The New York-based company is part of a recent trend to make shopping on the iPad easier and more fun than sifting through an offline catalog.

Pickie participated in TechStars in New York this spring, and was co-founded by Sonia Sahney Nagar, who previously worked as a product manager at Booz & Company and Amazon. The company is announcing today that it has raised its first round of seed financing. Investors include DFJ Gotham, Betaworks, Liberty City Ventures, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, MESA+ and several angels.

It is also launching its app, also called Pickie. Once a user logs in to the app using Facebook and sets up his or her account, including interests such as home goods, books or fashion, the app will start scanning Pinterest and Twitter for product recommendations. Similar to a magazine or even a catalog, Pickie will tie together the experience with some of its own editorial, but the real advantage is that Pickie will allow you to click to go to the retailer’s site and buy an item without ever leaving the application. Today, users must leave Pinterest and sometimes have to dig several layers deep to find the items they want to buy.

Another recently launched iPad app that is trying to solve a similar problem is Flit, which aggregates a user’s favorite stores into one app, eliminating the need to switch between multiple browser tabs to shop.

Earlier this year, Apple added an App Store category called “catalogs,” obviously recognizing the trend of digitizing the experience of receiving a glossy circular in the mail. Today, there are hundreds in the category from retailers like Jo-Ann and L.L. Bean. There are catalog collections, too, with a handful of well-known brands, including CoffeeTable, Google Catalogs and Catalog Spree.

As part of the unveiling, eBay CTO Mark Carges provided a glimpse of how the company plans to make the shopping experience more social.

“It’s a no-brainer, in terms of where we go next,” he said in an interview.

After it was announced on Wednesday, the new homepage slowly started rolling out to consumers in the U.S. What they will notice first is a more contemporary feel that looks more like a mobile application than it does an e-commerce site. Recommendations will appear based on your past searches, and the algorithms will change as you interact with the feed. In the end, consumers will have ultimate control, so even if you buy razor blades and coffee filters on eBay, you don’t necessarily have to see them in your feed.

Next, Carges said, eBay will be adding a community layer for consumers. Users will be able to share their feeds, or follow other feeds. A good example would be an eBay seller who has created a collection of goods he or she is selling and makes that feed available to others to follow. Motifs could form round comic books, coffee or shoes, for example.

“I’ve been here for four years, and have focused most of my time on making search better,” Carges said. “But shoppers have also said they need browsing and inspiration capabilities. We felt now was a time to bring out a way to personalize passions, whether it is their hobbies or things they like to buy — and bring it to life in the feed.”

The comparison to Pinterest is already worn out, but the personal and social features only accentuate the overlap. Pinterest has done an excellent job in creating a huge community that refers ideas to one another. The commonalities between its homepage and Pinterest are not lost on Carges, but you could nearly see him wincing through the telephone line each time they came up. “It’s also very unique in a couple of ways,” he said. “One is that it’s instantly shoppable. Other sites have highly visual metaphors, but the difference is that we have done it in the context of shopping.”

That is true of “other sites.” In many cases on Pinterest, the item that someone is recommending could be sold out or be three or four clicks deep — which can be way beyond a consumer’s tolerance level. In contrast, eBay wants buying to be insanely easy. As part of the homepage redesign, it narrowed down the number it clicks to make a purchase from four to one.

EBay’s move to a more social and browsable model is part of a broader trend of e-commerce companies trying to become more social. To date, retailers efforts in the space haven’t produced much. Most experiments have revolved around using Facebook to create a more personalized experience. For instance, people who logged into retail sites with their Facebook credentials would, in theory, see recommendations based on their stated interests. And other retailers have come up with nifty ways for purchases to occur directly on a Facebook feed. Even Facebook is trying to figure out commerce, with its recent launch of Facebook Gifts.

