Exciting Commerce // Unlimited

Samwer Report: Kinnevik Holds 12% of Rocket Internet

2010-07-28T20:24:44+02:00

Since February, the Swedish investment house Kinnevik has been holding 12% of Rocket Internet (Zalando, 7Trends, FP Commerce, etc). The option exists to raise this share to 25%. This is according to the 6 month report (PDF):

"In February Kinnevik completed the acquisition of shares and warrants in the online group European Internet Holding ("EIH") (previously Rocket Internet) for EUR 35 m.
The investment gives Kinnevik the right to acquire 25% of the company if all warants are exercised. Kinnevik has also directly invested EUR 5 m in two of EIH's portfolio companies.

Quelle: Kinnevik Investor Presentation Q2 2010

EIH has a portfolio of e-commerce companies and other consumer-oriented online businesses, including an ownership in e-commerce company Zalando.
Kinnevik works closely with EIH and actively supports it in becoming the leading European online company."

Extrapolating from the 12% acquisition, the valuation of Rocket Internet at that time was 292 million euro.

Kinnevik, with a 2 million euro stake, was one of the shareholders of the Groupon aquired Citydeal. The remaining 3 million euro of direct investment went towards tariff comparison company R2 International, which Kinnek currently holds 20% of.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

The Markets Benevolent to Online Supermarket Ocado

2010-07-24T19:45:57+02:00

Lessons learned from the much anticipated IPO of British online supermarket Ocado: If you impose exceedingly optimistic expectations on the market these days, you will still have an excellent chance to hit an above average valuation. With the side-effect however, that the share price will then tank (“Ocado slumps on stock market debut”):

"Shares in the loss-making retailer closed last night at 167p, down from a listing price on the so-called "grey market" of 180p. Shares had traded as low as 155p.
On Tuesday afternoon Ocado, which sell Waitrose groceries over the internet, was forced to cut its IPO price by 20pc: to 180-200p from a previous range of 200-275p.

The fall gave Ocado the dubious accolade of having the poorest first day's performance of any London IPO since shares in Brookwell fell by 8pc in June 2008, according to Bloomberg data.
Tim Steiner, Ocado's chief executive, said that people are "missing things" about Ocado as they are "looking into the rear view mirror and looking at our historical performance – past cash flows, not future cash flows". "

At Wednesday’s IPO, Ocado valued at 937 million pounds. The original plan was 1.2 billion. Through the IPO, Ocado raised 200 million pounds of fresh capital which can be now used for further investments.

Ocado generated revenues of 427 million pounds in 2009.

Further details on the topic to be found at Google News.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Global Group Buying: Oliver Jung Building Network of Groupon Clones

2010-07-21T08:44:20+02:00

E-commerce investor duo Klaus Hommels and Oliver Jung are building in parallel to their private sales club network (“BrandsAlliance”) also a global network of Groupon clones with the support of the Swiss based Global Group Buying AG (PDF):

"Group Buying Global AG, promoted by Dr. Klaus Hommels & Oliver Jung owns & manages group buying portals across four continents."

According to press releases, Global Group Buying has till now invested in the Indian DealsAndYou (a sister of the private shopping club FashionAndYou) as well as the Russian Beaucoup.ru.

Oliver Jung is furthermore shareholder in Germany’s DailyDeal, Brazil’s ClickOn (sister of BrandsClub), Turkish Grupfoni (sister of Markafoni) as well as the Groupon clone Spreets in Australia.

Oliver Jung’s Global Shopping Club Empire

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Soap.com and the Online Supermarkets of the Future

2010-07-20T22:27:49+02:00

Next generation online supermarkets are currently taking form in the US, in the style of Amazon, Zappos and the like.

After Alice.com, (see The Business Model from Alice.com), Soap.com also launched last week. With 5 years of experience with Diapers.com and a healthy cash buffer, Soap.com wants to change the way people think about the retailing of sundry items.

