can combine shopping to it--whoever figures that out, they will be set."

"Social Commerce is the New Black", according to Dave McClure (“Master of 500 Hats”).  In response to the question why Facebook, Slide, Ning and the flood of "Toy Apps" are worth billions he writes:

"Well if they're worth anywhere near that much, it's not obvious 100M+ widgets, walls, & installs are what generates revenue... however, it MAY be because of the social graph data-mined from those users & apps & widgets, and what that means for the future of Social Commerce.”

Here you can read it his way

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Ready to Sell a Bionic Man? Etsy Breaks the $6 Million Sales Barrier

The Etsy team celebrated a new, record breaking sales level in April:

"We sold over $6 million for the first time ever, an 8% increase over March! Also, April 30th was Etsy’s biggest day ever, with 16,580 items sold, representing $256,000. Thanks, CNN"

In comparison to the previous months:

• $4,2 Million in January
• $4,8 Million in February
• $5,6 Million in March

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Woot! Stats: The Heat Is On

New sales stats at Woot! A daily heat map shows per-capita sales for every state. This is the Heat Map for the top seller in April with more than 10,000 units sold:

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Upfactory: 3 Suisses Creates Platform for Aspiring Fashion Designers

Exclusivity and direct access to exclusive products will be critical issues for the future of the retail industry. So it' s interesting to see that French catalogue retailer 3 Suisses launches Upfactory, an online marketplace for aspiring (fashion) designers.

Although completely in French there is an English description of the platform in the blog of the French consulting firm faberNovel:

"Four weeks ago, the fashion platform UpFactory was released and already there are over 130 creators and 1200 products for sale on the site and these numbers are increasing.

So what makes this ‘Social Shopping Website’ different? The site was developed for 3 Suisses, the large mail order catalogue company, in order to directly involve them in the current global dialogue about shopping.

The site is currently up and away in France,  but it is expected to expand into Europe very soon."

"There are sites such as shopstyle.com and stylehive.com where you interact about fashion/clothes/shopping. However, the main problem with having sites like this is that while they are social, it is necessary to go to an additional site in order to purchase a product.

At the other end of things, there are sites where you can go to buy and sell products, the most obvious example of this is ebay, but it is not possible to interact on a site such as this…so UpFactory has made its home in the niche between these too markets and done so in a way that is innovative in both format and function."

Further details in the blog from faberNovel.

It will be interesting to see, if Upfactory can catch on.  The site suffers a little bit from “Osoyou” syndrome.  The home page in particular seems overloaded and somewhat hard to navigate.  But time will reveal how it develops.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Zappos Exploring a Future beyond the Shoe Business

Zappos, already one of the most popular shopping sites, is following the footsteps of Amazon and is moving from a niche market focus to a universal one (via):

"The company's two warehouses in Kentucky hold around 4 million items, but at just under a million square feet", Hsieh says Zappos has plenty of room to grow.

And that's just what he's planning on; by the end of 2008 the company hopes to be selling footwear, apparel, sunglasses, watches, bags, bedding/linens, cosmetics, luggage, and electronics, according to his blog.

The Zeta version of the new homepage gives a taste of the up-and-coming range of products (via).

What’s exciting is that Zappos isn’t just tweaking its selection.  An insider look at Zappos on their blogs reveals various facets of their (shoe) business and the funny people at Zappos ("Some Glimpses into a Zappy Hour and a Good CEO Slappin' ").

Recently Zappos has discovered Twitter for itself ("Zappos Shows How Social Media Is Done").

From the get-go a free-shipping, customer oriented business, Zappos is showing the big mail order companies what happens when an online niche player gets big enough to leverage their cost efficiencies and then really shift into high gear.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Wishpot grabs $1 Million in Venture Capital

Wishpot, seen in the previous post at the bottom of the social shopping barrel, has secured $1 Million in it’s first large financing round.

As mentioned in the press release:

"Wishpot is planning to use the funds to further enhance its vertical offerings, improve the Wishpot platform, increase the business development activities, and introduce business analytics for enterprise customers of the platform."

From a conceptual point of view, Wishpot’s strong user focus makes it definitely one of the better social shopping sites.  But when will Wishpot go beyond wedding lists?

More interesting than the website itself are the connections of Wishpot’s investors.  Besides Wishpot in Curious Office’s portfolio is amongst others, Imagekind, Shelfari and Coolspotters.  Italy’s H-Farm is amongst others a shareholder of Zooppa.

Wishpot has been operating a Facebook application of the same name since August 2007.  The application has also up till now generated rather lackluster popularity.

Related posts:

• Social Commerce: Traffic and User Data from 17 Sites
• ThisNext Scores with I Want Application

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Social Commerce: Traffic and Usage Data from 17 Sites

SocialMediaTrader has collected usage data from Compete, Quantcast and MSN Adlabs for 17 American and British (social) shopping sites:

Of interest:

• Kaboodle continues to profit from traffic from Hearst Interactive Media
• Etsy has been able to keep pace
• Etsy and Stylefeeder are favorites for women
• Stylehive and Stylefeeder continue to be neck and neck in the fashion area
• Zebo, as expected, scores well with the youth

Along the same lines – the latest news:

• Stylefeeder has just joined the Glam Media Network (press release)
• Crowdstorm has just launched it’s new version.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.