“There’s an excellent growth opportunity for U.S. retailers outside the U.S.,” said Michael DeSimone, CEO of FiftyOne, a logistics company. “E-commerce is much more nascent [outside the U.S.], but our merchants are seeing extraordinary growth by building their brand with a new customer base.”

As it turns out, however, shipping and selling goods internationally is extremely complex.

First, there’s currency translation, then there’s the complexity of dealing with customs. And there are other considerations: For instance, a down pillow or a snakeskin purse may have to be cleared by the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife or require a permit if the animal is on an endangered list.

“The opportunity for a bad customer experience is very high, unless you have a repeatable process in place,” DeSimone said.

In other words, done well and executed efficiently, it can be a moneymaker, but if done poorly, you can hurt the brand.

FiftyOne helps U.S. retailers ship products to 106 countries worldwide, by assisting retailers with currency conversion and global shipping logistics, including customs and returns. It manages a central distribution in Columbus, Ohio, where all the packages exit and enter the U.S.

The New York company works with dozens of online retailers, including Macy’s, J.Crew, Overstock.com, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Pottery Barn, Gilt Groupe and Wet Seal. Since FiftyOne started focusing on international logistics, back in 2008, it has seen e-commerce start to take off internationally, DeSimone said.

Last year, the company’s gross merchandise volume, accounting for the total amount of all international purchases made, was $136 million, almost up twice from the year before, when it recorded $78 million. In 2009, its business totaled $26 million.

The biggest international markets for U.S. retailers today, FiftyOne said, are English-speaking countries such as Canada, Australia and the U.K. But South Korea, Brazil and Mexico are also all growing close to 50 percent year over year.

In addition, DeSimone said, the average order size increased to $265 in 2011, up from $237 the year earlier.

Here’s a graphic detailing some of the challenges in shipping internationally:

In an interview, Doug Bergeron explained to AllThingsD the reasoning behind the spending spree, saying that the company is undertaking a major transformation that requires selling software and services — not just hardware.

Only two weeks ago, VeriFone agreed to acquire Point, a major retail payment provider in Europe, for $817 million (not including $230 million in debt). Two weeks before that, it picked up Global Bay, a smaller company that helps retailers connect their e-commerce assets to physical stores through the use of iPads. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Additionally, a year ago, it agreed to buy payment security provider Hypercom in an all-stock transaction valued at about $485 million, including debt.

The three acquisitions easily push the company’s investment above $1 billion. A bet of this kind represents a substantial risk, but Bergeron believes the decision to turn into a services company was a no-brainer, even calling it “obvious.”

The San Jose company, which has about 3,000 employees globally, has a history of growing through acquisitions stretching back to 2005, so maybe it can pull it off. In its fiscal 2012, the publicly-held company is projecting it will make a profit of up to $2.50 a share on revenues of up to $1.72 billion before the Point merger is taken into account.

Earlier this year, VeriFone appeared on the defensive, after Bergeron attacked San Francisco-based Square for not providing encryption in its mobile card readers. Since then, Square has promised to add another layer of protection, although the rollout is still pending.

VeriFone now seems to be on the offensive, having figured out what role it will inhabit as mobile payments come increasingly into play. And despite Bergeron’s earlier outcry about Square, he says the company will play “the role of Switzerland,” and will be neutral about which technology will win.

In particular, VeriFone wants to be the software developer that makes all the new innovations — including Google Wallet, PayPal, ISIS, the carrier-led initiative and others – work with a retailer’s existing systems. Since retailers have limited resources for technology, he believes this will be an important role.

Here are excerpts from my interview with Bergeron, who is not modest in calculating the opportunity in front of VeriFone.

What was the thought process behind the acquisitions?

Broadly speaking, VeriFone has a very impressive market share at the point of sale, and now worldwide with Point. We see the most signficant dynamic shift taking place is the new complexity that’s hitting the point of sale as a result of all the innovation that’s taking place.

It means transforming VeriFone from a focus on the best in products to both products and services. We will be delivering payments as a service. Retailers want to take advantage of Google Wallet and the iPad, and brick-and-mortar stores want to connect with online stores through multichannel integration. But these retailers don’t have 100 people on staff capable of integrating. They can either be left behind and not participate, or they can reach out to a partner to co-manage the increasing complexity at the point of sale.

Global Bay is providing software for tablets that basically allows for integration with inventory systems and e-commerce solutions and other types of services that the market is going to demand. At the end of the day, the retailers don’t want to lose a sale, and if they have someone ready to buy something, like women’s apparel or jewelry or apparel of any type or home repairs, where there’s a dialogue in the store with the customer, they want to upsell or make sure they leave with more than they would otherwise.

Otherwise, it’s hard to compete with Amazon, which has massive distribution centers across the country. But if small or large retailers can leverage their corporate distribution centers, then they have an advantage over Amazon. They have the touch factor with the person [in the store]. It’s a new age that has arrived for multichannel retail, where brick-and-mortar meets e-commerce. That’s what Global Bay is doing so well.

