Do Your Users Have Shopping Cart Abandonment Issues? Everyone loves a good deal, and shopping comparison and coupon sites have made it easier than ever.
Facebook And eBay Team Up To Breathe New Life Into Social Commerce. Can social commerce catch up with email? Although many are heralding the advent of “social commerce”, the biggest e-commerce wave of the last couple of years has in fact used the most basic Internet technology.
Enormously successful deals companies such as Groupon, LivingSocial, and Gilt Groupe send simple e-mails. Users click through those emails to a single landing page whose only goal is to get users to hit “Buy”. There is no innovative technology at play here, rather a simple email op-in that asks consumers what regions or products they are interested in when they join the mailing list. 12 Tips For Designing an Excellent Checkout Process - Smashing Magazine.
Advertisement Shopping online can be a great experience. You don’t have to leave the comfort of your home and you can quickly compare and read about all the competing products in order to pick the best one for you. Amazon's amateur book-reviewing becomes vicious free-for-all with readers the victims. By Nick Fagge Updated: 13:02 GMT, 29 November 2010 Author Rosie Alison became so incensed by a series of barbed reviews on the website that she called in investigators to see if rival publishers were behind the stinging criticism The story involves subterfuge, jealousy and dirty tricks in the world of literature.
And its unlikely setting is the readers’ reviews section on Amazon. Alongside details of a book for sale, the website offers supposedly independent verdicts from customers, including a rating of from one to five stars. How Amazon.com undersells Best Buy, the Apple store, and almost everybody else. - By Farhad Manjoo. Apple's new 11-inch MacBook Air has a list price of $999 —that's what you'll pay at Apple.com and the Apple store, as well as at Best Buy and other large retailers.
At Amazon.com, though, the same model sells at a slightly lower price— $979. That difference seems relatively insignificant until you go through the checkout process. At Apple's Web site, the final tally for a $999 MacBook is $1,101. That's the price at Best Buy, too. But at Amazon, the final price is the same as what's listed on the product page: $979. (Disclosure: Slate participates in Amazon Associates, an "affiliate" advertising plan that rewards Web sites for sending customers to the online store. Why doesn't Amazon charge you sales tax? Sales tax is a touchy subject for Amazon. Expedia on how one extra data field can cost $12m. TC Teardown: Chegg Is A Money Machine. Editor’s note: Book rental startup Chegg is making money hand over fist.
Guest author Steven Carpenter does a teardown of its business model and estimates its revenues will reach $130 million this year. Carpenter was the founder and CEO of Cake Financial, which was sold to E*Trade earlier this year. Bing lets shoppers poll their Facebook friends before they buy. Microsoft’s Bing search engine rolled out a social network integration in its Shopping section today that lets shoppers on the Bing Shopping section of the site announce their purchase plans to friends on Facebook, Twitter and email, in hopes of getting feedback from friends on whether to buy or not.
Is Groupon buying CityDeal actually a disaster for German innova. The Groupon acquisition of CityDeal is being hailed by many across Europe as a good exit for the German-based clone (yes, there is no point in saying it is anything else but a Groupon clone).
But luckily there are more than just clones in Germany. The burgeoning cluster in Mitte, central Berlin, is producing startups such as Soundcloud, hiogi, Babbel, Twinity, SongBeat and aka-aki. Nokia bought Dopplr and with it set up an innovation lab amongst the beating heart of Berlin’s startups. Hamburg has spawned many others include Qype, Europe’s Yelp, and more recently the interesting Apprupt. VCs in Hamburg and Munich vie over raw engineering talent out of German universities, and our TechCrunch Europe Munich and Berlin events last year were buzzing.
Berlin is now vying with London as the second tier cluster in Europe with a decent critical mass. Tippr Proposes “Open Deal Format”, A Standard For The Group Buying Industry. Demandbase Brings Real-Time Customer Identification to B2B Marke. What would you do if you knew exactly who was coming to your site and were able to tailor your site accordingly?
With Demandbase's B2B-focused Real-Time ID service, businesses can now identify information about a visitor's company, including industry, size, location and revenue before they even render their sites. In addition, they can also identify if that visitor is already a customer. Thanks to this, businesses can now, for example, tailor their marketing messages and advertising on their home pages for every visitor, and show them just those messages and white papers that are relevant to their businesses.
The coffee shops of Mayfair: Multi-niche ecommerce: is it a busi. Rumours abound of Hayneedle looking at an IPO.
CSN stores just reported a record quarter. 4 European multi-niche ecommerce businesses are getting funded (disclaimer: I have invested in one). Why the excitement? Well, in short, the business model is working. Three ways to build an ecommerce business to $500m in revenues « Since my earlier post on “Three ways to build an online media business to $50m in revenues” was well received, I thought I’d examine the e-commerce industry as well.
The margin structure in most (physical) ecommerce businesses is dramatically different from that of online media businesses. Whereas online media businesses can enjoy gross margins of upwards of 90%, and net margins (at scale) of 50% or higher, many ecommerce businesses have gross margins in the 20-40% range and net margins (at scale) in the 5-10% range. As a result, ecommerce companies have to grow to a much bigger top line to achieve the same value. We’ll target $500m in revenue to get to net income in the same range as a $50m revenue online media business.
There are three ways that an ecommerce company can get to this scale: 1. You’re probably able to spend on building a brand (vs performance based marketing only) and you likely think about customer lifetime value. Goodsie.