Over the past two years, eBay has been investing heavily in social. Last year, it hired Don Bradford as VP of social, and made it one of its four priorities, along with local, mobile and digital payments. Before joining eBay, Bradford worked at Microsoft Live Search communities and MSN Hotmail, and worked shortly at Yahoo, where he was VP of Communities.

Previous social experiments for eBay have included things like group gifts, which allow multiple people to chip in to buy a present. The company has also enabled users to log in to their Facebook account on eBay’s homepage to get product recommendations on past purchasing habits and things you have “liked” on your Facebook page, such as movies, books and music.

While this week’s homepage design isn’t the largest project the company has undertaken over past few years, “it’s the most visible,” Carges said. “The thing we’ve been focused on in the turnaround was under the covers and deep in the tech, search and algorithms. These are things that buyers see.”

But it’s not what you may think. Sales are forecast to increase because there are two additional days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, giving consumers more time to shop than they had last year.

That was the conclusion of a 15-page report written by analysts at Citi Research.

What’s more, the report said that retailers will see very little impact from people making purchases on mobile devices like phones and tablets, or on social media sites like Facebook or Pinterest, even though there’s a lot of hype surrounding those two areas. “While mobile and social will likely grab headlines this season, retailers should concentrate on their ‘core technologies,’ namely e-commerce nuts and bolts, and strategies that integrate their traditional stores [with online ordering and in-store pick-up],” concludes the report.

The document, which was distributed to Wall Street investors, includes data from several key industry sources, including Shop.org’s holiday outlook, ChannelAdvisor’s holiday outlook and information from Retail Systems Research.

Overall, it finds that online spending is expected to increase by 20 percent this year, which is slightly less than what the industry experienced in 2011 when it reported growth of 23 percent. In general, e-commerce continues to see significant gains as spending shifts from offline to online. Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, noted in a report last year that e-commerce in the U.S. was making up only 8 percent of overall retail.

While it indeed takes a lot for companies such as Amazon, eBay and Walmart to see an impact from changes, consumers are shifting their behavior to mobile and social, although probably not as fast as investors would like to see.

EBay is one of the most vocal companies in breaking out the impact of mobile. It told AllThingsD recently that its mobile applications have now been downloaded 100 million times. Furthermore, it is projecting sales on mobile devices to hit $10 billion, which is double what it did last year. That roughly pencils out to 16 percent of the company’s revenue, if you base the calculation off of last year’s gross merchandise volume.

In contrast, Citi cites data from Forrester Research that says smartphones will account for 3 percent of e-commerce this year, increasing to 7 percent in 2016.

Social commerce is less mature, although that’s starting to change, too. According to research conducted by Monetate, which helps Best Buy, Urban Outfitters and other clients market their Web sites, Pinterest came out of nowhere over the past year to become one of the most significant drivers of social traffic to e-commerce. In the first quarter of 2012, Facebook made up 60 percent of the social traffic to retailers, while Pinterest made up 26 percent; by the holidays, it could surpass both Facebook and Twitter.

Citi’s report quoted specific data from Booz & Co. that suggests that revenue from physical goods sold on social networks will grow by 93 percent per year in the U.S., reaching $14 billion by 2015.

Citi’s biggest piece of advice for retailers is to provide as many choices to consumers as possible. For instance, users should be able to order online and pick up items in the store; retailers should have their databases synced so that they see the same prices in the store as they do online. Perhaps one of the most surprising nuggets was that brick-and-mortar retailers shouldn’t necessarily be losing out this holiday — after all, 90 percent or more of sales still occur offline.

The New York-based company, which sells “unique” and trendy apparel, home decor and other items, was part of a wave of commerce sites that experimented with requiring visitors to sign up just to be able to browse its inventory.

In theory, membership provided the facade that the consumer was getting exclusive access to the site, even if it was free and accessible to anyone. It also gave merchants permission to send members a daily newsletter, which helped get new users in the habit of returning to the site everyday.

Today is the first day that visitors to Fab.com will no longer have to register, although customers will have to sign in to buy.