So you are evolving from a hardware company to a services company?

I’m going to edit your question.

We don’t produce hardware. It’s manufactured by third partners, and our product comes out of a $130 million R&D budget, of which $110 million is software.

For VeriFone, 90 to 95 percent of revenue has been product, but over the past two years, we’ve stepped up our services business with encryption and content at the point of sale.

In the fourth quarter, the quarter we are about to report on, we are projecting that services will be 22 percent of our business, and that’s on top of the total business growing dramatically. By the end of 2015, we think we can get it to 50 percent.

With the Point acquisition, which is all services — or close to it, at 88 percent — we’ll now be in the low-30s percentage.

I’m pretty sure, but for the most simple requirements, we’ll say [to the retailer], here’s the products, here’s all the boxes, and then check all the boxes for things you want, like Google Wallet, encryption; or do you want to support gift cards, or multichannel sales through the Global Bay capability?

You have a good perspective on the wide range of mobile payments that are rolling out. How many of these technologies will make it?

What I don’t know is what are the next types of innovations coming out of the Valley or other places.

Everything looks good on YouTube, or in a standalone trial, but if you have to roll it out to thousands of stores — and 50 lanes in each store — whatever new that’s out there has to coexist with the old stuff.

Who’s going to do that and the integration, and who’s going to manage the software updates? It certainly can’t be the two guys in IT, because they don’t have the resources.

How slowly will these rollouts occur? When you put it that way, it seems impossible for retailers to adopt it very quickly.

I think things move deliberately, not slowly.

That’s a bit of a wake-up call to those who come out of the online world and think they can put some code up in the cloud and it works. But when you talk to Costco, Macy’s or McDonald’s, which are all our accounts, they are innovative. They’ve rolled out pin debit or cash back, but it goes through a process of quality assurance, and they have labs where they test all this stuff, and then methodically move it out.

National retailers will have to get on board. They are the ones that move mindshare. They want the same experience in every store in every city in every state, and to mass deploy that, it takes a fair amount of planning.

How many new providers will make it?

There’s no question there will be a few, but it’s not limitless.

There’s a limit to the amount of change and chaos that the important retailers are willing to deal with at any given time. I’m describing a situation why VeriFone is so important. They [the retailers] love the meetings with PayPal and Google and ISIS, but all of this stuff has to coexist together.

In a lot of ways, we are playing the role of Switzerland. We are supportive and encouraging of all the innovation. We are the systems-agnostic guys that are operating on behalf of the retailers.

But all of these things would require software. The things that Google is trying to accomplish integrates with back-office systems at the SKU level. If it was just throwing hardware at the problem, it’s one thing, but it’s software.

You’ve talked about the importance of Global Bay, but now let’s talk a little more about the Point. Why was that acquisition important?

The data is out there. It’s a company that has grown fivefold over the last eight years, and is precisely located in the geographies in Europe that are A) healthy, and B) prone to be the first movers of mobile payments.

That’s where the Point lives and breathes. They have massive market share using VeriFone solutions, and more than half a million merchants in Northern Europe and the U.K. are using them to manage services that are largely around keeping EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, up to date. EMV uses chip technology instead of swipe technology like we do here in the U.S.

They took out all the complexity of managing EMV and provided them [retailers] a monthly managed service. It’s precisely that framework and model that will allow us to turn the lights on for PayPal and Google Wallet and other services. The Point has been very much ahead of the pack, rolling out NFC capabilities before retailers have asked for it. This can be very exciting for Google and others, because it can enable a rapid deployment capability for any of them.

Are you going to make any more acquisitions? 

We are busy integrating right now. I don’t think you’ll see anything sizable for quite some time. For the most part, we are done with Hypercom, and waiting to do integration in January for the Point. For the most part, it will be independent. I think we have a lot of tools in the shed to help to find a new VeriFone.

Google Maps 6.0, available to Android users, will provide access to indoor layouts for a few dozen locations, so shoppers and travelers can find their way around without having to ask for directions.

Google’s Product Management Director Steve Lee told All Things D that — just as with outdoor Google maps — a person’s location will be highlighted by a flashing blue dot surrounded by points of interest.

In an airport, that means you’ll be able to find a particular gate or ATM, or if you are in a mall, you’ll be able to find the Gap or the kids’ play area. For Ikea, the home furnishings store known for its sprawling layout and chaotic atmosphere, it means finding the bathroom or the smorgasbord before a state of emergency is reached. Better yet, it could even mean figuring out where to park, based on which mall entrance is closest to the store you want to visit.

The announcement was made today on Google’s blog.

