Exciting Commerce // Unlimited

Zazzle Launches International Operations in Europe

2008-11-17T11:04:42+01:00

Zazzle, a global trendsetter in e-commerce, now delivers out of the UK in addition to its US operations. After months of preparation, the English site was launched and with that its first international operation (press release):

"The launch of Zazzle.co.uk further reinforces Zazzle's commitment to revolutionize e-commerce, and to empower buyers and sellers around the globe."

"The Zazzle platform was built with global commerce in mind," said Michael Karns, Head of International Development for Zazzle."

The new Zazzle is much more design and marketing oriented.

Zazzle, although already quite innovative with their widgets and mashup tools in 2007, has used the past months for a complete makeover. As Michael Karns described to us last September during a visit to the headquarters in Redwood City, Zazzle used to be a mainly tech focused company.

In the meantime, Zazzle has put more value on design aspects, starting from a new logo and ending with a pretty slick packaging design.

Several months ago Zazzle launched one of the most amazing design tools in the industry, rendering the design to predefined body shapes. Here's an example for the male body:

In the future, Zazzle wants to be more marketing driven. Lots of the changes of the last months are related to this goal.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

OpenCandy Announces $3.5 Million Series A Financing

2008-11-13T22:35:59+01:00

OpenCandy Inc demonstrates that startups with proven ideas - particularly in the area of monetization - may very well weather the current financial crisis. They announced a few days ago a Series A financing round in the order of $3.5 million.

OpenCandy’s distribution engine technology is targeted particularly to application developers who don’t have huge marketing resources or distribution networks to grow their installed base.

Originally developed to bundle software installs for DivX, OpenCandy’s technology opens up an association based recommendation network into your application’s installation routine. When a user installs your application, they will receive suggestions to install other associated applications. As the host application you can not only decide to hand-pick apps that you like and want to support, but also allow the distribution engine to associate apps for you (which will be a paid recommendation). To maximize user acceptance, the additional recommendations will always be purely opt-in. The company claims to have some intelligent evaluation routines which will determine relevant recommendations based on the software which is already installed on the user’s computer.

My take on this: the capability to mix-and-match altruistic genuine recommendations with a royalty based system gives this technology a "please everybody" characteristic that should help it gain widespread acceptance.

Financing was supplied by Bessemer Venture Partners, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and a group of angel investors which include Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, Mozilla), and Jordan Greenhall (Former CEO and Co-Founder of DivX).

(via TheDownloadBlog)

Sales Update: Etsy Doubles Trade Volume Since January

2008-11-13T00:03:20+01:00

Etsy is growing from month to month and has doubled its trade volume this October with $8.4 million in relation to the January figures of $4.2 million:

Nevertheless, with cumulative volumes at $64.6 million so far, it could be difficult for Etsy to achieve it’s 2008 target of $100 million of gross merchandise value.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Zappos Lays Off 8% of Workforce

2008-11-13T00:01:59+01:00

Even a role model enterprise such as Zappos needs to cost cut. 8% of its workforce will be reduced. Zappos CEO wrote on Thursday in his blog:

"Today has been a tough, emotional day for everyone at Zappos. We made the hard choice of laying off about 8% of our employees.

The layoffs will affect almost every single department at Zappos. In addition, we are also looking at closing some of our brick and mortar outlet stores in Nevada and Kentucky.

Fortunately for Zappos, we're in a much better position than many other companies. Unlike many other companies, we are still growing and already profitable and cash flow positive."

Zappos follows eBay, who recently also made similar cuts.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Social Commerce: Zlio Launches Marketplace for Merchants and Suppliers

2008-11-11T16:56:34+01:00

The social commerce platform Zlio may have in the past focused on sales of products from affiliate partners, but on the new marketplace “Zlio Suppliers”, dealers can also set up products which will be marketed across the Zlio sales network.

Zlio would like in the future to profit from higher commission fees by bypassing the affiliate program structure. In doing so, Zlio hopes to avoid bitter experiences such as with Amazon.com whereby Zlio was completely blocked out of the affiliate program.

For Zlio it’s the third or fourth strategy change. With the exception of the user driven distribution model, the current platform has barely anything in common to the original Zlio from 2005.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Mangrove Capital Partners Invests in Russian Shopping Club KupiVIP

2008-11-09T23:42:47+01:00

Private shopping clubs are spreading around the world. Since the recent membership drives of Cocosa in England and ShopVIP in Holland, the next country to catch shopping club fever is Russia (press release, RU/EN):

"With KupiVIP.ru, the first private shopping club has been launched in Russia. The shop cooperates with over 300 brand names who offer up to 70 percent discounts. The club is planning 30 sales events for the rest of the year."

