The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘shopping’

One of the advantages of having a plethora of app directories for iPhone and Android devices, is the wealth of additional data that has emerged regarding users buying and downloading habits. Facebook-based app directory mPlayit has a few compelling stats out today that show that games are four times as popular among iPhone users than among the Android user base. BlackBerry users are twice as likely to be looking for games content than Android users, eventhough BlackBerry devices are primarily used for business purposes.

According to mPlayit, 83 percent of Android app activity on the directory/store is related to non-game related mobile apps, and 17 percent of activity is towards downloading and checking out games. On the other hand, 36 percent of iPhone app activity is related to non-game related mobile apps, with 64 percent of activity towards gaming on the device.

Other trends identified by mPlayit include the massive growth of location-based apps, with Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla all receiving attention on the directory by users. But mPlayit says that even lesser known location-based apps such as FastMall and AroundMe on iPhone are receiving an increased number of downloads. Evernote continues to dominate on the Android, iPhone and BlackBerry platforms, in the Lists & Notes category. Barcode-scanning apps are also increasingly popular, holding the top Utilities category slot for iPhone and BlackBerry, and the second Shopping category slot for Android and iPhone.

The fact that that Android platform doesn’t support gaming as well as the iPhone is not new. But with the introduction of powerful Android devices such as Motorola’s Droid and most recently, Google’s Nexus 1, gaming apps and functionality has improved on the device. Especially now that both devices have multi-touch technology. That being said, it may take a bit longer for both developers and users to catch on.

MPlayit /2009/11/18/myplayit-launches-mobile-app-discovery-directory-on-facebook/”>launched its Facebook app that allows users to discover, share and recommend a variety of mobile apps back in November and covers apps available for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Mobile (Java) devices. Mplayit’s directory of apps includes a dedicated page for each app where Mplayit will post videos of the app (created either by the developer or pulled from YouTube), a detailed description of the app and reviews. You can also click to buy the app from various app markets, including Apple’s App Store and the Android Market. Once you start clicking on various app and downloading apps, Mplayit will begin to recommend apps to you based on your behavior on the site.

Like.com has been steadily expanding its mini digital fashion empire. There is Like.com itself, a visual shopping engine; Covet.com; a recently launched visual shopping personalization application; and Weardrobe, which is a social platform for users to shop street style compilations (Like.com acquired Weardrobe last December). Today, the company is expanding its mini-empire with the launch of visual styling tool Couturious.

Couturious’ focus is on 3D photo-realistic styling. You pick a photo of a model (you can choose from a variety of races and body types) and then style the model accordingly with clothes from over 100 different brands. Like.com’s computer vision technology allows your to dress a fairly realistic model and actually style them. So you can tuck pants into boots, adjust the folding of a scarf or have the model wear the shirt with top few buttons open. And you can purchase any of the items that are styled and share your styles to Facebook and Twitter.

The idea is for users to not figure out what to wear but how to wear it. Along with the ability to style a model from scratch, users can also see pre-set styles from stylists. At launch, Couturious has partnered with 20 of the top fashion bloggers in the industry to feature their own styles. Couturious is also partnering with 6 designers at launch (Tory Burch, Tibi, Charlotte Ronson, Yigal Azrouel, Cynthia Rowley, and Alice+Olivia) who are making items they debuted at last week’s fashion week in New York City available for users to style immediately, even though these items aren’t even in stores yet.

Like.com’s CEO and founder Munjal Shah says Couturious fits the strategy of revolutionizing the online soft goods shopping experience. Weardrobe helps you to be visually inspired with streetstyle looks; Covet helps you to visually personalize your shopping (using celebrity photos), Like.com helps you to visually shop for soft goods and now Couturious will help you to visually style the items you have. Couturious makes money when people click on the links to buy the outfits, similar to the model on Like.com’s other sites. Couturious will also white label the technology to retailers and designer sites for a processing fee. Couturious will face competition from fellow styling site Polyvore.

Like.com, which launched in 2006, is growing steadily both in revenue and networks. The startup raised $32 million in funding during the implosion of the financial industry, with a valuation just north of $100 million. And while we can’t reveal what’s to come, there is definitely more innovation in store for Like.com.

In the annals of stealth startups, Next Jump deserves its own chapter. It’s not often that a company can build a large and successful business for 15 years, raise $45 million in venture capital, hire 225 people, and sign up 60 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers without anybody ever hearing about it. Yet that is exactly what Next Jump did until the first story ever written about the company appeared in the New York Times last month. The $45 million came over the course of 8 rounds and all from angel investors, including early Google investor Ram Shriram and Deutsche Bank asset management chief Kevin Parker (who are both board members).