To make it all work, Lee says, they’ve been able to fine tune the location-based services Google uses for the outdoor locations, including cellphone towers, Wi-Fi hotspots and GPS — without requiring the retailer to install any new hardware. He claims it’s so accurate that the phone can pick up on the fact that a shopper is taking the escalator up or down and automatically changes the display of the store’s floor layout accordingly.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Point Inside has been working on this very problem for the past few years and has teamed up with several malls, retailers and other app developers to provide the indoor-mapping technology. Its technology works across iPhone and Android devices, but of course, Google’s advantage is that it will be able to leverage its install base of millions of Google Maps users, who will likely start using the new feature without having to change behavior or download a separate application.

Google said all the technology was built in-house by its own engineers.

For Google, the key will be accuracy. Getting location information even with the help of GPS can be challenging, even outdoors. Adding multiple floors, thick cement walls and getting up-to-date data from the retailer, mall or airport, adds to the complexity.

Starting today, there will be indoor maps for several hundred million square feet, including 17 airports, several department stores, including Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s; big-box retailers like Home Depot and Ikea; and major malls, such as the Mall of America in Minneapolis.

Lee said that for now the team’s focus is on adding more locations, not on monetizing the feature, but it’s easy to see how Google could present an advertisement to someone as they walk by a merchant in the mall. With the search provider already dabbling in daily deals and mobile payments, it’s not a stretch at all.

Here’s Google demonstrating how it works:

(Restroom photo credit: Pictonym.)

How did I miss this fantastic holiday commercial for Macy’s, featuring teen heartthrob and singing sensation Justin Bieber?

Called “Screamers,” it’s a very sly take on the proclivity of people to emit high-pitched utterances around the Biebs.

But this time, it works.

Adorkable all around:

Best Buy Co. is joining the list of big store chains opening at midnight after Thanksgiving this year in hopes of getting a jump on the competition, following recent announcements by Target Corp., Macy’s Inc. and Kohl’s Corp.

Best Buy Chief Executive Brian Dunn, said he felt forced to “make a very difficult decision” and open at midnight because rival retailers were doing so, though the decision was controversial inside the company.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

BoomTown was looking over Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong as I blogged the conference call after Yahoo released its fourth-quarter earnings after markets closed today.

It’s pretty! But Yahoo’s revenue growth–still, not so much.

Let’s begin:

2:02 pm PT: Yahoo turned in earnings that were slightly better than expected, although no big shakes either, so the call was likely to sound exactly like the last several quarterly calls.

Bingo! We’re trying! It’s encouraging! You’ll see!

In fact, “encouraging” was just the word that CEO Carol Bartz used as she tried to focus on a doubling of operating income, operating margin and earnings per share.

Impressive, the revenue at Yahoo is still stubbornly not moving, which the company continued to attribute to the new search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft.

“This is all part of our plan to turn Yahoo around,” said Bartz, who added a new buzzword, “personalized content,” to its offerings.

She turned the call over to Yahoo CFO Tim Morse, who ran through the numbers, which pretty much came down to this: Display advertising up 16 percent from last year, while search revenue dropped 18 percent.

As in previous quarters, Morse talked about how “headwinds” will soon lessen and it will be smooth sailing for Yahoo ahead.

After the stormy seas of recent years, that would be nice, since investors have gotten pretty seasick owning Yahoo shares.

Morse offered that, “while there is still much to do, we are still executing well against our plan” and went on about how good things are.

Finally, we have a “unified purpose,” which he characterized as personalized content too.

It’s a nice new catchword for Yahoo, and I liked Morse’s strong tone and gumption, which for an accountant was like hollering.

His big Achilles’ heel: The revenues projections ahead remain soft.

2:24 pm: Back to Bartz, who focused on the future success of the Microsoft advertising alliance and also Yahoo’s leadership in display advertising.

She listed some big offline brands, such as Wal-Mart and Macy’s, noting when looking for online ads, “That’s right, they all came to Yahoo.”

Bartz moved on to its stake in China’s Alibaba Group and noted it was a “great investment with a bright future.” Translation: We are not selling for now.

But noting its investment in Yahoo! Japan, Bartz had a slightly different take, mentioning talks to “unlock” the value of the stake. Translation: Maybe we’ll sell if we can figure out how not to pay all those taxes.

Bartz did the same with all of Yahoo properties, putting a sunny spin on what is still a turnaround situation.

It’s a good strategy, but it is one that is starting to sound like a broken record, especially when Google, Facebook and others seem to be like a house on fire.

2:35 pm: Now on to Q&A, in which Wall Street analysts ask softball questions of executives.

And so they do, asking queries that include small details about its operating margin, questions on tiny changes in numbers due to accounting changes. And very little about larger strategy.

You can read about this stuff in the press release, but whatever.

I am thinking of starting an investment bank, so I can jump in on these calls and ask some questions that have actual substance.

The United Bank of Swisher? Goldman Sucks?

Ooh, I was wrong, because one analyst asked a good one about possible future layoffs.

Bartz noted the company would be adding people, um, after laying some employees off.

It’s all about “re-allocating” staff, which Yahoo did earlier today by laying off one percent of its workforce, after an earlier four-percent cut.

