Some of the exciting e-commerce news from the last few days:
The History of E-commerce
Doc Searls has written an article on the usage of data in the web and how the network is evolving. In it, he refers to a presentation from Phil Windley:
"HISTORY OF E-COMMERCE
1995: Invention of the Cookie.
The End."
Doc Searls writes further:
"About all we’ve done since 1995 on the sell side is improve the cookie-based system of “relating” to users. This is a one-way take-it-or-leave-it system that has become lame and pernicious in the extreme. We can and should do better than that.
Phil’s own company, Kynetx, has come up with a whole new schema. Besides clients and servers (which don’t go away), you’ve got end points, events, rules and rules engines to execute the rules.
David Siegel’s excellent book, The Power of Pull, describes how the Semantic Web also offers a rich and far more flexible and useful alternative to the Web’s old skool model."
Facebook
In the course of their mobile offensive, Facebook has enabled merchants to offer deals over Facebook Places. There are a variety of different types of deals:
“You’ll see a few different types of Deals: individual deals for a discount, free merchandise or other reward; friend deals where you and your friends claim an offer together; loyalty deals for being a frequent visitor to a place; and charity deals where businesses pledge to donate to a cause when you check in.”
The deals are at the moment limited to the US and are available via iPhone app. Facebook is not requiring a fee from the merchants for setting up the deal.
Spreadshirt API
The Spreadshirt API is now officially in Beta. The API is based on REST and Spreadshirt has informed us that the API will continue to develop. Amongst other things, it will later offer functions for shop admin and checkout (example for shared basket).
Tippr
Tippr has launched a white label solution for group based sales along the lines of Groupon. GigaOm on Tippr:
"The Seattle-based startup today launched a white-label group-buying platform that it says does exactly that: gives companies an alternative to signing up with Groupon, by providing them with both the software and the support to run their own online group-buying campaigns."
"[Tippr founder Martin Tobias] says that Tippr.com is the number three group-buying service in many major markets, behind Groupon and LivingSocial. (It’s in 13 markets in total, and the site gets about 700,000 unique visitors a month). Like its competitors, it gets a share of the revenue that merchants bring in when they offer a group-buying discount."
Amazon and Facebook
Amazon is continuing to experiment with integration into Facebook. Via Facebook they have introduced a new method to send gift certificates. TechCrunch:
"Now on the gift card platform, you can choose to log-in to Facebook via Facebook Connect, which will allow Amazon to access your friends’ names and birthdays, and post the gift card to your friend’s Wall on the delivery date (Amazon says that user data and purchase history will remain private)."
Originally posted in German by Marcel Weiss, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
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