Exciting Commerce // Unlimited

Spartoo Looking For 100 Million Euro To Take On Zalando

There’s no business like shoe-business! The German-French battle of Zalando vs. Spartoo is going into the next round.

While Zalando seems to already benefit from fairly deep pockets, Spartoo is on the hunt for a capital injection in the three-figure million range (according to Reuters):

"Spartoo, a French online shoe retailer, has hired investment bank Jefferies to help it raise 100 million euros from a new investor as it seeks to expand, sources familiar with the situation said.

Jefferies and Spartoo, which one of the sources said was worth between 200 million and 250 million euros, could not immediately be reached for comment.

The unlisted company, which calls itself Europe's No. 1 online shoe retailer, has said it is aiming to boost sales to 100 million euros this year from 60 million euros last year."

With this, Spartoo seems to have surpassed their original revenue target of 50 million euro for 2010.

Zalando was valued already last year at least at 370 million euro. And parallel to Zalando in Germany, the Zalando investors are pushing their shoe businesses via Bigfoot GmbH in Asia and South America.

Besides the Samwer brothers, other investors involved with Zalando/Bigfoot include Holtzbrinck, Kinnevik and Tengelmann.

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

Demandware IPO, the Exit Trend, Speculations on hybris

Demandware announced their intended IPO last week. According to the SEC prospectus, Demandware reached revenues of $36.7 million in 2010 (+71%).

Neckermann.de was by far the largest of the 75 Demandware customers and alone generated a fifth of the 2010 Demandware revenues.

The most interesting of the financial figures are summarized in the offer prospectus:

 "We generated revenue of $7.5 million, $21.4 million and $36.7 million in 2008, 2009 and 2010, respectively. […]

As of March 31, 2011 we had 75 customers using our Demandware Commerce platform, up from 23, 40 and 69 as of December 31, 2008, 2009 and 2010, respectively. […]

For the years ended December 31, 2009, and 2010, revenue recognized from neckermann.de represented 27.9% and 20.6%, respectively, of our total revenue."

21% of the Demandware shares are still held by founder Stephan Schambach. Demandware. The hope is to top Magento by raising up to $100 million in the public offering. Magento is rumoured to have been valued at $180 million as per their recent exit.

For about a year now, a wave of exits have been happening amongst the shop system providers and the last months have shown no stopping of this impetus: First Oracle grabbed ATG for a cool billion, then eBay acquired GSI Commerce (with Intershop) for $2.4 billion and Magento for a speculated $180 million. And now it is Demandware with their IPO.

Ina Steiner commented again on the enthusiasm of the market in regards to the proud valuations of recent past:

"When its competitor GSI announced 4 months ago that eBay was acquiring it, Demandware wrote on its blog that it was "thrilled" by the recent developments in the industry. "We at Demandware are excited to see that in the past six months, two public ecommerce platform providers, ATG being the other, were both acquired for $1 billion or more. With these lofty valuations, it just further highlights the shift in consumer shopping preferences to the online world and the upcoming investment that retailers will need to make to meet the demand."

Now that some of the biggest players in the e-commerce solutions market have shuffled around, all eyes are now on hybris. As one of the last of the large shopping system providers, it wouldn’t be surprising if hybris takes advantage of the current environment to make their move. An IPO like Demandware or an acquisition like ATG/GSI? With IBM already covered, SAP could be the hottest favourite for an acquisition. At least it doesn’t hurt that SAP uses hybris already in their BusinessByDesign solutions package.

Originally posted by Jochen Krisch as two posts (1, 2), adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

K5 - Expect a New Kind of eCommerce Conference

We are in the final stages of launching our first K5 Conference for eCommerce, a growth conference for Germany's 500 strongest ecommerce companies, on October 6-7, 2011 in Munich.

According to the German mail order association bvh the German market will grow at a 7% rate in 2011, the highest growth rate the market has ever seen, to a record market volume of 32.4 billion Euro. Based on these numbers these are our market projections for the next 10+ years:

The K5 Conference will focus on growth potentials and business opportunities in the German ecommerce market and is the natural extension to our LSD (Live Shopping Days) early stage conference, where Accel Partners gave a fascinating presentation on the Future of Commerce this March in Berlin:

Confirmed K5 Speakers are from Tengelmann Group, Ecommerce Alliance/Shirtinator, Spreadshirt, Keller Sport, Limango, Swoodoo/Kayak, Brack Electronics.

Attendees will be Germany's well and lesser known top online retailers with at least 7-figure revenues throughout all product categories and industries - electronics, wine, books, home & garden, fashion/apparel, beauty & cosmetics

Furniture: WorldStores Raises £8.5 Million Growth Capital

WorldStores in England is taking a page from the book of CSN Stores of the US, who successfully runs over 200 online niche stores in the house and garden market. The success of this strategy is apparent from the CSN Stores performance, having now reached 51^st place amongst all the top American online retailers. Similarly, WorldStores is showing growing success:

"Internet ‘department store’ Worldstores expects to reach sales of £40million this year after a growth spurt that will see the company’s range more than double in size.