Next, a question about search share, with Morse noting there will be search volume growth in the future.

Big message: We are in this to grow the share.

Except it has not been growing, as the last several months of surveys of search share have shown.

But Bartz firmly declared: “We’ll be up” in 2011.

A question focused in on mobile, and Bartz pointed out that Yahoo had the disadvantage of not having a mobile operating system such as Google does with Android.

Good point!

2:59 pm: Another terrific analyst comment about the disconnect between the execs encouraging comments and the actual financials, which show a downturn in, yes, revenue.

It is exactly the point here, which Yahoo has been trying to spin. Morse went through the list of excuses, from bumpiness of the search transition to weakness in affiliate sales to whatever.

Bartz jumped in and blamed the search alliance again, noting that moving advertisers over to the new platform was hard to do.

“I will not back down on the fact that we are gaining momentum,” said Bartz about search. “There is a lot going on here.”

Morse chimed in, noting he was the one using “gaining momentum” in his script. “I really believe that,” he said, going through the terrific plans.

“You’re correct the top line is not showing that yet,” said Morse in an increasingly loud voice. “There’s an awful lot there to be optimistic about.”

The accountant that roared.

Encouraging.

But then came the last question about the growth of Facebook, the Silicon Valley social networking phenom that is clearly going to be Yahoo’s biggest rival over the next years.

Bartz acknowledged Facebook’s explosive growth, but declared the company more compatible than competitive.

“There’s room for everybody here,” she said.

Presumably, that’s the hope for Yahoo.

(Also, you can see a slide deck of the financials here.)

Being the largest e-commerce company is an obvious barrier to entry, but there are at least two opportunities in 2011 that will drive even more traffic to its site and others: Social and mobile.

A 78-page presentation by J.P. Morgan on the Internet Sector Outlook of 2011, which focuses a lot on the e-commerce market, predicts that the big losers will be physical retailers as more spending shifts online.

If you’ve been reading eMoney, you already knew this. Last month, we referred to these trends as the so-lo-mo trifecta, referencing the impact of social, local and mobile on e-commerce.

In 2010, J.P. Morgan found that nearly 8 percent of Amazon’s traffic was coming from Facebook, compared to 20 percent coming from Google, and that e-commerce revenues are expected to grow by 13.2 percent in 2011.

But as more consumers discover products and services through social networks, like Facebook, and compare prices on their smartphones in stores, traditional brick-and-mortars will lose market share and face bankruptcy, J.P. Morgan concludes. (It’s a small coincidence that Macy’s said it expects to add about 725 new positions over the next two years to beef up its Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s Web sites).

Here’s how J.P. Morgan makes the case for the future of e-commerce:

–U.S. e-commerce revenues totaled $28 billion in 2000, soaring to $166 billion in 2010. Revenues are expected to grow by 13.2 percent in the U.S. this year alone.

–In 2010, 36 percent of people said they bought something online at least once a month. Slightly less, or 32 percent of people, said they purchased one to two items online a month. However, less than 2 percent of folks bought more than 10 items a month.

–Traffic to Amazon’s sites is increasingly coming from Facebook, jumping 328 percent over the past year to almost 8 percent. That compares to almost 20 percent of referrals coming from Google.

–Facebook is driving less traffic to eBay than to Amazon, or roughly 4.7 percent, compared to 11.4 percent from Google.

–E-Commerce 2011 Top Picks: Amazon, Priceline and Latin American e-commerce provider MercadoLibre.

One particular highly accessible kind of flash mob, in which local singing groups perform Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus at shopping malls, has been replicated all over the U.S. and Canada in the last month or so.

Quickly: Flash mobs are traditionally secretly orchestrated performances that play out in public places while bringing a little bit of magic to unsuspecting people in the right place at the right time. If you’ve ever seen those videos of a person breaking into song or dance in a public place, then being joined by hordes of interlopers who somehow know the full routine, you’ve seen a flash mob. (There are also less choreographed variations, like public pillow fights.)

Since flash mobs seem so fun, organic and full of life, they’ve of course been co-opted by marketers who mimic the style right down to camera shots of the surprised and confused onlookers capturing videos of the moment with their own camera phones. But they’ve also recently been adopted by wholesome community groups wanting to spread a little holiday joy. And in many cases, both the performers and the audience know about the event in advance (element of surprise be damned).

One flash mob performance of “Hallelujah” in a Canadian shopping mall, posted on YouTube on Nov. 17, has been seen more than 25 million times. YouTube’s Trends blog recently called it “by far, the most popular video of the season.”

YouTube’s Kevin Allocca also highlighted some 20 other flash mob performances, also of “Hallelujah” and mostly in shopping malls, from Orlando, Cleveland, Chattanooga, Juneau and Winnipeg. Allocca says the meme may actually have been kicked off by the Opera Company of Philadelphia performing “Hallelujah” in a Macy’s as part of the Knight Foundation’s Random Acts of Culture. That video was posted Nov. 1 and has more than six million views.