"Quidsi is the fastest growing e-commerce company in the country and parent of Diapers.com (baby care) and Soap.com (health, beauty and household essentials).

The company's mission is to make life easier by creating a new type of e-commerce experience, delivering items free and fast (within 1-2 days) while also providing extraordinary customer service.

Quidsi is redefining e-commerce by combining the focus and customer connection of a specialty store with the scale, efficiency, choice, value, and reliability of a national retailer."

Techcrunch has in addition to the launch announcement also a few videos on the topic. See eConsultancy for a current interview with the founders.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Supermarkets: Is Ocado Worth More Than 1 Billion British Pounds?

2010-07-20T07:16:10+02:00

How much is an online supermarket like the British Ocado worth, when they can raise revenues of 427 million pounds (2009) but can barely turn a profit?

In the run up to a planned IPO, last week’s proclaimed valuation of over a billion pounds met with a healthy amount of scepticism:

"Its proposed valuation range, with a midpoint of 1.18 billion pounds including the proposed fundraising, was greeted with scepticism by analysts and investors alike.

Shore Capital analyst Clive Black said the maximum value he would ascribe to Ocado was 534 million pounds, while Arden Partners' Nick Bubb also urged the firm to lower its sights.
"They are asking far too high a price," a fund manager from a major investment house told Reuters on condition of anonymity."

One of the most damaging reviews came from Moneyweek. Some other analysts are seeing a fair valuation at 560 million pounds. Ocado is naturally convinced otherwise. Other reports indicate that a market value of 800 million pounds could be in the making.

This debate is particularly interesting because the valuation of e-commerce firms working in low margin segments is already fairly well documented. Recently, Buy.com went to Rakuten for $250 million.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Garmz: On The Fashion Front with Crowdsourcing and Outsourcing

2010-07-17T14:40:29+02:00

Garmz, the fashion startup from Vienna, seeks to attract young and undiscovered fashion designers with their complete outsourcing service. The company wants to offload all operative tasks from the designer. Designers can create their masterpieces and Garmz will take over the production and sales for them – at least for the ones which rank well within the community. The pitch: “You design fashion, we do the rest”.

Designers upload their designs to Garmz and other Garmz users can then give feedback, discuss and vote on their favorite designs. The designs which are supported by the community and have the possibility of mass production are then prototyped with the designer.

The prototype is then promoted by Garmz on the “Upcoming” area of the webshop, where users can make binding orders for the product. According to the amount of confirmed orders, Garmz manufactures the items and markets them under the designer’s own label via the Garmz webshop.

Designers will have maximum control over their creations and will also be able to control their profit margins using a pricing tool from the website.

The fashion world lives from borrowing ideas and mutual copying. But how many designers will be able to survive when their ideas can be copied even before production, because they are all publicly viewable? Garmz is depending on the speed-to-market advantage of their production, which is not 100% convincing.

If Garmz is successful and makes a name for itself in the fashion world, this could become a real problem. A possible solution would be different levels of viewing rights within the Garmz community.

That is still a case for the future. Garmz is in beta and doesn’t have all basic features online yet. At the moment, designers can upload design drafts. At the end of July, the first community features are planned to go online. The end of summer should see the first products being sold from the Garmz webshop.

Garmz has closed a seed financing round and according to own statements is now finally covered for the rest of this year. According to TechCrunch EU, the seed round was in the lower six figure range. The founders want to take up further talks with VCs later this fall.

Joao Belo has released a detailed review of this startup and comes to the following conclusion:

"As it stands, garmz’s value proposition isn’t clear, isn’t game-changing or disruptive and so it’s difficult to believe they will become the fast-growing profitable business that can deliver on VC’s IRR expectations.

garmz’s team, however, will certainly execute on their strategy and have a couple of surprises up their sleeves that might make me think otherwise – let’s see!"

