Extras: Magento Mobile, Facebook Credits, Zappos API

Some further exciting e-commerce news from the past days.

Magento mobile

Magento has announced their launch of Magento mobile:

"The product includes a new administrative manager (which we wrote about earlier this week), a native iPhone app that is fully customizable (colors, images, buttons, etc), and a service where Magento manages the submission and maintenance process for the iTunes App Store."

 

Amazon Webstore

Amazon has introduced with Amazon Webstore a completely customizable e-commerce platform. Details to be found on Amazon Strategies:

"It is essentially a 100% stand alone store. It's not like Target.com where you know from the look and feel, and especially checkout, that this is an Amazon-cloned experience."

Facebook Credits

Interesting relationship that Eric Eldon conjectures on Inside Facebook: Facebook’s ambition in regards to Credits (their virtual currency), points towards a business model where the usage of the platform may become mandatory. Facebook is predicting high revenues coming from the taxation of Credit driven transactions:

"[If] Facebook is planning to make this much money from Credits, the implication is that the company is trying to make the platform very successful overall. Otherwise, if it kills the platform, it will not be able to make a third of its revenue from Credits.

[..]
If Credits is to account for a third of Facebook’s revenue in the next 12 months, like Parker said, another implication is that the mandatory roll-out is coming sometime very soon."

Payvment

Payvment, the inter-network e-commerce solution for Facebook, plans to diversify after their last successful financing round: The APIs from MasterCard will be incorporated as alternative payment methods to PayPal. According to own statements, the MasterCard payment method will be very helpful for the planned internationalization. Furthermore, Payvment wants to extend its offering to other networks beyond Facebook:

"“It’s always been plug-and-play for networks,” [Payvment-CEO Christian Taylor] says. “We never had a goal of being a company that just sat on Facebook.”"

Zappos API

Zappos. The online retailer started with shoes and expanded into a universal retailer and social web company. Now they have introduced an own API. The roadmap sounds exciting and covers exactly what one would want to have in an API in this industry:

"In our upcoming releases, we are going to have a lot more fun things. APIs such as "What are the most popular products right now", "What was just bought in my city in the last 5 minutes", etc. But we also want to hear from you all on what features you would like to see. So keep the feedback flowing."

Related posts:

• Social Commerce: Zappos’ Evolution into a Social Web Company
• Extras: WePay, Markafoni, Social Payments
• Payvment Offers Open Shopping Cart Network for Facebook

Originally posted in German by Marcel Weiss, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.