It’s gotten so bad that on Monday night a mall near Sacramento had to be evacuated after crowds overwhelmed it and the fire department feared for its structural integrity. A planned flash mob by the Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra and other local congregations had been endorsed by the mall and promoted for weeks, drawing thousands to watch and sing along with their printed-out sheet music.

Would-be flash mobbers broke into impromptu singalongs as they were escorted out of the building and into the parking lot (with their video cameras recording all the while, of course). So apparently spontaneity isn’t dead yet.

The retail industry coined the phrase “Cyber Monday” to represent the Monday immediately following Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving). Presumably everyone was returning to work and continuing their shopping online.

However, the term ended up a misnomer because there was always a day closer to Christmas that exceeded it in sales, as procrastinators waited until the last minute to shop online.

Well, that may change this year, says comScore, which measures such stuff.

“At this late juncture in the online holiday season, we have likely already witnessed the peak spending day of the year, which means that Cyber Monday should emerge as the season’s heaviest online spending day for the first time in history,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni in a release.

That’s not to say other days didn’t come close.

Overall, online spending this year is up 12 percent, when looking at the 47 days between Nov. 1 and Dec. 17, and this past week’s numbers were even higher. Online shopping reached $5.15 billion in the week ended Dec. 17, jumping 14 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

Both Monday and Friday were abnormally strong, coming in at $943 million and $942 million, respectively.

But for the first time ever, neither of those day was able to outperform Cyber Monday, which hit an all-time record of $1.03 billion.

Historically, two days in the past week have particularly stood out. Monday is named “Green Monday” after the color of money, and Friday is called “Free Shipping Day,” because a number of physical and e-commerce retailers teamed up to promote online shopping by giving away free postage for a 24-hour period. Monday was up 12 percent over last year, and Friday was up 61 percent.

Based on historical patterns, comScore had reasoned that one or more days would exceed $1 billion in the past week. Now with Christmas six days away, it’s likely too late to see that kind of volume again. Although Amazon’s cutoff for fee shipping ends tonight, and Wal-Mart’s free shipping (with guaranteed arrival by Dec. 24) ends tomorrow night, and department stores like Macy’s is offering free shipping until Monday for items $99 or more.

In all, the shopping season to date stands at $27.46 billion.

Happy holidays, indeed.

The idea of being rewarded for being a consumer is getting a lot of heat of late, as retailers seek to take advantage of the fast-moving social phenom among consumers, especially young ones.

Thus, a wide range of efforts to combine location-based mobile apps with purchasing, both online and offline.

Earlier this week, BoomTown posted on a funding for one such start-up, Topguest, which links check-ins with airline and hotel loyalty programs.

Today, another company in the space, shopkick, announced it had added another store–Minneapolis-based Target–to its list of retailers deploying its platform and mobile app.

As with customers of Macy’s, Best Buy and others, users of the shopkick app will receive points and other rewards, as well as instant mobile coupons, just for walking in the store.

The point being: Retailers need to reward foot traffic and not just purchases.

The Target partnership is limited now to 242 stores in the Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City and the San Francisco area.

Target will also offer scannable mobile coupons to customers for redemption at checkout.

It will be interesting to see how effective apps such as shopkick are as they roll out, as consumers test them.

Unlike others that offer quick deals–from Foursquare to Facebook to, now, Yahoo–shopkick uses its “kickbucks” as an enticement simply for being present in a store or scanning certain barcodes.

It’s certainly easy enough–my son, Louie, did it with ease and definite enjoyment–although a user does need to remember to fire up the app when entering a participating store.

There is also a small device retailers need to install need to make the shopkick ecosystem work.

CEO Cyriac Roeding, a former EVP for CBS’ mobile unit, created the concept for the Menlo Park, Calif.-based start-up while an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins.

The company has raised $20 million in venture funding from Kleiner’s iFund, longtime Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman, as well as Hoffman’s home at Greylock Partners.

Here is a video interview I did with Roeding about where shopkick is going next:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101116/shopkick-checks-in-with-target-ceo-cyriac-roeding-talks-about-social-shopping/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101114/meebo-foursquarifies-the-web-with-check-ins/ http://allthingsd.com/20101114/meebo-foursquarifies-the-web-with-check-ins/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:21:38 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=340 Meebo on Tuesday plans to announce an update to its popular Meebo Bar (which is used on this Web site, and many others, to make it easier for users to share content). The goal is to help users discover new Web sites (kind of like StumbleUpon) and become loyal to them by using a check-in system (kind of like a virtual Foursquare).

Starting tomorrow, users who want to participate can download a new browser extension called the Meebo MiniBar. Starting in December, Web sites can add check-ins through embeddable buttons and the Meebo Bar itself (which counts 8,000 publisher users, with a combined 180 million uniques). Brands such as Macy’s, Sprint and L’Oréal Professionnel have already committed to participate.