Originally posted in German by Marcel Weiss, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Daily Grommet and the Feminine Take on Live Shopping

2010-07-12T01:26:19+02:00

At the first Live Shopping Days conference in the summer of 2008, Exciting Commerce’s Jochen Krisch was able to see a good half a dozen live shopping business concepts which went beyond the all too oft seen focus on competitive pricing.

The locally focussed ideas roundly symbolized the Groupon concept, which launched in the fall of 2008. Groupon went on to trigger a third wave of live shopping frenzy after the “one deal per day Woot!” concept and private sales clubs such as Vente-Privée.

The feminine take on live shopping has been well implemented by the Daily Grommet (‘fresh finds, true stories’) which has been online since October 2008.

Last April, the female founders received their first large financing round of $3.4 million, in part due to their vision of revolutionizing retail with their sales model:

"I went on to explain my vision to disrupt how consumer products (that form 65% of our economy) get discovered and distributed.
The investor later said it gave him chills and that it was the best moment of the meeting. His sharing that personal response made me all the more confident to frame the vision as big as I see it."

In comparison to Groupon, the launch of the Daily Grommet gave a rather tentative impression. However in due course they have found their own style and are growing - in particular from an ever increasing product base as well as their explanatory video presentations. The latter can best be described as a mix of Martha Stewart and QVC.

Although the new daily products are presented in the foreground, the sales method is not nearly as aggressive as it should be for a live shopping model (and for how aggressive their goals were).

Motivational elements such as counters, limited availability, etc are entirely missing. Instead, the founders are betting completely on the strength of the stories behind the products. Early in the year, the Daily Grommet labelled themselves as the “Birthplace of Citizen Commerce”.

In terms of revenue, the founders continue to have big ambitions:

“We are going to be a failure if we don’t become a $100M company in relatively short order.”

Noteworthy reads are the interviews from their early days. At that time (about a year ago), their plan was:

"By introducing 250 new products per year and selling just $100,000 worth of each product, each vertical could bring in $25 million per year in gross revenues, she projects.
The plan for Grommet’s growth, Pieri says, is to build on the success of the original site by creating “verticals,” business-speak for topic-specific offerings, such as “Grommet Gear,” “Grommet Food,” “Grommet Garden,” and the like (the company has 12 product categories in mind altogether, Pieri says."

Although the Daily Grommet still needs to drive their sales more, it is otherwise still an outstanding example of how live shopping can look like. Useful to see are the background reports, typical of the Daily Grommet videos.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Ocado: How Big Is The Online Grocery Market Really?

2010-07-11T11:11:28+02:00

The British online supermarket firm Ocado is currently preparing its IPO. Ocado, claiming to be the “largest dedicated online supermarket by turnover in the world” has published its prospectus (PDF) on 284 pages and offers a deep look into the market for groceries via online channels.

Ocada has around 240,000 active customers who generated gross revenues of 427 million pounds in 2009 (2008: 341 million pounds, 2007: 291 million pounds). The EBITDA results have been positive for two years, nevertherless, operatively Ocado has been still writing down losses.

Via IPO, Ocado wants to raise fresh capital and are working towards a valuation of 1.18 billion pounds.

The company was founded by ex-investment bankers in 2000 and launched operations in 2002. Deliveries are made via a central warehouse and several distribution stations. With this infrastructure, Ocado can reach 66% of all British households. Ocado ranks as the fourth largest British online supermarket, behind Tesco, Sainsbury and ASDA.

John Lewis, the parent of the British grocery store chain Waitrose, is via its pension fund one of the largest shareholders of Ocado. Waitrose itself operates WaitroseDeliver; the Ocado prospectus mentions some details of an existing non-competition agreement between the two companies.

For interested parties, the prospectus is very illuminating. The corporate video provides further impressions.

A good overview of the European online market for groceries can be found on the E-commerce Lounge site (in German, GE/EN)

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Rakuten On Their Expansion Plans with Buy.com and Priceminister

2010-07-08T21:17:23+02:00

Although the main attention is on the big US players, Asia’s e-commerce innovators are increasingly making their presence known internationally.