The company is one of a growing number of sites little known beyond a loyal customer base but on the verge of achieving sales to rival established High Street names.

Founders and joint chief executives Joe Murray and Richard Tucker expect to break even this year and have forecast growth of more than 70 per cent.

The site is split into subsites such as Matress World, BarbecuesWorld and CrossTrainersWorld. The number of home and garden categories has more than doubled to 76 in the past 12 months. The board believes that could increase to 200."

WorldStores has recently announced a second big financing round:

"Advent Venture Partners and existing investor Balderton Capital (“Balderton”) have provided funds of £8.5m.

This will enable WorldStores to expand rapidly into sizable new categories, to develop further its market-leading delivery and service offering, and to become the leading consumer destination for home and garden products."

WorldStores is expanding in England with dozens of sites and is looking to do some first trials in Germany in 2011.

In the German market, FP Commerce is already active in this market space, whereby their focus seems to be very much with Möbel-Profi.de. Otherwise they have rather toned down their offering by discontinuing niches such as their wine site.

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

Shopping in the Subway: Tesco Pushes eFood Shop Homeplus in South Korea

Pretty clever: To raise their online revenues in South Korea, Tesco (branded there as Homeplus) bought advertising space in local train stations and put up large posters of supermarket shelves. Beside the price of each product was an appropriate QR Code. To buy the product, you needed only to scan the code with your smartphone and the item was automatically put into an online shopping cart. After finalising the transaction with your smartphone, the products would be shipped to your home.

The marketing campaign boosted online revenues by 130%. New registrations rose by 76%.

"After this campaign, on-line sales increased tremendously (Nov.2010-Jan.2011). Through this campaign, 10,287 consumers visited the online HOMEPLUS mall using smartphones. The number of new registered members rose by 76%, and on-line sales increased 130%. Currently, HOMEPLUS is No.1 in the on-line market and is a very close 2nd offline."

Here the video ad, which won several prizes at the advertising film festival in Cannes.

Related posts:

• US Investors Value Catch of the Day At $200 Million
• LeShop Grows in 2010 to a Record 151 Million CHF (+15%)
• Nick Lansley of Tesco.com Speaks on “APIs and the 4th Screen”

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

Best Practice: Seatguru.com

From our excitingtravel.de “best practice” archive: seatguru.com.

Founded in 2001, the service from seatguru.com is invaluable, especially for long haul flights.

What is good about seatguru is that the website limits itself to the essentials: Seating plans of all airplane types and a hundred different airlines, each highlighting the best and worst seats on the plane.

Interested travelers can search for their airline, flight route and flight number via a simply structured left hand navigation bar or via a search field.

Seatguru marks the bad seats in red, good seats in green and seats with marginal disadvantages in yellow. Meanwhile many airline companies have realised that there is a strond demand for green marked seats and some now charge extra fees for those seats.

The business model for seatguru is straightforward: They link to Tripadvisor and its internet booking engine or they serve banner ads. That’s it.

The company is based in Newton, Massachussetts and has been acquired in March 2007 from Tripadvisor, which is itself a part of Expedia Inc.

Originally posted in German by Dirk Loew, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

A Look at Amazon’s Tablet Strategy

Apparently Amazon is planning to bring more tablets to the market. And probably even in 2011 already. At least, such a multi-use tablet has more or less already been confirmed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Why does Amazon start an app store for Android apps, a store for Mac programs and now want to build their own tablets?

First: The probability of success for Amazon is downright good, having already built up a successful e-reader ecosystem with its Kindle. Amazon tablets would likely be built on Android and could push Android in two ways which are increasingly missing from Apple’s iPad: Push #1 is the link between app stores to customer’s account information. The attractiveness of an easy payment system for app developers could lead to the second push: If developers ensure compatibility to the Amazon tablets because of its easy payment system, then Amazon could build a de facto standard for Android and reduce the fragmentation of this operating system in the consumer segment. One could imagine the “Amazon compatible Android tablet” label from third party manufacturers. Assuming no issues with hardware, Amazon could create a drift towards their standard.

After seeing how Amazon might be successful with their endeavour, the next question is why? What is on Amazon’s radar? 

It seems as if Amazon is actively preparing for a time when entertainment goods such as books and films won’t be consumed from physical media but rather exclusively in digital form via the internet. Amazon appears to be setting itself up as a major player in this new world. With the Kindle, they’ve already made big steps towards this goal for the book industry. Nevertheless, this evolution of one of Amazon’s core businesses is an enormous challenge.