To check in on Meebo, a user will need to have a Meebo account. The idea is for people to be motivated to share in order to become VIPs on the sites they visit often (another extension of the Foursquare metaphor). Users can also subscribe to feeds of people who like similar Web sites so they can find new places to visit.

This is not a new idea–if you take the pitch and replace the term “checking in” with “social bookmarking” you’ll find a pile of (mostly discarded) companies. More specifically, back when OneRiot was called Me.dium it launched just such an extension in 2006, and the current start-up Badgeville makes a white-label loyalty platform for publishers. And Facebook, of course, has its “like” system of allowing users to subscribe to Web sites and brands.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101114/meebo-foursquarifies-the-web-with-check-ins/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101018/luxe-lowdown-tony-sites-begin-to-invite-buyer-reviews/ http://allthingsd.com/20101018/luxe-lowdown-tony-sites-begin-to-invite-buyer-reviews/#comments Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:00:31 +0000 Rachel Dodes http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31186 More than a decade after book and electronics retailers embraced online customer reviews, the most elite stores in the U.S. are opening their websites—and the brands they sell—to the slings and arrows of public opinion.
At the end of the month, Saks.com, the online arm of Saks Fifth Avenue, will unveil a five-star review system where customers can express their opinions on products ranging from $1,700 Jimmy Choo bags to $7 Kiehl’s lip balm. Macy’s Inc.’s Bloomingdale’s division and Neiman Marcus added their own versions of reviews recently, following the lead of Nordstrom, which began offering them last fall.
The changes are being driven by the need to beef up online sales, and a realization among luxury retailers that customers want the ability to take shopping advice from their peers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101018/luxe-lowdown-tony-sites-begin-to-invite-buyer-reviews/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100716/venture-capitalists-new-frontier-where-cellphones-meet-retailing/ http://allthingsd.com/20100716/venture-capitalists-new-frontier-where-cellphones-meet-retailing/#comments Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:00:50 +0000 Spencer E. Ante http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=27238 Reid Hoffman, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who put money early into hot start-ups like Facebook Inc. and online gaming company Zynga Game Network Inc., now has his eye on the intersection of mobile phones and bricks-and-mortar retailing.

His latest bet as a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners is on Shopkick Inc., one of a number of young firms hoping to turn cellphones into tools for spurring sales. Mr. Hoffman, who joined Greylock last November, is leading its $15 million investment in the company and taking a seat on its board on behalf of his firm.

Founded in June 2009, Shopkick is building applications for the iPhone and devices powered by Google Inc. (GOOG) software that will offer product information or coupons when users check into a store with their cellphones.

The company plans to launch the application this summer and has signed up a number of partners, including Best Buy Co. (BBY), Macy’s Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. Sonny Jandial, brand manager with P&G (PG), said the company is trying to learn how to take advantage of consumers’ obsession with their cellphones.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100716/venture-capitalists-new-frontier-where-cellphones-meet-retailing/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100623/the-knot-susquehana-upgrades-on-improve-local-ad-outlook/ http://allthingsd.com/20100623/the-knot-susquehana-upgrades-on-improve-local-ad-outlook/#comments Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:00:41 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=26379 The Knot (KNOT) shares are trading higher this morning after Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Malindi Davies upgraded shares of the online wedding site to Positive from Neutral, setting a $9 price target.

“The risk/reward balance for KNOT has improved over the last few months, in our view,” Davies writes in a research note. “We are upgrading based on expectations that the local business should improve given a recent reorganization and platform upgrades. We believe the Macy’s overhang is well understood and see opportunities in registry and China longer term.” Davies notes that she sees “an improved outlook for local advertising.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100623/the-knot-susquehana-upgrades-on-improve-local-ad-outlook/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100421/retailers-reach-out-on-cellphones/ http://allthingsd.com/20100421/retailers-reach-out-on-cellphones/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 09:59:53 +0000 Geoffrey A. Fowler http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=24152 Thanks to Internet-equipped smartphones, shoppers are increasingly using software applications to check prices at other stores without leaving the mall. Now retailers are trying to use technology to fight back.

A start-up called Shopkick Inc., for example, has signed up Best Buy Co. (BBY) and Macy’s Inc. (M) as launch partners for a new kind of app for iPhone and Android handsets that detects when shoppers are in or near stores and offers rewards targeted to them. Shopkick exploits the phones’ location-sensing abilities–and cameras that customers can use to scan bar codes on items–to offer product information, coupons or other marketing offers when shoppers are in a convenient position to buy.

In a retail world that is typically divided between the “bricks” of physical stores and the “clicks” of online customers, Shopkick “is like bricks on steroids,” says Martine Reardon, Macy’s executive vice president of marketing and advertising. The app, she says, will help the department store find new ways to communicate with consumers while they are inside Macy’s and when they are nearby and might be lured into the store with just the right offer.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100421/retailers-reach-out-on-cellphones/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091125/where-to-find-black-friday-deals/ http://allthingsd.com/20091125/where-to-find-black-friday-deals/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:03:01 +0000 Marisa Taylor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=18404 The day after Thanksgiving is one of the biggest shopping days of the year and marks the official beginning of the holiday retail season.

