Exciting Commerce // Unlimited

Game Mechanics: The Gameification of the Web World (video)

At latest since Facebook, the gameification of the (web) world is continuing its steady advance:

"Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular "Facebook Games" era."

What can be learnt with this presentation, amongst others:

• How to apply game mechanics outside of the web.
• During conception and development of business models you can be much more creative by not neglecting the psychological factors.
• That the much vaunted "convergence" doesn’t make any sense, if not from the technical nature of the problem, then at latest when it hits your wallet.

What is exciting about (social) games is that they mostly work with award systems rather than punitive systems. With awards it is often much easier to control or achieve desired behaviour.

Thanks to Florian Bailey for the video tip.

Related posts:

• Game Mechanics: Putting the Fun into Functional (Video)
• Design rules! The First US Investors Are Re-orienting Themselves
• What Was and What Shall Be: The Rise of The Emotional Web

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

The Polyvore Founders Give Way To Professional CEO

Be it Spreadshirt, Threadless, Etsy or now Polyvore, nowadays you can set your watch against the time it takes between a big round of financing and the point where investors lose their patience and get a professional CEO to take the reins.

And it isn’t as if they aren’t making enough efforts:

"A very high-profile hire for fashion site Polyvore.


The startup, which lets users mix and match products from any online store and then share their creations with others, has added Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, who formerly led Google’s operations in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, as CEO.

Singh Cassidy had left Google in April in order to become CEO-in-residence at Accel Partners, saying that she was “ready to take the next step and run or grow my own company.” "

Polyvore has recently celebrated their third anniversary and had received a financing round of $5.6 million last August from Matrix Partners and Benchmark Capital.

Almost all social shopping sites of the first generation are finding it difficult to meet investors’ high expectations and are at the moment in the process of rethinking their strategies.

And although it repeatedly seems to make sense to bring in an outside CEO to professionalize the company, there is also substantial risk that the startup can lose their spirit in the process.

At least with Etsy, one of the founders was asked to come back and plans now to make innovative changes.

Related posts:

• Social Shopping Strategies: ThisNext, Stylehive, Stylefeeder, Kaboodle, Etsy
• Polyvore Raises $5.6 Million in Second Round, Fashion Playtes $1.5 Million
• Social Commerce: Etsy Returning To Its Roots

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Hollrr: The Perfect Look & Feel For A Twitter For Shopping

Hollrr is the answer to the question we raised earlier: how should a Twitter for shoppers look like?

Even their tagline “Shout about the things you love!” is pretty close to the question/slogan we put out in the German language “Was ist gerade cool und angesagt?” (what is cool and hip?)

Hollrr started up last spring and has recently introduced a whole row of innovations:

"Founder and CEO David Hegarty says that most social recommendation sites don’t really consider why people are motivated to share a product or a service with their friends.

Hollrr’s theory is that there’s a certain kind of person that really likes to recommend things to their friends.

Hollrr’s initial goal is to attract these users, allowing them to share their recommendations directly with friends through services like Facebook. And to help keep them interested, they’re focusing on building out a badge system that’s similar to Foursquare’s."

With their playful approach, their emotion filled user communication as well as their overall system, Hollrr has everything that you could wish for in such a business model.

Particularly splendid is the product site with the real time recommendations, a perfect source of inspiration outside of the livestreams on the start page.

More of these kinds of concepts would be very welcome to see! Perhaps then we would be able to move the social shopping industry further.

Hollrr comes from the Dogpatch Labs, the incubator from Polaris Venture Partners, which also recently brought the Groupon clone Scoop St. online.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Groupon Investors Put $5 Million into 1BOG

One Block Off the Grid (1BOG) is proving that the Groupon model can be intelligently adapted. They have recently secured $5 million from the Groupon investors:

"One Block Off the Grid, or 1BOG, rounds up groups of homeowners in a city and matches them with a solar installer offering a discounted rate.
 

By serving as a matchmaker, 1BOG aims to demystify the complex solar installation process for buyers, and brings a hefty chunk of new business to the installers.

Dave Llorens, chief executive, says his group has become an effective intermediary between consumers and the installers, who have not standardised their rates and sales pitch.

Both Groupon and 1BOG are backed by New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital group that specialises in consumer internet and clean technology investments. NEA gave Groupon $4.8m in early 2008 and followed up last December with a $30m second round co-led by Accel Partners, one of the early investors in Facebook. Last week they gave 1BOG a $5m investment.

Ravi Viswanathan, a general partner at NEA, says his firm was bullish on group buying. “There’s a viral nature to it that can really drive adoption,” he says. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy ... and the possibilities are endless.”