“We have 10,000 products on Fab, and (users) shouldn’t have to log in to discover them,” said Fab’s CEO, Jason Goldberg. “We always felt that design should be for everyone. The exclusive nature of members-only gave us permission to send emails to the inbox, but we are way past that now.”

Because of the required-registration process, some users never made it past the homepage. Goldberg said that about half of the potential customers would be turned away by the requirement, which isn’t a bad conversion rate, “but we decided that a better user experience is better than conversion in the long run.”

That is especially true since about 50 percent of Fab’s referrals are coming from social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. If shoppers can’t easily click through after a friend recommends a product to them, then they could be distracted by the next shiny thing – even if it seemed important at the time to check out the plastic outdoor chairs that double as lanterns, or the ridiculously ironic T-shirts with animal prints that your friends were sharing.

Fab has a sense for what can happen once the restriction is gone. Its mobile application, for instance, has never required users to register to view its inventory. Goldberg said that 30 percent of the company’s revenue and 30 percent of its daily visits are now from mobile.

Other members-only sites, such as Gilt Groupe, have relaxed their requirements over the years. Most of Gilt Groupe’s inventory can be viewed without registering, but some items do require you to log in to see more information. Other sites, like One Kings Lane, have no plans to get rid of the registation process, because they say that it continues to work for them.

Chirpify is announcing today that it has raised $1.3 million in capital to build a payment platform on top of the popular microblogging service.

Investors in the round include Voyager Capital of Seattle and other angels, including Seattle’s Geoff Entress, BuddyTV CEO Andy Liu, former Facebook executive Rudy Gadre, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes and TiE Oregon Angels.

In addition to announcing the funding, the Portland, Ore., company said it is rolling out a payment platform specifically for digital content, where musicians can sell songs and concert tickets on Twitter.

“Twitter is a tremendous platform for brands, retailers, politicians, musicians and others to engage fans, yet with more than 140 million users there’s still no way to directly exchange goods and currency,” said Ryan Holmes, who invested in the round.

Here’s how Chirpify’s new digital content service will work:

Artists upload content to their to Chirpify dashboard, and then tweet out a message. Consumers then use Chirpify to link their PayPal account to their Twitter account. To buy a song, users would only have to reply to a tweet, saying that they are interested.

Chirpify then sends a message back with a link to the download.

The experience seems a little clunky because of the additional steps a consumer would have to take to link their PayPal account to the Twitter service. But if merchants provide enough compelling content for sale, it’s possible that consumers will adopt it.

The platform works similarly for other merchants and nonprofits, where messages are sent back and forth between the merchant and the consumer. Chirpify is free, and charges a 4 percent commission rate on each sale.

The company was founded by Chirpify CEO Chris Teso last year. Before Chirpify, Teso founded theGOOD, and has been a creative director at several advertising agencies.

Threadflip is a new marketplace coming out of private beta today that is making it insanely easy to sell used clothes, shoes, jewelry and other accessories online.

The secret to the San Francisco company is that it handles all of the hard work for you.

For example, once an item sells, Threadflip figures out the shipping costs, finds the correct box, and sends it to your door. Its “White Glove Service” goes one step further. For those willing to send their items to Threadflip, the company takes care of the rest by photographing, listing, pricing and ultimately shipping the item if it sells.

Threadflip is also announcing today that it has raised $1.6 million in a seed round led by First Round Capital and Baseline Ventures. Other participants include Dave Morin from Slow Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Greylock Discovery Fund and Andreessen Horowitz Seed Fund.

The site takes a 15 percent cut of the transaction, which includes the box and shipping costs. Threadflip’s White Glove Service is still in a limited pilot, and is experimenting with a tiered model that ranges between 40 percent and 50 percent.

So far, the site has attracted higher-end items, with an average sale price of $50 to $60. That means more Prada and less Old Navy (although there’s some of that, too).

