Exciting Commerce // Unlimited

eBay Wow! Campaign Breaks Revenue Record in October

2009-11-10T00:26:51+01:00

The eBay Wow! campaign has reached a record new revenue level, just barely missing the 3 million euro mark:

Very clear as well, that eBay continues to want too much too fast and are using the same old tricks to boost the figures:

From the 2.9 million euro revenue in October, 721,000 euro (or 25%) stems from the sale of Wiis. The Wii best seller came no less than 4 times in October (on the 4th, 8th, 15th and 22nd of October). The 15th brought in record revenues of 389,000 euro.
The price point fell down to the record new low of 36 euro (last low point was 55 euro in June), mostly triggered by a big Fruit of the Loom sale:
On October 23, six Fruit of the Loom shirts for 9.99 euro sold a record breaking 23,160 times.

eBay raised the frequency of deals from one to two per day just last August - although without the expected revenue boost.

And although the team was apparently already struggling to find attractive best sellers to fill just 30 product slots per month, now just in time for Christmas the rate has jumped to 4 Wow! deals per day (press release in German).

To keep up this pace, now only 9 months from the start, 120 top deals will need to be found every single month. The effects might very well be noticeable on the quality of the selected individual products.

Interested live shoppers can follow the Wow! campaign developments live from Wortfilter (in German).

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

Who Can Be Our “Consumer Identity Provider”?

2009-11-08T16:43:27+01:00

At the developer’s conference Innovate 2009, where PayPal officially launched their PayPal X platform, PayPal also reviewed more precisely their plans for the future.

Apparently, the success of Facebook Connect is inspirational and with “PayPal ID”, consumers will have the possibility to login generally across many e-commerce sites:

"During his talk, Mark began discussing eBay’s goal to become the “consumer identity provider” of the web. Under the project, which for now seems to be called “PayPal ID,” users can use their PayPal login to identify themselves securely on e-commerce websites and web apps across the spectrum."

Contrary to Facebook Connect which is burdened by fake profiles, PayPal accounts are coupled to bank accounts which avoids this problem. As such, PayPal’s efforts are more suitable for the e-commerce sector.

PayPal is still working on the implementation:

"As to when it will launch: the eBay and PayPal team are currently building the back end of the system as well as speaking with government and regulatory agencies. Sometime next year, PayPal ID should enter testing."

The question is, if PayPal can reach the ambitious goal of being an ID provider for e-commerce customers across the web. In particular the question is whether PayPal should rather be working with existing identification projects such as OpenID, instead of trying to re-invent the wheel. Developer Jesse Stay writes:

“Is it possible for Paypal to go alone in this identity space when they could either be leading or joining existing identity efforts such as OpenID? I may be wrong but I do not recall any mention of the word “open” in his proposal.

And when he mentions things like “they are working with Government” it gets a little scary that a single company may control all this along with government."

These thoughts show that any company that wants to take on an ambitious goal such as becoming the Consumer Identity Provider will need to plan with a lot of resistance.

Which other companies besides PayPal would be able to take on such a task?

Only two: Facebook, the largest social network in the world, who with Facebook Connect have already massively extended their influence. And Google, with its very well developing and similarly functional Friend Connect.

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

Magento Matters: Vertical Versions Coming in Spring

2009-11-06T00:59:50+01:00

As Roy Rubin announced during the Open Source debate last Tuesday at the Insight E-Commerce conference in Jena, Magento will bring to the market in 2010 the first vertical versions for specific industries.

On this point, he had already given us a short statement at the Shop.org Summit in Las Vegas:

It will be exciting to see which industries will be served by Magento and how specific these industry solutions can be, and in particular see how this could act as a diversification strategy for Magento.

All statements on the future of Magento to be found centrally on YouTube.

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

PayPal X: PayPal Launches Platform For Third Party Apps

2009-11-04T23:55:27+01:00

PayPal X, a platform announced in July, was launched today at PayPal’s developer conference Innovate 2009.

Amongst other things, PayPal X enables integrating PayPal based payment systems into applications such as social networks. With PayPal X, users won’t have to go anymore to PayPal.com in order to make purchases from within online games or other web applications.

