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Facebook As Social Commerce Engine?

Worthwhile to watch: the video interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg taken at the Web 2.0 Summit. The primary focus at the Summit was the new infrastructure and the role Facebook wants to take as a platform for social applications.

What does it mean for the different industries (“verticals”) when instead of products being the focus of an application, people are?

"As has already happened in the gaming industry – where Zynga now has a larger market cap than Electronic Arts – Facebook expects insurgent entrepreneurs to "reform" the film, TV, news, e-commerce and music industries with the help of Facebook.

Some of these companies will be incumbents. Some will unseat incumbents.  Facebook will then – perhaps through credits or advertising, but also perhaps some other way – tax these companies in exchange for the value it has added."

The video is quite long. The more exciting parts are near the end. The first part deals primarily with Facebook’s new mail product (which in the abstract form only a few can understand). In the second part the topic moves to Facebook’s other initiatives. Business Insider has a good overview.

Facebook has launched several infrastructure improvements this year which can be used as a basis for new social applications – from the social plugins (as omnipresent as ‘Like’ buttons), to Facebook Places, Facebook Groups, Facebook Deals and Messages@Facebook.

In our previous post we have already referred to the Web 2.0 Summit presentation from Lockerz founder Kathy Savitt. She described what e-commerce for the next generation might end up looking like.

Related posts:

• Lockerz Founder Kathy Savitt on the Lockerz Phenomenon
• Ifeelgoods: Driving Sales with Facebook Credits
• Web Currencies: What Facebook Is Planning With Their Credits

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

Lockerz Founder Kathy Savitt on the Lockerz Phenomenon

No one is thinking more far reaching on e-commerce concepts than Lockerz. At the Web 2.0 Summit last week, Lockerz founder Kathy Savitt spoke openly for the first time about Lockerz and their envisioned target groups:

She describes Lockerz as a “Social Commerce and Entertainment Platform” and hypothesizes on how individual web offerings will in the future not be attractive enough to captivate users. She ended her talk with an appeal to brands to be more open.

Lockerz is one of the core parts of the $250 million heavy Kleiner Perkins sFund for investments in the social web. Amazon, Facebook and Zynga are also on board as strategic partners.

Liberty Media has reduced their holdings in Lockerz from 92% to 53% in the second financing round. And although originally founded on the East Coast, Lockerz is now close to Amazon in Seattle.

Related post:

• Lockerz: The Shopping Extravaganza for the Next Generation

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

Groupon App Helps Merchants With Groupon Redemption

How does Groupon get feedback from merchants about which Groupons have been redeemed?  Until now that has been one of the biggest process challenges amongst the Groupon services and for the most part is a manual effort.

Groupon has now introduced a solution for the Android and the iPhone platforms which will make it easy to scan in Groupon barcodes using a mobile phone camera and then have the results transferred to Groupon.

"We are excited to announce that our mobile redemption tracking apps are now available for download from Apple’s App Store or the Android Marketplace.

Our goal was to make it dead simple for merchants to redeem and track Groupons. Once the Groupons are downloaded to your phone, all you have to do is scan the barcode on each Groupon that a customer brings in, with your phone’s camera.

The app will log the Groupon as redeemed and automatically update our online database. You can also use the app to track additional information such as the total amount each customer spent."

Groupon is further planning additional analysis tools for merchants:

"In addition to the new mobile tool, Groupon also says it will soon launch a merchant analytics dashboard and communications tools to help businesses stay in touch with new customers they gain through Groupon."

Related posts:

• Is Groupon Putting Too Much Pressure on its Merchants?
• Groupon’s “Shady” Methods Questioned
• SyncFu Makes Groupon-like Campaigns Possible for Any Online Store

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

Google Boutiques: Will Google Take the Fashion World by Storm?

It seems like the gossip from the past days are turning out to be true: Google is making good on their announced e-commerce offensive and is getting into the fashion business with Boutiques.com.

"Today, WWD confirms the news via several sources privvy on Google’s plans.

From what we can tell, it sounds like Google is taking a page out of ShopStyle and Polyvore’s book. The site will allow users to “create and share their own personalized shop by selecting style preferences and the looks, brands and items they love” (Polyvore), while linking out to a pre-existing e-tailer like Saks, ShopBop, or Yoox for purchase (ShopStyle)."

The number of celebrities that Google has gotten on board to vouch for Boutiques.com is impressive:

"Google has tapped no shortage of bold-faced fashion names to create their own boutiques, including Sarah Jessica Parker (who is already on board), Oscar de la Renta, Tory Burch, Erin Fetherston, and Katie Holmes."

The domains Boutiques.com belongs to Like.com, whom Google acquired in August this year. Very likely, Like.com has also been involved with the implementation of Boutiques.com.