So where can you find the Black Friday deals? Google (GOOG) the term and a host of compilation sites pop up, many of which began posting information a month ago to alert customers to the best deals.

Black Friday Ads, for example, publishes daily updates featuring the best deals on electronics across the Web. SlickDeals.net categorizes offers by retailer, including major ones like Amazon.com (AMZN), Best Buy (BBY), Macy’s and Target, and the number of deals available at each one. BlackFriday.info allows shoppers to create a Black Friday shopping list and specifies which deals are online-only.

Some sites offer a highly organized look at what could otherwise be a jumble of information. DealsVista has created a deals spreadsheet that can be viewed online or downloaded, and Shoppers Shop created an online table of deals that includes start and end dates.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091125/where-to-find-black-friday-deals/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090911/google-to-create-world%e2%80%99s-largest-searchable-archive-of-arguments-against-google-books/ http://allthingsd.com/20090911/google-to-create-world%e2%80%99s-largest-searchable-archive-of-arguments-against-google-books/#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:07:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=24558 Add another name to the list of opponents of the Google Book Search Settlement: Marybeth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights. In testimony before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Thursday, Peters tarred the deal as “fundamentally at odds with the law” and villainized Google, saying the company is making a “mockery” of the copyright protections in the U.S. Constitution.

“The settlement would alter the landscape of copyright law, for millions and millions of rights holders of out-of-print books,” Peters said. “It would flip copyright on its head by allowing Google to engage in extensive new uses without the consent of the copyright owner–in my view, making a mockery of Article One of the Constitution, that anticipates that authors shall be granted exclusive rights.”

The settlement, as Peters sees it, will allow Google (GOOG) to profit from the work of others without prior consent. “It could affect the exclusive rights of millions of copyright owners, in the United States and abroad, with respect to their abilities to control new products and new markets, for years and years to come,” she said. “In essence, the proposed settlement would give Google a license to infringe first and ask questions later, under the imprimatur of the court.”

One of the more blistering attacks on the deal to date, especially given its source: The nation’s top copyright official. But Google nevertheless dismissed it as unfounded: “We think the settlement is legal, and we think it is structured well within the guidelines of what you can do in a class action settlement,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said during the hearing. “It certainly is not usurping Congress’s authority to do whatever it wants.”

A typically arrogant response from Google, though the company does appear to be conceding a bit of ground in the face of widening opposition to the deal. Responding to Peters’s criticism and claims that the deal will essentially grant Google a de facto monopoly over out-of-print books, Drummond said the company plans to make those works available to any book retailer.

“For the out-of-print books being made available through the Google Books settlement, we will let any book retailer sell access to those books,” Drummond told the committee. “Google will host the digital books online, and retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore will be able to sell access to users on any internet-connected device they choose.”

Sadly for Google, that conciliatory gesture did not go over well with critics of the deal. “The Internet has never been about intermediation,” Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, said of the company’s offer. “We are happy to work with rights holders without anyone else’s help.”

The Internet Archive’s Peter Brantley was even more disdainful. “I fail to see what’s really new here,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s like Macy’s telling Sears, ‘You can sell Macy’s clothing.’ There’s no fundamental change of the conditions under which Macy’s acquires those clothes. Google remains in control.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090911/google-to-create-world%e2%80%99s-largest-searchable-archive-of-arguments-against-google-books/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090512/organizing-your-online-shopping/ http://allthingsd.com/20090512/organizing-your-online-shopping/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 00:20:03 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090512/organizing-your-online-shopping/ Last winter, I spent a good hour shopping online for the perfect black leather boots. I used tabbed browsing to open at least 25 Web pages, comparing each pair’s cost, heel height, zipper, leather and toe style. I emailed a friend with links to a few sites so I could get her opinion. And when I finally decided on the right pair, I dug through my email inbox to find a coupon code for 20% off.

This week I tested a solution that might have made my quest for boots a little simpler. Snipi, which became available as a free download from Snipi.com on Monday, helps you organize your online-shopping results by gathering, or “snipping,” product information from Web pages and saving the information to lists.

These lists are stored on your personalized Snipi page, where you can access them later. Snipi also can save photos and videos to lists. And it has a coordinating iPhone app that shows up-to-date versions of the lists created on the computer, so you can have them with you on the go.

The Snipi Toolbar collects and displays the user’s online research.

To do all this, you use the Snipi Toolbar, a horizontal window that pops up within your browser so you never have to navigate away from the site where you’re shopping. If you see an item you like, simply drag and drop an image of it into the toolbar, where details about the item — including its title, price and image — are automatically filled in. If the item was previously snipped by another Snipi user, a description box will be filled with whatever that person wrote or pasted in from the product page; you can fill in the box yourself, too.