Alibaba announced their first takeover in the US a couple of weeks ago (see interview). And the former primarily local Japanese concern Rakuten has its sights set now on the world market and is making a strong international push.

Last May, Rakuten bought Buy.com in the US for $250 million. Following in June, they took over Priceminister in France for 200 million euro.

Last week, Rakuten publicized their global expansion plans:

Rakuten will use a federation model for their global business. Presented in the video are the companies and strategies of Rakuten, Priceminister, Buy.com and Baidu. Approaching the end of the video is a Q&A session for media representatives and analysts. Here the associated charts (pdf).

Not uninteresting are the plans from Buy.com which indicate a new and extended understanding of the social shopping concepts such as those propagated by Etsy. Buy.com would like to get to a next level of shopping experience with new communications tools:

"In the last 5 years we've made two acquisitions and a strategic investment around social shopping. We have two different pieces of social shopping currently and we'll be launching a new collaborative shopping tool, that will allow users and merchants on our site to be able to talk with other users, to chat real-time with their friends, with their customers and it will create, once again, a stronger in-store-experience online."

The German market doesn’t (yet) seem to be Rakuten’s focus. Buy.com is already represented here.

However it would likely turn out to be a real challenge to conquer the established European market using a French enterprise such as Priceminister.

At the moment, concentration is on the south and east European (growth) markets. But there are certainly a few German candidates which would indeed fit perfectly to the Rakuten strategy.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Earlybird: Twitter Prepares Live Shopping Campaigns

2010-07-05T07:47:48+02:00

As ReadWriteWeb reports, Twitter is preparing the launch of Earlybird campaigns ("Twitter to Publish Shopping Deals Through @EarlyBird Account"):

"Carolyn Penner, friendly communication contact at Twitter Inc., said to us by email after publication: "There are interesting things in store for @earlybird. Keep waking up early and you might be the first to find out what they are."

Woot! and Twitter have been testing Woot Happy Hour for some weeks now. The partnership was announced by Darold Rydl last January at the Live Shopping Days conference in Berlin.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Woot! Insights from the Live Shopping Days 2010 Conference

2010-07-05T07:35:34+02:00

Darold Rydl, Director of eCommerce and one of the first on board at Woot!, spoke about the company’s sales philosophies at last January's Live Shopping Days conference in Berlin:

A summary of some highlights from his keynote address:

The Woot! channels and the selection of niches

Woot! targets the types of products for their channels very selectively: How does does the overall offering look like? What is the competitive situation in each particular niche? How big is the market? What kind of structural features exists (such as seasonal factors)?

Besides these questions, it needs to be clarified if the product types vary enough to be able to offer a deal every day without having too much repetition. According to Rydl, this means many manufacturers and many different products. The kids.woot channel, which launched August 2009, fulfills the criteria excellently.

The same applies for wine.woot. The success criteria for the wine market is similar to the electronics market: Fast and relatively short product cycles combined with consumers with strong opinions.

At Shirt.woot the designers are a part of the community. Shirt.woot is also Woot!’s only international channel. All other channels are only available in the US.

Transparency, transparency, transparency

Woot! puts priority on radical transparency and openly address problems or product flaws directly. According to Rydl, this has now become an ingrained expectation amongst Woot!’s community. Adding to the transparency are officially published statistics.

The current size of the Woot! community is 2.6 million, according to company statements.

Announced cooperation with Twitter

After he had spoken about a cooperation with Blippy, Darold Rydl used his keynote to announce a cooperation with Twitter.

The Woot! account on Twitter has over 1.6 million followers. According to Rydl, it’s Twitter’s largest store account and the leading monetizer on the platform.

Mobile Apps

From the audience, the question was raised if using different access methods (such as mobile apps) bring the consumer closer to the promotions. Woot! doesn’t create their own apps, but the community has written six apps for the iPhone.