Manik Singh, founder and CEO of Threadflip, argues that other solutions for selling used clothes online, like eBay, require some technical expertise and a lot of time. This one was designed with his wife in mind, who never bothered to resell an expensive pair of boots, even though she never wore them.

“You never have to leave the house,” Singh said. “When we launched [in beta], women loved it, because it eliminated two barriers: ease of uploading and shipping. We remove both of those barriers.”

While in beta, Singh said, a third of users visited the site every day to share an item, “like” an item, or buy something. The women who have gravitated to the site the most are between the ages of 22 and 35; they enjoy blogging and writing about fashion, including taking photos of all of their outfits and posting them on Facebook.

That behavior drove Threadflip to create a feature that allows women to post photos directly from their Facebook accounts. “They might take a photo of a dress and post it on Facebook, and then in six months, when the dress is out of style, you don’t want to take a new photo. It’s a heavily used feature,” Singh said.

Because the sellers are often amateur fashion bloggers or other like-minded people, the pages often look like a magazine, featuring images of models wearing the clothes, rather than a snapshot of a pair of pants laid out on a kitchen table.

But the mega-retailer is trying to change that by building a tech center in San Bruno, Calif., just south of San Francisco, which houses Walmart.com and a growing team of researchers.

The mission of @WalmartLabs is to study how mobile and social platforms are changing commerce, and how the line is increasingly blurring between online and offline shopping.

The lab, which now has a headcount of around 200, was founded about a year ago, when the Bentonville, Ark.-based company purchased Bay Area start-up Kosmix.

In an interview last week, SVP of global e-commerce Anand Rajaraman, who founded Kosmix along with Venky Harinarayan, said the group has had near-autonomy in trying out several experiments, some of which you might have thought would be taboo for such a large physical retailer.

For instance, the team rolled out Shopycat over the holidays on Facebook, which recommended gifts based on a friend’s interests.

The notable part was that the gifts did not necessarily come only from Walmart, but other retailers, as well. “It was the first time we sent traffic to a non-Walmart site,” Rajaraman said. “But if we want to be a place to find gifts, we thought the right thing to do was to include other retailers.”

More recently, the lab launched a contest called “Get on the Shelf,” which allowed small businesses to submit a video featuring a product they had invented. Starting on March 7, visitors to GetOntheShelf.com will be able to vote on those products they think deserve shelf space. Among the submissions is a product called “the Catcher,” which, as it implies, can be used to catch your dog’s poop before it hits the ground.

In the interview video below, Rajaraman also addresses another unfavorable topic among large brick-and-mortars — the shift from buying offline to online. It is a trend that Walmart’s big Internet competitor, Amazon, is benefiting from.

Today, retailers are fighting hard not to become showrooms, places where consumers go to decide what to buy before then making the purchase online. But Rajaraman suggested that maybe the concept can be embraced, and physical locations will indeed become showrooms, where shoppers pick up items that were ordered online, or try out products that are ultimately shipped to their homes.

And perhaps Rajaraman will help invent the technology that will make it all happen.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120203/a-look-at-wal-marts-plans-for-making-commerce-high-tech-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120120/groupon-acquires-mertado-for-its-social-commerce-expertise/ http://allthingsd.com/20120120/groupon-acquires-mertado-for-its-social-commerce-expertise/#comments Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:51:33 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=166140 Groupon has acquired its second start-up in the social commerce space over the past month.

Today, the daily deals site confirmed it has acquired Bay Area-based Mertado, a social shopping company that helps consumers discover new products. The acquisition was first reported by TechCrunch.

In a statement provided to All Things D, Julie Mossler said: “Groupon is excited to announce it has purchased Mertado.com.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed; however, Mossler said several members of Mertado’s staff will join Groupon, including founders Mehul Shah, Rajiv Bhat and Vijay Chittoor, who is also the CEO.

Groupon was interested in Mertado’s expertise in the social commerce space, including the launch of Mertado TV, which combined video content with products. In a post on Mertado’s Web site, the company said it was no longer accepting new registrations and will officially shut down on Feb. 28.

