Copious revamps social commerce service with a new twist
Pinterest has yet to provide many details about how it intends to make money from its fast-growing image-sharing social service.
But that’s not stopping others from trying to capitalize on the online service’s rich catalog of product images.
Copious, a social commerce start-up, launched a new version of its website on Monday that lets consumers buy many of the bags, shoes and other fashion accessories that get shared by Pinterest’s millions of users every day.
Pinterest is just one of several online social media services, including Twitter and Facebook, that the Copious site connects to, allowing consumers to create a personalized online storefront that changes as frequently as your Facebook newsfeed.
The idea is to create a shopping experience based around people you follow and their actions, rather than around static categories of merchandise. Instead of browsing pre-set selections of shoes or sweaters, a visitor to Copious sees an ever-changing mix of items, based upon whatever the friends and bloggers they follow are sharing or commenting on at that moment.
The result is a shopping experience that’s constantly morphing, supposedly giving consumers a reason to come keep coming back.
“Conversation is always ongoing. That’s why people go back to Facebook on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily go back to Amazon.com on a daily basis,” said Jim Rose, the co-founder and CEO of Copious.
Google and AOL venture arms fund tool to track retail price changes
Most people wouldn’t be too pleased if they learned that the price of a digital camera suddenly dropped by $50 a few hours after they purchased it from the same online retailer.
Yet according to the creators of a new shopping tool called Shopobot, such price swings happen every week, sometimes every day, as retailers adopt more sophisticated techniques to test out different price points.
“The volatility is really being driven by these algorithmic approaches to pricing,” says Shopobot co-founder and CEO Julius Schorzman. “You have these automated systems that are trying to maximize revenue for retailers online.”
Shopobot, which is being backed by Google Ventures and Aol Ventures, is designed to let consumers take advantage of these price fluctuations, rather than get stung by them.
The company takes a Google-like approach to the task and crawls retailer websites, monitoring thousands of product listings for the latest prices – Schorzman says that’s a better tactic than subscribing to data feeds provided by the retailers, which he says are not always reliable.
Consumers can “follow” certain products, receiving an alert when prices drop, or they can get recommendations of the best times to look for deals based on the company’s analysis of the pricing data it collects.
How retailers react to this kind of pricing transparency remains to be seen. Schorzman says he expects retailers will ultimately embrace it the way they have other shopping tools such as pricing comparison services.
Is Groupon a savior or a destroyer?
By James Ledbetter
The opinions expressed are his own.
You could hardly imagine a starker contrast. The Wall Street Journal this week portrayed Groupon and rival group-purchasing sites as the ultimate friend of the small business owner. The Journal interviewed Cynthia Yee, who runs a Chinatown walking-tour business in San Francisco. Yee told the paper she’d participated in at least 7 “deal of the day” promotions in the last 18 months; Groupon alone sold a whopping 1700 vouchers for Yee’s service. Yee estimates that the deals brought in $25,000, and her trade has exploded to the point where she’s had to hire two assistants.
But that was not how things went for Posies Cafe in Portland, Oregon. In a lengthy series this month on TechCrunch, entrepreneur Rocky Agrawal has used Jessie Burke’s nightmare experience to paint Groupon not only as an unscrupulous exploiter of small business, but as a company built on a house of cards. (A lengthy video interview with Burke is below, and you can also read her blog account.)
These are only the most recent and prominent observers predicting that Groupon will fail, essentially because it is bad for businesses.
Really good stuff, James. It’s interesting that the coffee shop owner in the video admitted she didn’t tell her regular customers about the deal. As much as she feels gypped by Groupon, I might feel gypped if I was getting my coffee there every day and no one bothered to tell me I could get it for half the price (or treat a few friends).
Mobile sales are helping eBay, but is it enough?
eBay said Wednesday that the value of goods sold in the U.S. through its mobile applications surged 133% to $100 million during the month before Christmas. Globally, the growth was even stronger: Up 166% to $230 million worth of goods.
That is good news from one angle. eBay is having success using mobile devices to sell goods during the busiest retailing period of the year. But it obscures another fact: Mobile sales may be a growing market, but it’s a tiny portion of eBay’s overall sales. And overall sales don’t appear to be growing nearly as fast.
eBay’s Gross Merchandise Volume (the total value of all goods sold through eBay) was $48.3 billion in 2009, excluding car sales, and that figure is likely to top $50 billion in 2010. The $230 million GMV of mobile sales is equal to only 0.5% of eBay’s total GMV last year.
Put another way, the volume of goods sold through mobile devices during the holiday season is about 6 percent of the average volume of goods sold each month on eBay.
Overall, eBay’s holiday business grew but not as fast as other online retailers. According to ChannelAdvisor, a software company working with online retailers, eBay’s holiday business increased 11% during the busy Thanksgiving weekend, lagging the 68% growth rate for Amazon and the overall e-commerce growth rate of 27%.
eBay has a chance to use the growing popularity of its mobile apps to boost that growth rate in coming years. But if it wants to grow as fast as the rest of the e-commerce industry does during the Christmas season, it needs to find some additional incentives.
Will Facebook become a force in e-commerce, too?