This demonstrates that once a company builds a large enough community, such issues don’t need to be addressed centrally - so long as the company doesn’t mind to give up a certain amount of control.

iPhone traffic on the Woot! site amounts now to around 12% of revenues.

International expansion?

Woot! has no interest on international expansion. The barriers to entry, such as logistics, are too high, according to Rydl. Instead, Woot! prefers to focus on the American market and is working to further their share of the 300 million potential customers there.

Further details

The biggest problem for Woot! is to keep the massive amounts of product on hand.

Planning deals sometimes take only one to two days. In the best case they hold out for seven to ten days.

The return rate is less than one percent. Woot! warns in advance however, “you can’t return to us”.

Woot! has in total 160 employees (including warehouse employees, etc.). 12 employees are responsible for the product sourcing.

Monday is always the strongest revenue day of the week.

The introduction of “Two for Tuesday”, the coupling of two products on one deal, was actually an accident. But this promotion is expected by the community now and therefore it is maintained.

Tuesday is normally the weakest selling day of the week.

Originally posted in German by Marcel Weiss, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Woot! 2004 - 2010: After 6 Years, Sold To Amazon

2010-07-01T19:45:32+02:00

Two weeks before its 6th birthday, Woot! has been taken over by Amazon. (See very appropriate video announcement).

Though it didn’t work out with Threadless (GE/EN), Woot! has now joined with the likes of Zappos as one of Amazon’s subsidiaries:

"Holy crap! Woot has signed an agreement with Amazon - yes, the Amazon - to become an independent subsidiary of the ecommerce colossus.

Woot HQ will remain in Carrollton, Texas, and will operate as autonomously as other Amazon companies like Zappos and Audible. More details forthcoming after we pick our eyeballs up off of the floor. Anybody see where Lefty rolled off to?"

It had been going around the rumour mill for years that Amazon had an interest in Woot! With this move, it should be pretty clear that Amazon would as well want to have a go at Vente-Privée, should they ever be given the chance.

Relevant to this news is the current Fortune interview with Jeff Bezos, where he elaborates on why he likes to take over unusual enterprises:

"I just happen to think the exploration and inventing strategy is more fun. It's got its own strategies, but it's way more fun."

Or for a more somber and inpirational tone, see instead a very noteworthy speech made by Jeff Bezos at a graduation ceremony for his Princeton University alma mater: “In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.”

Exciting Commerce has been reporting on this live shopping pioneer since the beginning (“A Business Model Takes Over The World”):

Woot! (“One Day, One Deal”) went online on July 14, 2004 and now operates 6 live shopping sites with different focus - from Wine.Woot! down to Kids.Woot! In the meantime alone in the US there are up to 150 copycat businesses.

Here a summary of our reporting on Woot! on ExcitingCommerce.com (the series in German summarized here).

Originally posted in German as three posts (1, 2, 3) by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Palamon Seeking to Sell Dress-for-less For 400 Million Euro

2010-06-30T23:18:37+02:00

Reuters is spreading the rumour that Dress-for-less is for sale:

“Buyout firm Palamon Capital Partners is selling online fashion retailer Dress for Less as it looks to return money to investors ahead of a fundraising later this year, people familiar with the situation said.

The European mid-market firm has received approaches for the business, based in Germany, which it bought for an undisclosed sum at the end of 2007, the sources said.
One said the business could fetch about 400 million euros ($488.2 million).”

Dress-for-less owns a series of online shops and for a few months now, also the Kolibrishop.

Founder Holger Hengstler had introduced Dress-for-less at the NOAH conference last December.

Fashion Commerce: The Transformation of the Fashion Industry

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Thinking Bigger: Europe’s Top Entrepreneurs on the Future of E-commerce

2010-06-30T08:36:35+02:00

Fred Destin, who recently raised a stir at the Mini Seedcamp Berlin with his presentation (“Hacking Venture Capital”), reports in detail in his blog about the 5th annual Founders Forum, the meeting for Europe’s top professional business founders.