Going forward, it directed Mertado customers to Groupon Goods, which offers an eclectic mix of physical products for sale, like kitchen gadgets, consumer electronics and the Shake Weight.

Last month, as Liz Gannes reported, Groupon acquired Campfire Labs, which will head up the company’s social efforts. Before that, Groupon had been actively trying to buy other social start-ups such as Gowalla, which was acquired by Facebook, and Clever Sense, which went to Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120120/groupon-acquires-mertado-for-its-social-commerce-expertise/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111227/amazon-picks-up-social-expertise-through-talent-acquisition/ http://allthingsd.com/20111227/amazon-picks-up-social-expertise-through-talent-acquisition/#comments Wed, 28 Dec 2011 01:07:55 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=157503 Amazon has not been on the forefront of social shopping experiences, but that could change. Geekwire reports that the e-commerce giant has hired several team members from Quorus, a small Seattle start-up focused on building social shopping and marketing technologies for retailers and brands. Quorus co-founders Logan Bowers, who was previously at Zillow and Expedia, and Michael Dougherty, formerly co-founder of Redfin, have been hired along with other employees. An Amazon spokesperson has not replied to an email seeking comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111227/amazon-picks-up-social-expertise-through-talent-acquisition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111221/still-looking-for-gift-ideas-wal-mart-recommends-a-box-for-men/ http://allthingsd.com/20111221/still-looking-for-gift-ideas-wal-mart-recommends-a-box-for-men/#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:27:18 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=155821 Still don’t know what to get your loved one for the holidays?

Well, you better decide fast. For many sites, today is the final day that orders can be placed to get guaranteed delivery by Christmas.

If you are having a hard time coming up with ideas, there are plenty of Facebook applications that will offer recommendations based on a gift recipient’s interests.

Late last month, Wal-Mart launched an application called Shopycat, which does just that.

To be helpful, I got a list of Shopycat’s 20 most-recommended gifts. At the very top of the list was an unexpected item called a “personalized keepsake box” for men. The box, which costs $24.76, is designed to hold a man’s watch, jewelry, money clip and/or other items.

It’s not clear what a person’s interests would have been for this to surface at the top of so many lists (maybe the popularity of the holiday-themed Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg music video “Dick in a Box” had something to do with it?) After all, many of the other items on the list are clearly based on someone’s favorite TV shows, movies or videogames. For instance, other fun items that made the list were action figures for “The Big Lebowski,” an Angry Birds beanie and “Star Wars” bathrobes.

As for the man box, it is sold out, so clearly some people agreed with Wal-Mart that it made for a good gift.

Not all of the items are recommendations for items sold on the Wal-Mart site. It also refers shoppers to other sites, such as ThinkGeek.com, Barnes & Noble, CBSstore.com and RedEnvelope.

Wal-Mart did not say how many people have used the app since it went live last month, but given that Wal-Mart has 11 million Facebook fans, it could represent big numbers.

Here is the entire list of most-recommended gifts for 2011:

1. Personalized Keepsake Box
2. “Star Wars” Jedi & Sith Bathrobes
3. Personalized “Home is Where your Story Begins” Canvas
4. “Twilight: Director’s Notebook: The Story of How We Made the Movie”
5. 3-Pointer Basketball Tin
6. “House” Cane Ornament
7. “Harry Potter” Clue
8. Men’s Comfy Feet Miami Dolphins
9. “How I Met Your Mother” MacLaren’s Irish Pub Shot Glass
10. OtterBox iPhone 4 Defender Case
11. Angry Birds Red Bird Peruvian Beanie
12. Picnic Backpack
13. “The Big Lebowski”: Urban Achiever 8-Inch Figures
14. The Official Chuck Norris Fact Book
15. Tennis Star Gift Tin
16. Dallas Cowboys Floor Mats
17. “1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die”
18. “The Wire”: Bubbles Depot Reusable Travel Mug
19. “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn” Wall Calendar
20. “Game of Thrones” Sword Letter Opener

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111221/still-looking-for-gift-ideas-wal-mart-recommends-a-box-for-men/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111130/dont-trust-your-instincts-wal-mart-uses-algorithms-to-find-gifts-people-want/ http://allthingsd.com/20111130/dont-trust-your-instincts-wal-mart-uses-algorithms-to-find-gifts-people-want/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 03:00:27 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=148906 Wal-Mart has launched its first Facebook application that helps people buy better gifts for their friends.

