Trying to Make Online Shopping More Fun

The new breed of e-commerce sites is benefiting by making shopping more personal and more like a game, the CEO of high-end retailer Gilt Groupe said Wednesday.

Susan Lyne, whose site offers designer brands to members at reduced prices, said that by offering a limited number of products for a small amount of time, Gilt has overcome one of the biggest difficulties for online retailers: getting people to move from putting an item in their cart to actually buying it. Gilt’s site has often been compared with real-world “sample sales,” where buyers often scramble to get a few designer dresses before someone else snaps it up.

“The quickest anyone has ever gotten from login through checkout is nine seconds,” she said.

Ms. Lyne was speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, on a panel that also included Rob Kalin, the CEO of Etsy, an online marketplace for makers of hand-crafted items and the like. Both entrepreneurs believe they differentiate themselves from the Amazons (AMZN) of the world by giving people a more personalized experience.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Must-Reads from other Websites

Panos Mourdoukoutas

Why Apple Should Buy China’s Xiaomi

Paul Graham

What I Didn’t Say

Benjamin Bratton

We Need to Talk About TED

Mat Honan

I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass

Chris Ware

All Together Now

Corey S. Powell and Laurie Gwen Shapiro

The Sculpture on the Moon

About Voices

Along with original content and posts from across the Dow Jones network, this section of AllThingsD includes Must-Reads From Other Websites — pieces we’ve read, discussions we’ve followed, stuff we like. Six posts from external sites are included here each weekday, but we only run the headlines. We link to the original sites for the rest. These posts are explicitly labeled, so it’s clear that the content comes from other websites, and for clarity’s sake, all outside posts run against a pink background.

We also solicit original full-length posts and accept some unsolicited submissions.

Read more »