Like everywhere else at the moment, a central topic was the enormous potential of e-commerce:

"E-commerce penetration is currently around 5%, expected to get to north 15% - 30 to 40% for the most bullish of the group.

Serious concerns arise related to the over-reliance on amazon, apple, ebay. Google felt to potentially be the big loser here -- high proportion of revenues from shopping search are likely to go away.

Google do not capture shopping data on apps, private sales, apple network. The Plink / Google team (who showcased their amazing visual recognition tech) may disagree."

The British Wired Magazine also reported on the event:

"Organised by Jonnie Goodwin, Marc Samwer and Brent Hoberman, the forum -- now in its fifth year -- is remarkable for the high level of talent it attracts.

Entrepreneurs flew in from the US, China and Japan for the event -- but it was its significant representation of local heroes that was the real eye-opener.

After spending eight hours at the Four Seasons Hotel in Hampshire, I came away pretty optimistic that the culture is changing.

That California "fast company" spirit is finally becoming embedded in Britain, albeit in a small but growing way."

We have previously reported on Europe’s blossoming entrepreneurial scene.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Groupon’s “Shady” Methods Questioned

2010-06-29T22:57:04+02:00

Techcrunch reported on “shady” methods being used for the Groupon expansion in South America, primarily being driven from the Samwer brothers’ Citydeal team from Berlin ("Loaded with Fake Deals").

"We’ve received three separate reports that ClubeUrbano, Groupon’s Brazilian site that it acquired earlier this month, is loaded with fake deals and venues that don’t even exist. As one source put it: “Fake names, stock photos, fake addresses, everything.”

"Groupon President Rob Solomon explains that Groupon’s standard practice when it expands to a new market is to show users examples of the kind of deals they could get once the site goes live in their city.

All of the fake deals on ClubeUrbano, he says, are meant to serve this purpose, but he concedes that Groupon has “done a terrible job of calling that out on the website”. Soloman says this will be fixed immediately."

Groupon founder Andrew Mason is anyways embarrassed about the incident and has distanced himself from the marketing tactics in the Techcrunch blog comments:

"I just want to apologize... we honestly didn't know this was happening, but that's not really a good excuse. We deserve to be called out - Michael's right, it's totally shady.

One clarification to Rob's comments above - this is in no way standard practice for us. For smaller cities in Europe, we run national deals until we have enough deals to run a local deal a day. I don't yet know if something got lost in translation between Europe and Brazil, but this is definitely not how we operate.

Anyway, I'm completely embarrassed (by the practice, not the bad press) - sorry to all, and hopefully our actions over the coming months will earn the trust and respect of the people of Brazil."

In the TC comments, some interesting elements of Citydeal’s expansion in Europe are pointed out.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Thinking Bigger: How The New VC Generation Stands Out

2010-06-29T00:13:46+02:00

The first two posts on our VC series focussed on Europe’s blossoming startup scene and on Lars Hinrichs’ notable Hackfwd program. With Hackfwd, Lars Hinrichs demonstrates himself to be a genuine risk capital financier, using a new and contemporary approach which provides fresh inspiration to old and overused VC dogma.

The paradox of venture capital
The paradox of venture capital is that when a VC starts acting with aversion to risk, the overall risk for the investors could actually increase. Overly conservative VCs cannot nearly achieve the exorbitant rates of return which are expected from their investors (see Risk and Return).

Investors who have understood the VC business would readily avoid funds from VC firms with a strategy focussed on copycat business models. There are numerous other classical investment methods associated with strongly growing established companies which would realize similar gains - with far less risk.

For a while now in the US there is a debate on if and why the VC industry is “broken”, and if the VC model has outlived its usefulness. The cause of this failure is highly disputed. But all are agreed that the VC industry does not deliver on expectations.