1BOG is already running pilot programmes to test the model for home retro-fitting, and conversions that turn Toyota Prius petrol-electric hybrids into plug-in electric vehicles.

“The model clearly extrapolates pretty well to any big-ticket home improvement,” says Mr Llorens. “We’re just scratching the service of what new social technologies can do with this.”"

Besides the detailed report in the Financial Times, there are also reports on Techcrunch and in the blog from 1BOG.

In particular for the coming months, the viral factor of this sales model should lend impetus to a group sales renaissance - let alone the progress made by Groupon.

Related posts:

• Groupon Obtains Additional $5 Million Capital
• Groupon Nabs A Healthy $30 Million
• The First European Groupon Copycats Hit The Market

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

TheBakery: How Intershop intends to revolutionize the retail industry

In the present phase of upheaval the e-commerce industry has the chance to completely get rid of obsolete mail order structures that have been maintained by catalog retailers so far and rapidly establish modern retail and distribution structures.

And of all things, Intershop may become the driving force in this matter as an important catalyst for next generation trading. In February 2009 and largely unnoticed by the public Intershop invested in a majority share of TheBakery, which is a German start-up company with disruptive potential.

TheBakery aims high at breaking up traditional distribution structures and extensively establishing a virtual distribution of goods to allow for a wealth of innovative co-operation and distribution models. 

"In the future, our standard solutions will allow for virtually incorporating the product lines of suppliers or third-party vendors into the range of products offered in an online shop and selling them in addition to own products.

There will be no constraints, since an unlimited number of suppliers can be integrated into an unlimited number of platforms. Of course, the data transfer will work automatically in all directions via standard interfaces." states Henry Goettler, Member of the Board of Management."

Behind TheBakery is a part of the former Product + Concept-team, who for example developed and operated the virtual “Quelle Market” platform for the Quelle company. Despite a promising future, the “Quelle Market” platform was shut down almost one year ago, because a purchase price couldn’t be agreed upon during P+C’s insolvency.

Now at the best time TheBakery puts a vendor-independent solution on the market, meeting many exciting commerce demands for contemporary retail and distribution structures:

• Flexible connection of different manufacturers and suppliers with vendor-specific assortments.

• Standardized shopping basket by integrating the entire assortment into existing shopping-systems (shop or portal)

• Although powered by Intershop, TheBakery can be connected to any existing shopping-system.

During the past years many retailing sites have been struggling with proprietary sales platforms from Ebay Express to Electronicscout24 and even Neckermann, Otto and Quelle.

If this concept works, TheBakery will bring drop shipment to a new level and plenty of "Quelle Markets" and other virtual sales systems will spring up like mushrooms in the near future. Even comparison engines and social shopping sites may use TheBakery to sell products all by themselves without difficulty.

We will be keeping an eye on this development with great interest. At first a well known electronic group is said to go live with TheBakery already within this year. 

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch

Magento Strategies: Seeking Crowdsourcing Extensions

While Magento already delivers very useable solutions for live shopping events, solutions for user driven shopping models are still scarce.

On that topic, startups like MyFab (see also Fashion4Home) and sites such as Groupon are at the moment leading a crowdsourcing renaissance and transferring known sales models to new product categories.

Until now, the t-shirt industry has been leading in this area, with Threadless, Uneetee, and Shirt.Woot! as prime examples. Indeed, Naked & Angry show in particular very well how different product groups can suit the crowdsourcing model.

Also Spoonflower demonstrates the creative potential that exists in this still largely untapped e-commerce field.

The market for open innovation is growing - and some of the most exciting developments in this area are the innovative components which are increasingly becoming inherent to the sales model. Crowdsourcing, with its playful competitive effects, grants some of the best opportunities to test this field.

Traditional shop systems have not implemented such business models and in turn, the innovation drivers in this field have needed to develop everything on their own. It would be very interesting now to see some Magento extensions which would help other merchants to access this model and allow them to more closely engage their users.

Tips on such crowdsourcing modules would be highly appreciated at crowdsourcing@excitingcommerce.de.

Related posts:

• Magento Matters: Social Shopping with Facebook and Magento
• Magento Introduces Module for Private Sales Events
• New Study: The Market for Open Innovation

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Game Mechanics: Putting the Fun into Functional (Video)

Amy Jo Kim from Shufflebrain with a good introduction to game mechanics (“Putting the Fun into Functional”), which is being increasingly applied to social apps. In the presentation she repeatedly refers to good examples from e-commerce:

A question which immediately arises from this is: Why are shopping systems so bad at presenting already purchased products?