The social graph that Facebook is slowly building has been extending its tentacles into different areas of the web – not just micro-publishing the thoughts of a user’s circle of friends, but also online videos, photos and email. One huge area that Facebook has been quiet in so far is e-commerce. But this holiday season, there are early signs that that is beginning to change.
Coremetrics, a web analytics company owned by IBM, recently looked at new trends in the annual shopping spree stretching from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. Among them, it found a nascent trend it called social shopping:
The growing trend of consumers using their networks on social sites for information about deals and inventory levels continued on Cyber Monday. While the percentage of visitors arriving from social network sites is fairly small relative to all online visitors—nearly 1 percent—it is gaining momentum, with Facebook dominating the space.
Intriguing as that may be, it’s hardly strong proof that Facebook will become a force to be reckoned with in e-commerce. But other signals suggest that, given enough time, that could in fact happen. The blog AllFacebook received an email from Facebook with data suggesting that the company is well aware of the potential.
In the email, Facebook reported that half of the top 25 online retail sites, including Amazon and eBay, have integrated their stores with Facebook. Those retailers were active enough in their Black Friday updates to deliver a sixfold increase in status updates from the previous Friday. During Thanksgiving weekend, referral traffic from Facebook to top retailers increased 70 percent.
Retailers may have an incentive to welcome potential shoppers from Facebook: One shopping site found that consumers tend to buy more goods on the Facebook store than on its web site. That may be because people are more trusting of shopping suggestions made by friends, or because of viral coupon campaigns that spread on the Facebook site.
And as Hitwise recently reported, on the day Beatles songs were available for sale on iTunes, Facebook was a key driver of traffic to the iTunes store. One in 200 visits that left Facebook the day the news broke went directly to Apple. All of these examples are more anecdotal than conclusive, but together they strongly suggest that Facebook could emerge as a huge player in e-commerce. Facebook has a ways to go to harness that potential, but even an online retail giant like Amazon would be foolish to ignore the social site as a source of shoppers.
Or you can take the other side of this. 1% in 2010 is nothing. A small blip of Groupon blew up to a 6 billion dollar business while facebook has almost zero traction. Who has your credit card??? Amazon, Groupon, Apple. Not facebook, not google. There is your answer.
PayPal sees early promise from mobile experiment
The “mobile wallet” concept has been bandied around for years as a promise that one day “soon” we’ll be able to leave our purses at home and pay for everything via the cellphone. Of course we were also meant to to get to work using Jetpacks and have robots cleaning the house by now too. However, with credit card companies and banks desperately looking at new avenues for growth, they’re starting to talk up mobile with a vengeance as they all battle for a dominant place in the fledgling mobile payments industry. And since they’re doing it, online payments provider PayPal has joined the fray because if consumers really want to move their lives to the cellphone, it can’t limit itself to the desktop. Interestingly PayPal says it is seeing early signs of mobile success in an area where it looks to make an old fashioned bank service – check cashing – more convenient. The unit of eBay says it handled $100,000 in checks from its mobile customers in roughly a day and a half after it kicked off its mobile check cashing service, which allows you to add money to your PayPal account by just taking a cellphone photo of a physical check and using the PayPal mobile app. Roughly a month later, PayPal says it processed over $1 million worth of checks. This is a pittance in comparison with what banks handle — U.S. banks processed $30.6 billion of checks in 2006, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, implying $2.55 billion worth of checks every month. Still PayPal is happy enough with the result that it is already looking for ways to improve the service, specifically by reducing the check-clearing window from six days, where it currently stands. It is also experimenting with other services aimed at expanding beyond eBay auctions and other online transactions where it is most popular. One is allowing consumers to pay for goods in a store by using a mobile PayPal app on their phone, which would require the vendor as well as the consumer to open a PayPal account. For this service PayPal says it has signed up 200 merchants in just a few weeks. In comparison the credit card industry has convinced retailers to install contactless payment terminals in all of 150,000 locations in about five years. The idea with contactless payments is that you can wave your phone to pay instead of having to fumble in your wallet for a credit card. Paypal is also trying out this method for size via its partnership with a company called Bling Nation, which lets you spend from your PayPal account by slapping a “Bling” sticker to the outside of your phone and waving at the machine. “We don’t know which will take off so we’re experimenting,” said Laura Chambers, a senior director for PayPa.l But she noted that “merchants aren’t excited about hardware upgrades.” At a New York event where the company showcased their mobile services, a bunch of which were launched on October 6, Chambers said that this year would be a year of experiments for her company. And since mobile operators have a direct relationship with their customers, Chambers said PayPal is also in talks with U.S. operators about how they can work together. She would not disclose any details but said: “There’s a great opportunity to replace the wallet and for the mobile phone to become the wallet.”
(Photo: Reuters – of American stuntman Eric Scott hovering over London using a Jetpack)
I’m all for mobile payments and love the gadgets, etc. But anyone who’s used the phone to check in or try to go through security at airports multiple times probably knows that the phone can be more trouble to scan than a regular boarding pass. Similarly a phone can be more trouble than swiping a credit card in that you have to log in, maintain signal, and keep the phone from timing out…and the retailer’s equipment has to work flawlessly as well (and the cashier has to be capable and confident in using it). I’d love it to work but have my concerns.