Snipi has a partnership with Shopzilla Inc., so the Snipi Toolbar also has comparison shopping built in: It displays links to Web sites where your snipped product, or products like it, can be found at lower prices.

One of the big drawbacks to Snipi is that it currently works only as a browser plug-in with Mozilla’s Firefox, not Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer or Apple’s (AAPL) Safari. Snipi says it plans to introduce versions of its toolbar — though less functional ones — for IE and Safari by early to mid-June. Even so, downloading and installing a browser plug-in isn’t yet a routine thing for most people. And often, people who use plug-ins forget to keep them up-to-date.

Another downside to Snipi is that its comparison-pricing feature failed with apparel. The feature only really worked when used with “hard goods” like electronics, which are sold at retailers that participate in price-comparison networks. Yet Snipi still makes pricing suggestions for clothing and shoes, however irrelevant. For example, when I snipped a $150 Banana Republic dress, a link to $16 eye shadow sold at Sephora.com appeared in the Price Compare column. To reduce confusion, Snipi shouldn’t make such suggestions for apparel.

A handy feature built into the Snipi Toolbar lets you immediately share items via email or post them on Facebook, Twitter or WordPress blogs. This would have been useful while I was shopping online for boots because I could have more quickly shared my finds with friends, rather than copying and pasting URLs into emails.

While browsing on BestBuy.com (BBY), I found a Sony (SNE) Cybershot DSC-W220 with 12 megapixels and a 4x zoom lens for $199. Selecting a small icon in the Firefox browser’s bottom right corner, I opened the Snipi Toolbar and created a “Digicams” list, including the Sony. Snipi suggested alternative prices for this camera, including $159 for the same thing on Amazon.com (AMZN).

I got an early start on bathing-suit shopping by browsing Web sites for J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s. As expected, the price-comparison suggestions didn’t make sense. For one $58 Victoria’s Secret bathing suit, Snipi suggested a list of alternatives, including a $170 Kohler shower door, $203 Giorgio Armani glasses and an $82 corded telephone. I assure you that the bathing suit looked nothing like any of those items.

Confusing alternatives aside, I liked using the Snipi Toolbar as a place to gather my online research. It displayed images of items neatly lined up in a row, and when I selected an item, the description appeared. Someone like my sister, who is planning a wedding, might enjoy using the Snipi Toolbar for saving photos of various locations in a list she could call “Wedding Venues.” She could then share the entire list with me in one step. Or she could go visit some of the places and bring an iPhone with the Snipi app to see her list.

I tried the iPhone app, and it was a cinch to tap My Lists to see the online research I’d gathered. Here, as on the browser toolbar, visuals make it easy to glance through many products.

The toolbar can save various lists that you name and categorize into Shop, Photos or Videos, and these can be kept private, shared with friends or made public. Public lists are seen by all other users on Snipi.com, which is also a social-networking site. I wouldn’t use it as such, because I already rely on other social-networking outlets, but some people might.

Snipi, which uses a guessing algorithm to fill in details like a product’s price, says its toolbar will improve as more people use it. If you do a lot of research or online shopping or you simply want an online tool for saving images and videos from the Web, Snipi will work well for you. Its price-comparison suggestions need some improvement, but I felt more organized after using the Snipi Toolbar for a week’s worth of browsing.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090512/organizing-your-online-shopping/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081203/hey-amazon-you-forgot-the-bar-code-scanner/ http://allthingsd.com/20081203/hey-amazon-you-forgot-the-bar-code-scanner/#comments Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:07:11 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=9048 There’s a new beachhead in Amazon’s campaign to commandeer sales from competing retailers: Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. This morning the retailer uncrated Amazon Mobile, an iPhone/iPod Touch application that allows users to browse its wares and those of associated retailers like Target (TGT) and Macy’s (M). The app supports Amazon’s standard features–customer reviews, “1-Click Shopping” and whatnot–as well as an intriguing new one. Called Amazon Remembers, it allows users to search for products they’d like to purchase by photographing real-world products. Testing Amazon Remembers this morning, I snapped a picture of the Sonos Controller on my desk and, sure enough, about 10 minutes later Amazon (AMZN) let me know that it does offer that product for sale.

A neat little feature, although why anyone would actively use it is beyond me. Text searches on Amazon Mobile–and Amazon’s iPhone-optimized site–are both easier and far, far faster. Why bother with the cumbersome “snap photo-submit photo-wait for Amazon to identify product in photo and its availability and price”?

What this application is clearly lacking and, frankly, just begging for, is a barcode scanner and real-time price comparison function. That would make it a killer app, indeed. And Snappr has proven barcode scanning on the iPhone is possible. The device just needs an improved camera for it to work….

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081203/hey-amazon-you-forgot-the-bar-code-scanner/feed/ 5