Like.com started with the face recognition search engine Riya but has been leaning towards a more e-commerce focussed image recognition of product photos.

It is expected that tomorrow’s event is the launch party for the new site.

Related post:

• Commerce Search 2.0: Google’s Parallel Shopping Universe

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

A Diaper Retailer as Technology Leader, Amazon takes over Diapers.com for $545 Million

A few day ago we heard the official confirmation from Amazon:

"Amazon today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Quidsi, Inc., which operates Diapers.com, an online baby care specialty site, and Soap.com, an online site for everyday essentials.

Under the terms of the agreement, which has been approved by Quidsi's stockholders, Amazon will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Quidsi for approximately $500 million in cash, as adjusted for the assumption of options and warrants, and also assume approximately $45 million in debt and similar obligations."

Observers are considering the valuation to be relatively low and are attributing this to the price war that Amazon had started in advance:

"What is perhaps most surprising about the deal is the seeming low-ball acquisition price of $540M for a rumored $300M revenue rate ( just a 1.8x revenue multiple.)

There are reports that Amazon was cutting out the legs of Diapers.com by selling diapers at a loss."

The acquisition was preceded by reports from CNN Fortune predicting the takeover of Quidsi, which have been running Diapers.com since 2004, Soap.com since June 2010 and since some weeks BeautyBar.com.

Exciting Commerce had also made remarks last October on the Amazon/Diapers relationship (German link) in response to the cover story of Business Week last month (“What Amazon Fears Most”).

Besides their customer focus, Diapers.com is distinguished by their obsession with technology:

"So before we launched, we built proprietary software from scratch. We built software with computational algorithms to determine what the optimal number of boxes to have in the warehouse is and what the sizes of those boxes should be.

Should we stock five different kinds of boxes to ship product in? Twenty kinds? Fifty kinds? And what size should those boxes be?

Right now, it's 23 box sizes, given what we sell, in order to minimize the cost of dunnage (those little plastic air-filled bags or peanuts), the cost of corrugated boxes, and the cost of shipping. We rerun the simulation every quarter."

Exciting Commerce’s Jochen Krisch dedicated an article in Internetworld Business early this year on some of the success factors of Diapers.com (German link).

Further reports on Diapers and related topics:

• Soap.com and the Online Supermarkets of the Future
• BabyAge Raises $15 Million for the Fight Against Diapers.com
• The Fastest Growing US Private Companies in 2010

Originally posted in German by Marcel Weiss in 2 parts (1, 2), adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Extras: Facebook, Tippr, Cookies, Spreadshirt-API

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.

Rosedeal Village: Vente-Privée’s Coupon Campaign Launched

As announced ("Vente-Privée Starts Coupon Campaigns for Retailers"), Vente-Privée has started their Rosedeal concept. Named Rosedeal Village, the service is now live.

Rosedeal follows VPLounge (for high end brands) to be the third permanent service offered by Vente-Privée.

In the summer, Vente-Privée had tested their VP Summer Camp in Europe (German press release). Besides that they have Rosebuzz magazine and VPGift.

Related posts:

• Rosedeal: Vente-Privée Starts Coupon Campaigns for Retailers
• Vente-Privée Cleans Up At The Media Momentum Awards 2010
• Privalia Trumps Brands4Friends and BuyVIP in Latest Investment Maneuvers

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

Shopping for Shopping Clubs: Privalia Trumps Brands4Friends and BuyVIP in Latest Investment Maneuvers

Rosedeal: Vente-Privée Starts Coupon Campaigns for Retailers

With the launch of Rosedeal, Vente-Privée is bringing a coupon concept to market. Vente-Privée will be able to offer time limited coupons for associated retailers.

The concept takes cues from the established Groupon campaigns: during a short time span (2 to 4 days), members of Vente-Privée will be able to purchase coupons for the current retailer. For example, a coupon valued at over 50 euro could be sold for half of that price.

Rosedeal is scheduled to start today in France and should follow “very soon” in Germany.

Xavier Court, co-founder of Vente-Privée and the project lead for Rosedeal shared with Exciting Commerce that the German launch of Rosedeal is planned for latest end of November.

The partners for the first deals in France are Go Sport and Speedy. After Germany, Rosedeal should also be expanding to the UK, Italy and Spain.

Other private member shopping clubs are also testing similar business models (see Gilt City in the US), however the Vente-Privée approach is significantly more appropriate to a private shopping club.

Related posts:

• Privalia Trumps Brands4Friends and BuyVIP in Latest Investment Maneuvers
• Vente-Privée Cleans Up At The Media Momentum Awards 2010
• Vente-Privée, Brands4Friends and BuyVIP: Breaking Revenue Records in 2009

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