Related posts:

• Design rules! The First US Investors Are Re-orienting Themselves
• What Was and What Shall Be: The Rise of The Emotional Web
• Lockerz: The Shopping Extravaganza for the Next Generation

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Quorus: How Personal Can Social Shopping Become?

As we’ve now been seeing, the majority of the first generation social shopping networks have begun to re-orient themselves. The most interesting aspect of this are the developments which now lead social shopping in the direction of the personal shopping network. With this comes the question: how personal can the social shopping experience become?

Etsy competitor 1000Markets is currently experimenting with the “Shop with a friend” solution from Quorus. On all the product sites there is a Q-Button “Add to Discussion”. Using this button the user can trigger a discussion amongst their close (or wide) circle of friends:

Particularly interesting is that the Quorus solution is universally deployable to all shopping sites and the focus is clearly on the personal communication level – in contrast to SixGroups and other “instant community” initiatives which tend to try to build a community around a specific website.

This is exactly what Quorus is not trying to do. Here every user should first tap into their personal network – either very simple over email, but also over Facebook, Twitter, IM, etc:

If your friends aren't available at that particular moment, they can also express their opinions later. The discussion moves around the particular product site and can from there very easily incorporate further product recommendations, alternative suggestions, etc.

In this way, the shopping site grows a sort of social layer: “Check it out! Whaddaya think of this? How does this look on me?” The best way to experience it is to simply try it out. Brooks Running is also using Quorus (“Discuss with a friend”).

Thanks to the Quorus team for the forward information. Some background info on 1000Markets to be found on the Techflash blog.

Related posts:

• From Social Shopping to Personal Shopping Network
• Etsy 2010: How Social Can Commerce Get?
• Magento Matters: Social Shopping with Facebook and Magento

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Social Shopping Strategies: ThisNext, Stylehive, Stylefeeder, Kaboodle, Etsy

After sleeping through some important developments the last couple of years, the social shopping segment is now bustling with hectic activity. The former pioneers are re-orienting themselves and are in part rolling out completely new strategies:

• The boldest plans are most definitely being nurtured by Etsy. We’ve reported on them several times already.

• ThisNext and Stylehive are coupling together as Curatemedia (“to dominate social shopping”) and want to run a bundle of niche sites. “What should I buy?” is the motto here (and not only for the users).

• Stylefeeder gets bought out and is taken under the wing of Time Inc. In this new relationship, Stylefeeder should dock into InStyle.

• Kaboodle, a part of the publishing group Hearst, puts its hopes on a fundamental redesign and wants in the future to swim on the “realtime” wave.

• Zlio pays tribute to their roots with Shopmarking (“On the fly social shopping”).

• Still unclear is how the German players will react. It goes without saying that Edelight and Smatch are needing at least one or two upgrades.

In general the developments should tend away from social shopping and towards personal shopping.

Blippy, Whosrich and others like them may not be the last answer, but could be indicators of which direction the world is turning. Shopping will become an increasingly personalized activity which will migrate out into one's circle of friends.

Thanks to Murat Icer for the valuable contributions to this post.

Related posts:

• From Social Shopping to Personal Shopping Network
• Etsy 2010: How Social Can Commerce Get?
• Magento Matters: Social Shopping with Facebook and Magento

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

From Social Shopping to Personal Shopping Network

Social networks and personal networks are in principle two sides of the same coin. One sees the network from the point of view of “the masses” and the other from the point of view of the individual.

In the social web, the pendulum has swung back and forth over the last five years, from MySpace to blogs to Facebook to Twitter (and naturally the ubiquitous iPhone :-).

At the moment, partially due to mobile applications, development is tending away from the big social networks and more towards the smaller, personal helper apps which assist the user to link into their personal network and thus their circle of friends and acquaintances.

Interestingly, there haven’t been any corresponding developments in e-commerce in the past years. Here, the social shopping network has reigned from the beginning. What is missing (and in particular what we are waiting to see in some Facebook apps), are personal networking tools which are custom-tailored to the shopping addicted.

After the Etsy announcements (“How Social Can Commerce Get?”) it can be certainly assumed that e-commerce is catching up and tools and services for the personal shopping network will slowly develop.

Last year with Optaros, we introduced a Magento extension which pointed in this direction. In the meantime you can find independent services such as Quorus (not to be confused with the well hyped Quora), which we would like to report on sometime in the future. Quorus’ focus on the personal network opens up a new range of potential for the social shopping area.

Related posts:

• Etsy 2010: How Social Can Commerce Get?
• Magento Matters: Social Shopping with Facebook and Magento
• What Was and What Shall Be: The Rise of The Emotional Web

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.