At x.com one can find developer tools, sample code and documentation to the various PayPal APIs as well as other information.

PlaySpan, a producer of platforms for virtual goods for games, already uses PayPal’s new technology.

With the Mobile Embedded Payment Toolkit, Paypal can also be deployed for mobile applications.

TechCrunch has a full list of APIs for PayPal X.

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

Magento Matters: Roy Rubin On The Magento Ecosystem

2009-11-02T13:52:05+01:00

As a run-up to the Meet Magento #2 conference, happening today in Frankfurt, Exciting Commerce’s Jochen Krisch had the opportunity at the Shop.org Summit to shotgun Roy Rubin with questions on the future of Magento. His most interesting answers are now on Youtube.

While many still regard Magento as a mere shopping system, Magento considers itself as rather an e-commerce platform and as an ecosystem for e-commerce applications:

Here, Roy Rubin shortly sums up again the Open Source vision from Magento and the developments to the current day:

Roy Rubin further describes in the following statement how cross-merchant applications and shared learnings across thousands of Magento merchants could look like:

On many aspects and topics, Roy Rubin doesn’t go into detail, understandably keeping things close to his chest. But whoever is following the evolution should have some clear guesses as to where it is all heading and have an good idea of the spectacular possibilities that are opening up for e-commerce.

Further statements on the future of Magento to be found on Youtube.

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

Deals.Woot!: Woot! Brings A Woot! for Bargain Hunters

2009-10-31T01:10:05+01:00

At the Shop.org Summit in Las Vegas, Woot! founder Matt Rutledge announced Deals.Woot! And at AuctionBytes, there is already a first taste of the newest Woot! initiative that should be coming online soon:

"Deals.Woot.com aggregates deals from other websites, and also allows its community of Wooters to submit deals and vote on the best ones.

While Woot.com is a "daily deals" site, its new Deals.Woot.com website is an aggregator of daily deals - and it is inviting eBay PowerSellers and other online merchants to submit their deals to the site."

For loyal followers of Exciting Commerce, this initiative won’t strike you as completely new (see the articles on the Exciting Commerce Stars of 2006 - National and International).

Fortunately, Woot! will do exactly what Dealjäger ("Deal Hunter") should have done - to provide an diversified and exciting combination of live shopping and crowdsourcing elements to the market - and in the well-known and proven style of Woot! The video announcement here:

Woot! is at the beginning equally focused on integrating both merchants and users. As soon as the site is live, it will be worthwhile to compare Deals.Woot with Deals.Ebay. While eBay is still fully stuck in its portal-minded ideas, Woot! is one of the few e-commerce players who understands how to operate in a live web environment - and therefore quite rightly has almost 1.5 million followers on Twitter.

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

GSI Grabs RueLaLa/SmartBargains for $350 Million

2009-10-28T13:21:37+01:00

Exciting e-commerce fusion in the US: For $350 million, GSI Commerce has taken over Retail Convergence, the operator of private shopping club Ruelala (approx. $100 million revenues) and the bargain shop Smartbargains (approx. $60 million revenues). GSI Commerce is a full service e-commerce provider serving large (fashion) brands.

Besides the detailed press release, Internetretailer has a written up a good background article.

We at Exciting Commerce commented recently on the changes occurring in the fashion industry, which is again underlined by this particular deal:

“According to our estimates, parallel to services such as Yoox, DePauli/Herrenausstatter or Design3000 (and their exclusive branded shops), in particular logistic service providers (such as Dohmen Solutions and Hellmann) will be cutting a larger piece of the fashion pie and in effect increasingly become competition for the established (mail-order) businesses.”

GCI Commerce, which is making its way to Europe, is expanding its service offering for branded manufacturers and can now start offering targeted clearance sales.

Source: GSI Commerce Webcast

P.S. Naturally, we are at Optaros very proud that we develop Ruelala as one of the first American private shopping clubs for Retail Convergence/SmartBargains - and are able to kit them out with a full set of sales supporting elements.

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

The Shop Exchange: HSE24 Valued at $200 Million

2009-10-26T08:01:43+01:00

According to the German ezine Spiegel Online (GE/EN), the shopping channel HSE24, now on the open market, is valued by recent interested buyers at $200 million (140.5 million):

“On October 16, Golden Gate Capital made an offer for a takeover of home shopping channel HSE24 at a price of 140.5 million euro.”