The application, called Shopycat, makes product recommendations based on the items people have liked or talked about in their news feed.

It is not particularly flashy. The logo is a picture of a cat sticking its head out of a shopping bag. The tagline reads “the right gift every time.” But the app’s rudimentary design fits nicely with the experimental nature of social commerce. Retailers are just starting to figure out ways to leverage social networks. Wal-Mart is no exception.

Wal-Mart promises that while it looks simple, the technology running behind the scenes is more complex than you might imagine.

The product was built by @WalmartLabs, which was created after Wal-Mart acquired Kosmix, a Bay Area start-up that was tracking social networks to determine people’s interests.

Venky Harinarayan, founder of Kosmix and co-founder of @WalmartLabs, said developing the application was surprisingly difficult. First, they had to find the relevant information on a person’s Facebook page. Then, they had to find products that best matched those interests.

For example, if someone likes Lady Gaga, the most obvious product to recommend is her albums. But a fan would likely already own those. A better gift is something more special — a collector’s item or a limited edition. That’s a more complex problem.

Since gifting is a practice humans naturally struggle with, maybe algorithms can do a better job.

After using Shopycat, Harinarayan learned his wife was a fan of “Game of Thrones,” the TV series on HBO. She has posted several times on Facebook about the show, but he hadn’t noticed. “Facebook is so transient and things flow by. Here’s a way to aggregate it all and put it in one place,” he said.

The technology also sometimes fails. When Harinarayan viewed gift ideas for me, it recommended a number of Sony products. Months earlier, I liked Sony’s fan page in order to gather information for a story — not because of any deep admiration I had for the company’s products. An algorithm would have a hard time knowing that.

“I think it’s a good first pass,” Harinarayan admits. “But there’s areas we should get better at. Right now, it is our goal to give one good gift idea per person. If we do that, then we are successful.”

The application is available to Wal-Mart’s 10 million fans on Facebook if they give permission to install it.

Harinarayan said Shopycat is the mega-retailer’s first foray into using social and promises that more is coming soon, including social experiences in the store and on its Web site.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111130/dont-trust-your-instincts-wal-mart-uses-algorithms-to-find-gifts-people-want/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111111/ho-ho-mo-record-number-of-consumers-expected-to-shop-by-phone-this-holiday/ http://allthingsd.com/20111111/ho-ho-mo-record-number-of-consumers-expected-to-shop-by-phone-this-holiday/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:00:28 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=143098 Forget about calling it “Cyber Monday.” The big digital shopping day of the holiday season might be more appropriately called “Mobile Monday.”

The Monday after Thanksgiving is one of the busiest online shopping days of the year as everyone returns to work and gets online.

But according to a study conducted by IBM, which analyzed data from more than 500 leading U.S. retailers, mobile is playing a larger role in consumers’ shopping habits, especially around the holidays.

The study found that traffic to retail sites from mobile devices is expected to more than double this month from last season, reaching 15 percent of all visits to retail sites. Last year on Cyber Monday, mobile visits totaled only 3.9 percent.

Of course, mobile is benefiting from the overall trend toward shopping online instead of shopping at the mall. A comScore report released earlier this week found that e-commerce spending was up 13 percent in the third quarter, compared to the same quarter a year earlier, to $36.3 billion.