A good example of a successful evolution can be taken from Netflix: Netflix began as a DVD rental service per post and has in the last years increasingly changed its focus to internet streaming videos. Now they are the leading video streaming service for film and TV shows in the US, creating more traffic than BitTorrent. At the same time, the video rental chain Blockbuster has declared bankruptcy.

A side note: With good reason, Netflix didn’t start out as “DVDflix” and Amazon didn’t use “books.com”. SEO with descriptive domain names have real limitations.

Back to Amazon: The Amazon Cloud Drive and CloudPlayer are playing exactly into this strategy to actively stimulate the consumer change. In addition, the rumours that Amazon is planning a film streaming service appear consistent with this strategy.

In the next years, tablets will not only become the most important internet devices beside mobile phones. They will in its various forms also become the central remote control for the upcoming multimedia networked household. A foot in the door into this industry could have massive payoffs.

It will be interesting to see if Amazon integrates shopping elements into its tablets and if so, what kind of innovations could spring up when an e-commerce company has the freedom to create its own custom hardware front end. Thanks to its openness, Android is very customisable. And Apple has already shown with iOS what can be achieved when vertical integration works.

Amazon is preparing for a future where access to entertainment skips over the physical medium and thereby also the limitations of postal transportation. As a side effect, completely new potential might open up for Amazon. Whatever the case, it will be exciting to see what the e-commerce giant will be able to move with its tablets.

Related posts:

• Viddler, Vimeo, Vzaar: Video Providers Surging to the iPad
• Nick Lansley of Tesco.com Speaks on “APIs and the 4th Screen”
• QooQ: A Tablet Device for the Kitchen

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

Google+: What to Make of Google’s New Social Networking Initiative

With Google+, the internet giant is making its next attempt to get a foothold into the social networking game. After Orkut, Wave and Buzz, this could be considered their fourth try already.

The currently invitation only service is functionally and optically quite similar to Facebook. Which is not particularly surprising: despite its size, Facebook is a good product in terms of function and user interface (with some isolated exceptions such as the confusing option jungle).

The stream is more or less mandatory and forms the central focus. (see also Marcel Weiss’ post on the social web pattern).

For an analysis on Google+ and a prognosis of Google’s newest social networking initiative, see Marcel Weiss’ posts on neunetz (in German).

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

Start-Up Report: Planely.com – Socializing in the Air

Dirk Loew, our Exciting Travel author and editor, posted recently on the startup planely.com. The company mixes online and offline worlds in an interesting way and facilitates face-to-face meetings between people who will be sharing the same flight.

The goal of the Copenhagen based start-up was summarized by CEO Nick Martin as follows:

“Our mission is to have millions of meetings happen that wouldn't have been possible if it was left to luck. We know that when great people get together and have real-world conversations then unexpectedly amazing things happen. We want to help as many of those amazing things come about as possible!”

On the technical side, planely.com pulls flight schedule info from an external company – planely has no access to the databases of the airlines and not even the seating plans. The website is currently only available in English. Other languages as well as a mobile phone app are in planning and should be implemented as quickly as possible.  A Facebook presence is already in place.

Once registered and logged in, the service is easy to use: Users search their flights and wait for matching persons on the same flight. According to CEO Nick Martin, planely.com is enjoying a 30% monthly growth rate for registered users, with the strongest demographics from the USA and Europe. Users from Asia and Australia are also represented.

Users can log in with their Facebook IDs and see the status of their networking in LinkedIn.

However: planely.com has yet to come up with a business model. The service is currently free. Potential revenue streams could be a pay for use premium service (profile details, fee-based App, etc.) or a CPC/CPL agreement with a third party website such as seatguru.com.

The service could also be useful for airlines: They would be able to offer guests a way to meet interesting people on their flights and that also worldwide, mobile and on very short notice.

This seems to be a trend for the future as well as a success factor for social networking initiatives: digital connected to real - Get familiar online via your network, and then meet in the real world.

Originally posted in German by Dirk Loew on the Exciting Travel blog, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

LivingSocial buys daily deals sites in Thailand and the Philippines

The Germany based Rebate Networks which is specialised on building Groupon clones has sold five of its services. Of those LivingSocial bought the Philippines based Ensogo and the Thailand based Dealkeren. The latter is operated by Ensogo.

Rebate Networks also sold sites which are based in Japan, Indonesia and the Ukraine. Rebate Networks still owns 24 Groupon clones in as many countries.

In the meantime LivingSocial is as well preparing for an IPO at a $10+ billion valuation.

Related posts:

 

• LivingSocial gets closer to Groupon, works on expanding mobile app
• LivingSocial Buys LetsBonus, Coming Soon To Germany
• Amazon Onboard with Groupon Clone Living Social for $175 Million