As an orientation: Arcandor had taken over (GE/EN) HSE24 from IAC in June 2007 for 145 million euro (equiv. $200 million) in stocks.

In its preliminary report, Spiegel Online covers also the background of the Quelle bankruptcy. In contrary to former statements dramatic revenue losses were reported:

"Even in September, the consultancy firm Roland Berger - under assignment from the insolvency administrators - estimated the possible annual revenue of Quelle around 1.6 billion euro. A good month later it was internally understood that only 1 billion euro was a targetable revenue volume."

This equates to a halving of revenue in comparison to the previous year.

For completeness, here is the official bankruptcy notice (in German) from the insolvency administrators from last Monday.

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

ACTA 2009: Frequent Order Customers Jump From 11% To 13%

2009-10-25T04:28:22+01:00

The Allensbach Institute released a few days ago their ACTA Study 2009 (PDF in German) on online user behaviour. While e-commerce first time users have reached their zenith and is now tending to stagnate, the Exciting Commerce market is picking up speed. The potential lies now at around 27% of the population.

After the number of frequent order customers first broke the 10% mark in 2007 (GE/EN), the percentage of Germans who order online on average at least every 4 or 5 weeks rose in the last year from 11% to 13%:

In total, nowadays 27% (last year: 25%) of Germans buy at least 5 time per year online. This ratio has practically doubled in the last 5 years.

The ACTA Study does not make any statements about the causes of this trend. Besides the generally growing acceptance of the Internet, it could be that besides classical online catalogs, online shoppers find private shopping clubs such as Brands4Friends or Vente-Privée or live shopping sites like iBOOD more attractive for repeated purchases.

Besides the bvh figures, the ACTA Study has proven itself in the last years to be the most reliable source of information for following and sorting out developments in the online e-commerce market. Exciting Commerce therefore consciously relies at the moment only on these two studies.

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

The Shop Exchange: The Holtzbrinck eLab Offloads Guut.de

2009-10-22T01:00:26+02:00

Like so many Holtzbrinck eLab investments, Guut.de must also now pay the piper. After the founders had to leave already at the beginning of the year, the current management took over the shares (GE/EN) and then laid off a good portion of the staff.

In contrast to Holtzbrinck Ventures, who take a more long term strategy, Holtzbrinck eLab is revealing itself to be a pure fair-weather “investor”. Our “exit driven investor” label from our previous post was evidently not too far off.

This is also bitter news for the German live shopping market, since it pulls us behind in comparison to the other European markets. One can be anxious to see if Guut.de can eventually find a new, future-oriented patron who will help it regain its former strength. Or, if a new player will use this opportunity to fill the gap.

The hottest candidate would have been Preisbock. But instead of seizing the moment, the team there seems to be unnecessarily distracted (GE/EN).

Only iBOOD is holding onto its strategy firmly and is already today playing at a new level. It looks pretty likely now that the local live shopping market - like the other e-commerce markets before it - will be developed by international players who will dominate the field for a long while to come.

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

Magento Matters: Social Shopping with Facebook and Magento

2009-10-20T22:34:34+02:00

How social can a shopping system such as Magento become? The Magento extension “Facebook Connect Social Shopping” is attracting a lot of attention (GE/EN) with its ability to bind (GE/EN) e-commerce sites to the Facebook social graph (your network of friends and acquaintances).

Jochen Krisch’s colleague John Eckman summarizes it in a screencast as follows:

"What’s holding retailers back from letting users get reviews from their social graph, not just from random strangers?"

Posts on the topic also to be found at Handelskraft (GE/EN) and in the Magento-Blog.

Additional information on this and related e-commerce topics can be found in the Ecommerce Playbook on Slideshare.

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

The Shop Exchange: Vente-Privée on Amazon and eBay’s Radar

2009-10-20T07:52:31+02:00

According to information from Mike Butcher of TechCrunch Europe, several US firms have got the French private shopping club Vente-Privée and the overall private shopping club sector in their sights.