But in particular, the IBM study says it’s also increasing because of smartphone and iPad penetration. Last month, iPad conversion rates reached 6.8 percent compared to the 3.6 percent conversion rate found for all mobile devices as a category.

This year, the statistics will be supported even more by more iPad sales. A year ago, the iPad was only eight months old. Separately, next week Amazon will be shipping its own tablet, the Kindle Fire, to consumers. If there’s a tablet that’s good for shopping, I’d bet Amazon would make it.

Other findings from the IBM study:

• In October, 10.7 percent of people who logged on to a retailer’s site used a mobile device, up from the 4.2 percent recorded in the same month in 2010.
• Additionally, mobile sales are growing, reaching a high of 9.6 percent in October 2011, up from 3.4 percent in October 2010.
• Social commerce is not seeing as much growth. Facebook accounted for 77 percent of all traffic from social sites, but only 9.2 percent of consumers who visited a retailer site from a social site made a purchase.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111111/ho-ho-mo-record-number-of-consumers-expected-to-shop-by-phone-this-holiday/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111107/sneakpeeks-social-shopping-expertise-attracts-asian-partnership/ http://allthingsd.com/20111107/sneakpeeks-social-shopping-expertise-attracts-asian-partnership/#comments Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:00:59 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=141028 Sneakpeeq is sneaking into Asia a little ahead of schedule, thanks to a partnership with Interpark, a leading online retailer in Korea.

San Francisco-based Sneakpeeq, which launched about six months ago, has engineered a site where consumers determine the price of items.

It is that technology that attracted Interpark, which is often described as the eBay or Amazon of Korea.

Henry Kim, Sneakpeeq’s co-founder and president, said he thought the company was still nine to 12 months away from expanding, but that the Interpark offer was compelling.

Interpark is willing to help fund the expansion and contribute its sales and marketing resources. Interpark also plans to take some of the site’s apparel and accessories to Korea, which will increase Sneakpeeq’s customer base.

The partnership is expected to go live in February.

Sneakpeeq’s business model is a little bit of a gamble for its users.

Each time someone clicks on the “peeq” button to view the price for a product, the price drops. Once someone buys the item, it resets to the original price and will start dropping it again as people resume viewing it.

The consumer can wait as long as they wish, but they may not get the lowest price if it resets. Prices typically range between 20 and 40 percent off, Kim said.

For instance, a turquoise and yellow rug, which costs $48 at retail, has been clicked on 197 times; when I clicked to see the price, it was only $28 — a 40 percent savings.

“We have developed the gamification of commerce that would work well in Asia,” Kim said.

To date, the company, which has 15 employees and has raised $2.7 million in seed financing, has worked with 500 brands, registered two million “peeqs” and has attracted 175,000 users.

In addition to its expansion plans, Sneakpeeq says it is rolling out a redesigned site in the U.S. today, with a new logo and new features, such as the opportunity for consumers to earn badges for receiving the lowest price.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111107/sneakpeeks-social-shopping-expertise-attracts-asian-partnership/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111026/facebook-funded-sociable-labs-helps-retailers-be-more-friendly/ http://allthingsd.com/20111026/facebook-funded-sociable-labs-helps-retailers-be-more-friendly/#comments Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:30:07 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=136728 Sociable Labs, which is helping retailers to integrate Facebook’s social graph into the shopping experience, has raised $7 million from investors.

The second round of funding was led by Battery Ventures. The company previously raised money from the fbFund, a $10 million seed fund and joint venture run by Facebook, Founders Fund and Accel Partners.

Nisan Gabbay, founder and CEO of Sociable Labs, said Sociable is exploring what social commerce means, and from what he’s determined so far, he doesn’t believe it means people shopping on Facebook.

Rather, he thinks the most value lies in connecting to friends on actual retail sites to share recommendations.

For instance, it would be helpful if people could see which of their friends are registered to run in a 5K when signing up for the race, or if anyone they know has stayed in a particular hotel in Miami before using a travel site to book a room.