The most prominent investor is Mangrove Capital Partners, who also invested in the German Brand4Friends. At first glance, KupiVIP almost looks like a Russian spinoff. Further financial support is from Oliver Jung, who is also a shareholder of Brands4Friends. CEO of KupiVIP is the German Oskar Hartmann.

The KupiVIP concept is more than a fad. Alone in France (where the private shopping club concept was born) there are around 50 shopping clubs already on the market. Germany has already a good dozen of them and the US about half of that.

US Media Discovers European Shopping Club Phenomenon

Originally posted in German by Stephan Randler, translated by Jason Soo.

Social Shopping: Kaboodle Founder on the Plans for 2009

2008-11-03T06:18:43+01:00

Studies have shown (German source) that the next generation of internet users have developed new online shopping behaviors. Manish Chandra, the founder of the social shopping platform Kaboodle confirms this in a current interview and reveals his plans for 2009:

"The shopping experience needs to be both fun and personal. Teens and the younger generation are very savvy online and have a strong sense of self-expression. These groups tend to gravitate towards interactive experiences. Using creative online shopping features, such the ability to create a Styleboard, and then share it with others, fosters interaction among these groups and is very important as it further integrates shopping into their broader online lives.

What new features or initiatives do you have planned for Kaboodle in 09?

Kaboodle will be offering a broader platform for online contests that allows us to partner with brands and retailers more frequently and also gives our community more fun ways to interact with each other. We will also be offering support for integrating photos and products so people can tag photos with the products that are being used in the photo."

Kaboodle counts as one of the oldest social shopping platforms of the web 2.0 generation. And, at latest since their $30 million buyout in 2007 from publishing group Hearst Corporation, is also one of the traffic heaviest.

Social Commerce: Traffic and Usage Data from 17 Sites

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Eye Candy: Amazon Launches Amazon Windowshop

2008-10-31T12:21:58+01:00

Amazon Windowshop ("Lose Yourself in Amazon Bestsellers") is now in Beta release and delivers eye candy for fans of visual shopping experiences. A self-description of Windowshop:

"Enter Amazon Windowshop--a destination for discovering what's new and hot in the world of movies, music, and more"

"We've taken out the text and created an immersive experience to help you lose yourself in exploration. Trailers for bestselling movies. Insight into the hottest TV shows and video games. Track samples from Tuesday's new music releases. Audio reviews of books you should read. Amazon Windowshop lets you get a taste of many titles. They're here - in one place - and all you have to do is move a few keys to zoom in on whatever flips your switch.

If you like what you see or hear, buy it. Everything has a direct link to Amazon.com, where you can complete your shopping experience with ease. And be sure to come back every Tuesday to see what's new."

(via via)

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Social Commerce: Shopit Founder on the Plans for 2009

2008-10-31T12:20:21+01:00

Shopit founder Matt Hill, who recently put together $2.5 million in a second financing round, described in a current interview the sales strategy of Shopit and the plans for 2009.

"Today, Shop It is a highly targeted e-commerce ad network that allows people for example from MySpace to sell to people on Facebook. We don’t charge any listing and transaction fees so it’s been quite appealing and we’ve grown quite a bit in the past 6 months.

We have probably about 600,000 stores in the network right now with between 5,000 and 10,000 new stores being created a day. Most of the stuff is apparel and pretty much the same goods you would find on eBay.

What are your goals for the service heading into 2009?

We’ve been a very seller centric business so far. We’ve appealed mostly to sellers, people that want to sell things and want to list their services or products. Our next phase of our development is going to be very shopping centric.

We’re releasing a new web portal, so there will be a new site coming out. We like to look at it like LinkedIn meets Yahoo stores. We’re also launching a mobile portal which will allow you to communicate with people who are shopping in your store via mobile, make offers and also perform transactions, all via the cell phone."

The complete interview at Social Networking Watch.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Venture Capital: $32 Million for Like.com, $2.5 Million for Shopit.com

2008-10-27T14:23:49+01:00

Two notable finance rounds for innovative e-commerce startups have been announced last week.
The visual shopping machine Like.com and its straight talking founder Munjal Shah have nabbed $32 million in startup capital this summer.

The beginning of the year saw Munjal Shah and ThisNext founder Gordon Gould in a tit-for-tat on the sensibility of “social” elements in e-commerce.

Prior to that he wrote in his CEO blog how Like.com evolved from Riya, it’s increasing specialization and its current focus on shopping solutions for the female target group.

Like.com, along with Polyvore and Zazzle, in our opinion make up the top 3 of Silicon Valley e-commerce startups.