Apparently Gilt, Amazon and eBay are actively looking at potential acquisition targets. Vente-Privée alone should be in the $1.5 - 2 billion range. Some sources even gauge Vente-Privée in the $2 - 4 billion ballpark.

Vente-Privée was late to take a foothold in the US market. In particular, the financially strong Gilt Groupe from the US is turning into a serious competitor.

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

SpreadBooster Plans Shopping Experience for the Masses

2009-10-20T01:44:01+02:00

Brilliant ideas are few and far between in the German e-commerce scene. SpreadBooster is one of these ingenious concepts which bring new drive to e-commerce and is already now one of the highlights of the coming Live Shopping Days conference:

The Spreadbooster principle is based on a falling price model, whereby known pitfalls (GE/EN) are cleverly circumnavigated. The site had gone online a few days ago with a preliminary version which tries to target potential online merchants who might join the Spreadbooster network. In contrast to Cashback type concepts and the like, Spreadbooster offers additional revenues to merchants without putting pressure on the margins (as is usually the case).

The fundamental idea remains: Bargain hunters can buy sneak peeks into the (falling) hidden price of an item which is on sale. The revenue gained from the sale of “sneak peeks” goes towards offsetting the falling price of the item. Spreadbooster is so constructed that price movement can be expected from the very beginning, even when some products just have a limited number of interested buyers.

SpreadBooster is the latest attempt from Luupo founder Joern Kunst, who has evolved into one of the most resourceful brains of the live and entertainment shopping world. (Luupo has gone online again under new management). Spreadbooster works based on a simple but innovative trick which will in all certainty be a trigger for a whole wave of new shopping concepts.

At the moment there are only a few innovators in Germany who are continuously tinkering around with new and well-thought out ideas in the live and entertainment shopping area. Beside Joern Kunst there are the guys from Egenium, who after Deutschland klickt also have one or the other trick up their sleeves.

We can count this now as ending our latest dry spell (and with it the endless copycats). We're looking forward to more innovative and original shopping concepts coming up in the next months.

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

Alice Shopping Platform With New Product Sampling Strategy

2009-10-16T08:44:40+02:00

Alice.com (“Everyone needs an Alice”) is an interesting new concept which has gone online in June 2009. It is an open, online shopping platform for manufacturers of consumer packaged goods (CPG) who want to make a direct connection with end customers. Consumers need to provide a profile on Alice.com to shop there.

TechCrunch wrote a review on the site last June:

"Although young, the site, which has over 6,000 products, has a great deal of variety when it comes to different types of products. There are 86 choices under bathroom paper, which includes kleenex, toilet paper, cotton balls and more. And there are 804 offerings for hair products.(...)

On the manufacturer side, Alice.com makes no retail margin allowing each manufacturer to control product assortment and pricing in its own direct sale to the end consumer. Alice collects the goods from the manufacturers in a warehouse and manages all of the e-commerce and shipping. So how does the site make money? Advertising."

Since the beginning of October, Alice.com has introduced an interesting strategy for free trial samples:

The manufacturers who sell products over Alice.com can directly target consumer groups of their liking with their free product samples. The samples are sent with the regular purchase orders. The profiles and other user data (such as purchase behaviour) allow for a more direct selection of sample recipients as opposed to when samples are made available to individual retailers.

In September this year Alice.com has raised a four million dollar financing round. In November 2008, Alice.com (back then still in stealth mode) was able to raise $4.3 million.

The founders of Jellyfish, the reverse auction shopping site, are behind Alice.com. Bought by Microsoft, Jellyfish.com leads in the meantime the shopping site for Microsoft’s search engine Bing, Cashback.

Parts of the technology from Jellyfish is used by Cashback.

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

Fashion Commerce: The Transformation of the Fashion Industry

2009-10-15T22:16:36+02:00

Even topping the Fashion Roundtable last June which focussed on web innovations, the Fashion Commerce Forum last week in Hamburg brought to light the transformation happening now in the fashion industry (presentations in German from Ecco, Design3000, Conleys, Limango, Spreadshirt and Brax):

The brands/manufacturers are pushing themselves more and more into the Internet space and often become their own retailers (as also seen in the offline business).