Sociable’s beta customers include Active.com, Chegg.com, Backcountry.com, Rue La La, HauteLook and Sole Society.

“Facebook is focused around entertainment, but it’s not about discovery or an immersive experience,” Gabbay said. “I find that the right experience is to offer the feature set where they already shop online, and by adding social features and the graph into that experience.”

Currently, most social commerce experiences are tied to the “like” button.

You can like a product and have it show up in your news feed on Facebook. But that information is not useful to your friends until they are shopping for something similar, at which point it may not be easy to find.

“Not everything can happen on Facebook,” Gabbay said. “Your friends don’t want to see what you are buying until they are making a decision.”

Privacy protections will obviously be key with this sort of integration and long-term cataloging of consumer purchases. But after a quick look at how Sociable is integrated on Active.com, a Web site dedicated to sports events, it doesn’t feel invasive. It’s information that friends would normally share on Facebook, but which would instantly get lost in the stream of news.

Sociable Labs will charge its lowest-paying customer $50,000 a year for services and licenses. The company currently has 25 employees, and plans to use the funding to deploy the software more broadly and market it, now that it is coming out of beta today.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111026/facebook-funded-sociable-labs-helps-retailers-be-more-friendly/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111011/ebay-set-to-outline-its-future-and-it-looks-nothing-like-amazon/ http://allthingsd.com/20111011/ebay-set-to-outline-its-future-and-it-looks-nothing-like-amazon/#comments Wed, 12 Oct 2011 05:59:02 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=131357 For the past decade, eBay and Amazon have been considered two of the most dominant e-commerce companies, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the two are headed down entirely different paths.

At eBay’s developer conference, kicking off Wednesday in San Francisco, more than 4,000 developers and merchants will receive a preview of X.commerce, the company’s new technology platform aimed at developers.

The nonconsumer-focused platform will enable developers to use the tools to build applications for retailers who are looking to have a larger presence on social networks, online and on mobile phones.

Also on stage will be some of eBay’s new partners, including Omniture, Adobe’s marketing and advertising unit, and Katie Mitic, the director of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook.

Mitic, who recently joined eBay’s board, is expected to announce a partnership between the social network and eBay.

The X.commerce division will draw from many of eBay’s existing technologies, including PayPal, but will also tie together several other acquisitions, including Milo, which has created an online database of offline inventory in physical stores; Red Laser, which is a barcode scanning technology; and Magento, which assists in the creation of online storefronts.

In essence, eBay is looking to partner with physical retailers to generate more sales online or by driving more foot traffic to their stores.

That’s in steep contrast to Amazon, which has increasingly focused on driving more and more spending online. It also has focused on the digital distribution of content, such as books, music and video, and is placing a huge bet on hardware, like the upcoming Kindle Fire, hoping to rival Apple’s iPad.

The opportunity still exists for many to grab even just a small percentage of local commerce — regardless of whether it’s through third-party developers or driving more spending online. That’s because e-commerce today makes up only a small fraction of spending, with the bulk of purchases continuing to occur at physical retail locations.

The X.commerce group in eBay joins three other major groups, including the eBay marketplace, PayPal and GSI, which it acquired earlier this year.

X.commerce is eBay’s biggest move to date in becoming a back-end technology provider rather than a consumer-facing brand. The service it builds will be aimed at developers, who will in turn own the relationship with the merchants.

Take eBay’s Red Laser technology as an example. If a merchant creates an application using the technology, a consumer will be able to scan a barcode in the store, and then find out if the item is in stock. The consumer will then have the option of buying it using PayPal directly on the phone without ever leaving the application.

The most consumer-facing element being unveiled tomorrow is what eBay is calling PayPal Access, which will enable online shoppers to log in to a Web site to buy something using their PayPal account, rather than having to create a brand-new account. By using PayPal, the consumer’s shipping address and billing information will automatically populate the store, saving a few tedious steps. PayPal Access will become available to consumers as online merchants adopt it.

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