Most recently it’s possible to upload photos from your own collection and find matching products for them.

Fresh capital was also available for Shopit.com, a social shopping solution for Facebook and Co. The team scored $2.5 million. More on the current activities from Shopit.com also to be found in their blog.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Web 2.0 Expo Europe: Wrap Up

2008-10-25T09:29:50+02:00

The European Web 2.0 Expo came to a raucous and good-spirited close on Thursday with the official Web 2.0 Expo Euro After-Party, "LateCrunch", in no small part due to the delightfully incorrigible hosting from TechCrunch's Mike Butcher.

The party topped off a three day long conference which had the very broad goal of touching all aspects of the 2.0 movement such as business strategy, technical development, best processes, marketing and even social impact.

Attendees were mix of folks from every possible field: designers, managers, developers/hackers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and analysts to name a few.

With such an ambitious goal, diversity of audience and a three day limit, one could foresee (and unfortunately later confirm) that it was a challenge to organize.

Workshops, for those who wanted to get their hands dirty, were clustered into parallel streams into the first day. This meant that participants could only choose one morning and one afternoon workshop.

Sessions were packed tightly together on the second and third days with 15 minute breaks in between. This essentially left only the lunch break as a meaningful time where networking and discussion could take place (unless you were twittering and posting while tuned out of a current session). I found it a little a bit ironic that a 2.0 conference expounding the virtues of new dimensions of connection and interaction would leave me with the feeling of a lack of engagement and inter-personal communication. Thank goodness for the evening events where it was possible to mingle and have substantial conversations!

I can't say I was impressed by every session I attended, but a few interesting ones stick out:

Duane Nickull held a well prepared bootcamp workshop on Adobe Flex which clearly demonstrated the main attractions of the framework and which was also simply fun to try out.

A tip of the cap to Robert Goldberg and Ted Shelton who held the Pitch Camp on Tuesday. Although I was a bit peeved that they ran overtime and overlapped with Tim O'Reilly's keynote address, I think it was pretty gutsy to try to mobilize 12 teams plus audience into break-out sessions. It didn't run smooth like butter, but in the spirit of "Act, don't talk" I salute you.

Lee Bryant's Niche Online Social Networks session came across both inspiring and professional. Citing examples where low cost, grassroots web projects have made a large social impact, he expounded on the quote from Andy Hobsbawm of Green Thing, that "small is the new big".

A thought provoking statement from Bryant:

"Innovation is about finding good problems to solve, not about the cleverest solutions".

The Reactive Advertising session from Burt where they introduced their Copybox product was like the dessert which I wish I had had from lunch. Although perhaps not an epiphany for anyone already in the advertising business, the Gustav pair wove an entertaining and convincing story to back up their product.

And last but not least, I find it absolutely necessary to mention the Electricity 2.0 session from Tom Raftery. As the only session of the conference which could be described as completely dedicated to addressing a real world crisis, I can recommend to anyone who couldn't attend to check out the slides:

Electricity 2.0 - Using The Lessons Of the Web To Improve Our Energy Networks

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2expoeu08 w2eb)

Thanks to the O'Reilly Media and TechWeb teams for their hard work in organizing the conference.

VentureBeat Comments on the German Startup Scene

2008-10-23T10:54:16+02:00

VentureBeat has an outstanding summary of the current state of the German startup scene:

“Rarely are German entrepreneurs working on a grand, cutting-edge idea. More often than not, they fall into the copycat rut. Mention this to them, and they nod in agreement. They know it. They’re even copying from the French, with German designer brand company Brands4Friends copying Vente-Privee, for example."

Matt Marshall doesn’t touch on one significant source of the problem. Germany simply lacks competent industry journalists and analysts who can size up the business potential of groundbreaking ideas and help broker deals. It’s a point which is often (and understandably) not covered in the press.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Web 2.0 Expo Europe: Pitch Camp x.0

2008-10-22T22:46:47+02:00

This year saw 12 young teams and an interested audience attend the Pitch Camp at the European Web 2.0 Expo Conference in Berlin.

Teams and audience got to hear presentation tips and discussion from an esteemed panel, who later divided up amongst the teams and served as coaches. After a 30 minute intensive workover, teams had 5 minutes to pitch their business story back to the entire panel and the general audience.

The average level of preparedness was somewhat lower than I had expected, however observing one of the breakout sessions where a Powerpoint presentation was essentially turned upside-down in 30 minutes, I can give some slack for some confusion at the podium.

On the official prize roster, Wuala took first prize, second prize went to Youcalc and third prize was divided amongst Amazee, Plista and Sofatutor (German).