Equivalently, classic (online) merchants such as ASOS are increasingly covering themselves by strengthening their in-house brand positions within their product palette.

At the same time, a new form of fashion retailer is emerging, who are indeed more like a service provider for the brands/manufacturers rather than a merchant in the classical sense.

Particularly in this area there is huge untapped potential for innovative online services which would offer solutions for the obvious and foreseeable problems faced by the brands/manufacturers.

The Effects of the Transformation

The spectrum today is already vast. On one end there are vendors such as Vente-Privée, Brands4Friends and the like, who specialize in very precise and targeted overstock liquidation (see also "How The Secondary Market is Changing E-commerce"). On the other side there are fashion platforms such as Stylight, Stylefruits, Smatch and others who are offering new revenue channels via modern (and emotion-based) sales approaches.

According to our estimates, parallel to services such as Yoox, DePauli/Herrenausstatter or Design3000 (and their exclusive branded shops), in particular logistic service providers (such as Dohmen Solutions and Hellmann) will be cutting a larger piece of the fashion pie and in effect increasingly become competition for the established (mail-order) businesses.

Already today they are bundling a multiple of brands together. And as soon as they have reached a certain scale, they are able to consider multiple-brand shopping platforms and strategic concepts for increasing revenue streams for their clients. In particular the Netrada initiative (GE/EN) from Heycom is moving in this direction.

One can already deduce: The fashion industry will be offering more than enough interesting material in the next while to feed further Fashion Commerce Forums. Thanks for all participants and speakers for the exciting discussions!

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

LSD 010: eBay Germany’s Managing Director on the Wow! Campaigns

2009-10-13T23:48:32+02:00

The doubling of the eBay Wow! offers from one item to two items per day has, as expected, not brought any revenue advantages. On the contrary, it even caused some losses in September:

Computer Reseller News editor Matthias Hell interviewed (GE/EN) eBay Germany’s Managing Director Stephan Zoll a couple of weeks ago:

CRN: One of the largest changes that eBay introduced this year was the live shopping modeled “Wow!” campaigns. How has this sales format developed in the meantime?

Zoll: Very good. From one daily deal we have transitioned to two, and will soon present four daily deals.

The sellers have given very positive feedback, because they can now sell large volumes on eBay within a short time, which many merchants have wanted for a long time.

On the buyer side, the Wow! offers have been in demand from both the classic eBay buyers as well new customers. Since the launch of the sales format, products from completely different areas have been offered, whereby 30-40% had a focus on electronic goods.

Interestingly, consumer questionnaires have shown that even more electronic items would be welcomed.

CRN: The second big innovation was the launch of branded shops on the eBay platform this summer. Can you already draw conclusions here?

Zoll: After eBay was already strong with C2C and B2C sales, we wanted to offer goods for sale with branded shops which would otherwise primarily be sold from outlet shops.

We launched the format at the end of May and now have 19 branded shops on the platform. By the end of the year it should be already 30 - 40 shops, which shows that the resonance is very positive with the manufacturers.

The spectrum of the offered products is very broad and extends from fashion articles to electronic goods.

The complete interview in German is here. eBay CEO John Donahoe explained already at the recent Shop.org conference why eBay doesn’t want to depend strictly on auctions anymore.

Interesting as well that eBay is considering a merchant interlinked shopping cart system (GE/EN).

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

Amazon Launches Javari Shoe Site in England and Japan

2009-10-13T13:16:01+02:00

Javari isn’t just a tributary to the Amazon river, but also the new Amazon spinoff for shoes and handbags.

Following the Japanese Javari site launch 7 months ago, the British Javari went online on October 1st (as per reports from Retailweek and Times). The German Javari domain has already been reserved by Amazon.

In the US, Amazon has been experimenting for almost 3 years with a similar offer on the domain Endless.com. They have notably also in the meantime taken over Zappos (see traffic comparison).

Javari, like Zappos in the US, will offer free shipping for shoe and handbag purchases as well as for any returns.

For Amazon, this is an effort to find the optimal shopping concept for soft goods to complement their proven methods for hard goods. A detailed review of the site can be found with eConsultancy.

The launch of Javari in England comes now at a time when the French Spartoo is driving their European expansion.

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