This is of course only conditionally true in this absolute form. Because there are a few VCs who have been delivering on their promises for decades now, and exactly these are the ones most sought after.

Industry experts thus clearly divide between the “real” VCs who are following a serious investment strategy, and the several “wannabe” VCs who try to go for the “sure thing” and at the most get by as a good asset manager.

A successful VC can afford up to 8 write offs
The business of a real VC might seem dubious to many. However it is relatively simple: From 10 investments a successful VC can afford up to 8 complete write-offs, as long as one or two investments are absolute hits.

The art of a VC is not, according to the typical conservative investor, to minimize risk and to achieve good but manageable returns, but rather to keep risks as manageably high as possible with the goal of maximum returns.

The requisite one or two successes can only be demonstrated when VCs take on 10 promising (=risky) businesses into their portfolios.

As soon as the VC knowingly begins to put money into low risk (=weak return) investments, the probability of success sink towards zero.

A knack for innovation is a prerequisite for a VC
It is not the wish to have every absurd idea funded that the editors of Exciting Commerce repeatedly lament on the lack of enthusiasm for innovation in Germany. Rather, it is the wish for an awareness for innovation that every VC should have as a pre-requisite in order to be able to reach the required minimum returns.

As described in earlier posts, this requires the right people who can not only recognize and judge the risks but rather also the potential of a business concept.

What is notable about the Hackfwd program as well as the other new VC programs which are causing a stir, is that they factor full risk into their selection of ideas and also complement their programs with a highly professional growth environment. It is a very exciting and must-follow new development which is feeding optimism for the future.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Commerce Search 2.0: Google’s Parallel Shopping Universe

2010-06-27T04:03:03+02:00

What is coming after the current conventional shop systems? Google is following a very interesting e-commerce strategy which at the current time concentrates more on individual shopping components (search, checkout, product database, etc.) rather than on an integrated shopping solution.

In focus besides the Merchant Center (formerly Google Base) is now the search: with Google Commerce Search, merchants can run customized shop searches.

Google has introduced in version 2.0 a few new features which will allow merchants to add tailor made search driven navigation independent of the already implemented shop system.

"Today we’re introducing a full merchandising dashboard, which gives merchants more control over promotions, ranking rules and filtering.

Marketers and product merchandisers can now do all of this themselves—no custom code necessary.

New intuitive retailer controls like time-based promotions, navigation bar with filters, and simple product ranking rules mean seasonal optimizations can be done on the fly."

Innumerable exceptional cases can now be implemented above and beyond the standard Google search. The adaptations seem to have been based on demands from existing users of the Google Commerce service, who wanted more manual control over the automated search settings. VentureBeat gives examples:

"Now retailers can decide what options users get alongside their search (for example, a furniture site can adjust the settings so that users can narrow their search results by product type, brand, or price), can set very specific rules for which products rank higher during search (so that a certain brand and price range is prioritized for laptop searches, while another brand and price is prioritized for office chairs), and also create limited-time promotions. "

Above the search itself, Google has upgraded the navigation features:

"Many shoppers depend on the search bar on retail sites when they’re looking to make a purchase, but some people will always prefer to navigate through different categories and discover new products.

Now, Google Commerce Search allows visitors to shop by browsing around your site as well as searching directly for products."

The search navigation thus gradually encompasses the navigation structure of current shop systems and as a result they are pushed further and further into the background.

Google seems to be slowly growing a form of parallel shop system which is coming through the back door.

The Google Commerce Search results/structure is logically also integrated into the Google-wide product search. The product data of the shops are transmitted to Google which stores the data for Google Product Search as well as then indexing the shops using the search technology.

That Google is refining its e-commerce strategy is obvious, but the big question is, in which direction? Google is being steered by longtime eBay manager Stephanie Tilenius, who has recently been given responsibility over Google’s e-commerce activities.

Currently Google Commerce Search, Google Checkout and others are only available in the USA and England.

Originally posted in German by Marcel Weiss, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.