My personal favorites, based purely on the pitch alone:

Most I want to see succeed: Amazee
Most I would like to see my friends start using: Doodle
Best executed presentation: Plista

full disclosure: I had to miss part of the Wuala and Youcalc pitches in order to catch Tim O'Reilly's keynote address, so the interested will have to check you out directly.

Posted by Jason Soo.

Web 2.0 Expo Europe: Web "Two Oh" Is Not Web "Two Over"

2008-10-21T22:05:57+02:00

Amidst a gloomy backdrop of the current economic woes of investors, entrepreneurs and high tech startups, Tim O'Reilly delivered an inspirational Keynote address at the European Web 2.0 Expo this Tuesday.

Illustrating the deep trends behind Web 2.0 such as internet-as-platform and harnessing collective intelligence, O'Reilly asked the rhetorical question, "Do you really think that we're done yet with exploiting this huge change...?"

Winners in this new era, O'Reilly claims, are in the areas of:

Cloud computing
Software as a Service applications like Google Apps
Open Source software
Companies delivering valuable services to business or consumers
Breakthroughs in collective intelligence
Entrepreneurs who believe so much in what they are doing that they stick to it.

Using the example of the PC industry, he cited the times when there were thousands of PC companies, but a natural consolidation reduced this number. He then made the conclusion that the current economic difficulties simply accelerate this inevitable winnowing process.

Bringing the "big picture" back into focus, O'Reilly reminded the audience sharply about the "real" issues facing the world today, such as income inequality, oil price shock, global warming and water scarcity to name just a few.

In the face of extreme situations, O'Reilly advocated robust scenario planning, concluding with the strategy:

"Work on stuff that matters"

Citing the inspirational example of the Berlin Airlift and the innovative efforts required to achieve it, he stressed that his point that:

"Great challenge = Great opportunity"

O'Reilly finished the keynote with the appeal to use innovations from Web 2.0 to address these important issues. Judging by the reaction of the audience, it is a vision that many people would like to share.

Posted by Jason Soo

Slideware Update:

OReilly Radar

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2expoeu08)

Zalando: European Zappos Clone Bets on Free Delivery

2008-10-19T00:02:26+02:00

The Germany based Samwer brothers want to use Zalando ("We serve shoes!") to bring the successful Zappos shoe retailing concept to Europe.

The key concepts with Zalando as with Zappos:

"Free Shipping. Free Returns. Free Hotline."

It’s a risky venture that will require enormous endurance: Zappos, founded in 1999, achieved profitability just only two years ago. They have a return rate of 40%, but also a loyal customer base and a repeat order rate that other online shops can only dream of.

At the same time Zappos is one of the few (online) mail order companies which are very clearly positioning themselves against the traditional brick ‘n’ mortar shops.

Zappos is forecasting for 2008 gross revenues of over $1 billion and is also planning to expand into other product areas.

(via)

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

NY Times Reports Social Lending in Crisis

2008-10-18T23:59:32+02:00

The New York Times wrote on Wednesday on the particular difficulties of social lending sites such as Lending Club, Prosper or Zopa. In the article (“Lending Alternative Hits Hurdle”):

"On Wednesday, the nation’s largest peer-to-peer lending site, San Francisco-based Prosper, stopped allowing lenders to make new loans, saying it needed to wait while the Securities and Exchange Commission evaluated its regulatory filings."

Across the pond we hope that such a good idea doesn’t go under. The German site Smava can take heart since it recently closed a 4 million Euro round of financing (GE/EN), giving it sufficient breathing room for the future.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in Germany

2008-10-09T00:14:13+02:00

The Amiando team held a reception with Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg in Munich and used the opportunity to introduce their Facebook Connect application for “Viral Ticketing”.

Via the Facebook Connect interface, Amiando users can directly access their friend or acquaintance network in Facebook in order to publicize their events. As external applications have long been able to nest themselves into the Facebook platform, Facebook now wants to use Connect to embed itself into other platforms.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is currently on a promo tour through Germany and recently faced questions from an audience in Munich.

Founderslink partner Oliver Beste posed the question if copycats will in the future need to prepare themselves for a wave of lawsuits from the USA.

Facebook recently took legal action against the German StudiVZ (German site) and Trialpay filed a $3 million lawsuit against new German startup Deal United (German site).

Mark Zuckerberg countered that the legal claim against the “StudiGuys” is a pure precautionary measure which ensures that no one will later be able to accuse Facebook of inaction. The legal system requires companies to take certain measures in advance.

In general, Zuckerberg took copious amounts of time after the official proceedings in order to answer individual questions.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.