The company is now coming out of its shell, partly because it is so big that it can no longer hide. “Our thought was to stay quiet until it feels like we had an elephant under a hay stack,” CEO and founder Charlie Kim tells me during a recent visit to Next Jump’s Manhattan headquarters, which take up two floors of a downtown office building. Next Jump runs perhaps the largest set of direct merchant offers businesses in the world, making the growing preponderance of offers in social games seem primitive by comparison. It operates employee discount and reward programs on behalf of 90,000 corporations, organizations and affinity groups which reaches more than 100 million consumers.

Next Jump connects 28,000 retailers and manufacturers to these consumers, typically getting the merchants to offer deep discounts to its members. In Kim’s eyes, this is a much better way to advertise. His pitch to merchants everywhere is this: “Take your ad budget and use it to lower prices for targeted sets of customers. The user is in market, and conversion rates are through the roof.” According to Kim, Next Jump’s conversion rate on offers is 11 to 1, compared to 1000 to 1 or worse for typical Internet ad conversion rates.

In addition to Fortune 500 companies, it also runs rewards programs for the AARP, NEA, Dell, Borders, Hilton, and Mastercard, and reaches consumers directly through Overwhelming Offers (which is also an iPhone app) and small businesses through Corporate Perks. It also powers Yahoo’s Daily Deals. And Kim says that Next Jump drives more transactions than any other affiliate to Linkshare, Commission Junction, and the Google Affiliate Network. It derives revenues from corporations on a per-employee basis, as well as from merchants via transaction and advertising fees (for sponsored slots on its various deals Websites).

Next Jump’s origins are in local merchant coupon books for corporations and running corporate discount programs for their employees. It started out as a print catalog business out of Kim’s Tufts dorm room in the mid-1990s. By 1997 it went completely online because print costs kept going sky-high as merchants demanded the ability to update their offers more frequently. On the Web they can update them hourly if they want, and the feedback loop of what works and what doesn’t helps them fine-tune their offers accelerate the rate of transactions triggered by the deals.

It’s a data-driven business, which is what attracted Shriram to invest and become a board member in 2006—the last time the company raised money. (Shriram used to be the president of comparison shopping engine Junglee before it was sold to Amazon a dozen years ago). Shriram tells me:

It is about the Data, and building the data model is what takes time. Next Jump had to find a model that was a win-win for merchants and consumers alike that can scale. Through a process of trial and error and course corrections they ended up in a good place based on results I’ve seen—namely, users, user engagement and the participation of large employers in the program.

Next Jump has three very rich sources of data which it uses to target offers: a unique consumer demographic database, a transactional database, and a consumer preference database. “The consumer is reached through ‘buying circles’ inside their employer’s intranet,” explains Shriram. “We know most employees mostly shop on-line while at work. Businesses in turn, see special offers and attractive prices as a perk for their employees.”

Since it operates discount programs for roughly one third of all U.S. corporate employees, it is considered a non-traditional benefits provider and gets updated weekly on the employment status of 30 million workers (who also happen to be consumers). It gets part of the employee record, including things like name, address, employment status, home and work address, marital status, and sometimes even job title or salary grade. While it doesn’t have access to actual salaries, it knows enough to put people in the right buckets. “Income is the single largest predictor of future purchases,” says Kim, which makes sense. The more money you have, the more likely you are to spend some of it. But even Amazon doesn’t know your income other than what it can infer from your zip code.

Next jump gets transactional data from its merchants, credit card companies such as Mastercard, and affiliate purchases. But it’s preference database is perhaps the most interesting. Because it is seen as an employee perk, says Shriram, “HR departments inside companies and the individuals themselves are willing to engage in a level of preference data sharing that has not been seen in e-commerce before. The customer preference data allows for better targeting and ultimately superior conversions (around 10-11% vs 2% for the best commerce sites today).”

Consumers tell Next Jump not only what items they would like to buy, but at what price point they would be willing to buy it for. Across various of its services, consumers can set reminders for when specific products are on available for deeper discounts. For instance, you can say alert me when I can buy this pair of Nike running shoes for a 40 percent discount instead of the current 20 percent discount. Next Jump collects all of this data and presents it to participating merchants in an online dashboard (see screenshots below) which helps them model demand at differemt discount points.  The dashboard also shows them current sales, average sales for competitors, conversion rates, and helps them target by different age, income, location, whether they are new or existing customers, and other factors.

Every offer gets ranked and every user gets ranked.  Next Jump’s OfferRank takes into account the discount price below retail, the quality of the offer as voted by users, and the performance history of that merchant as measured by click-through rates, purchase rates, average transaction size, and other variables.  UserRank is based on how many reward points someone earns.  You earn points every time you make a purchase.  Retailers and manufacturers target their offers by UserRank above all other factors. The higher someone’s UserRank, the more they tend to shop.

Next Jump wants to match the best deals with the best shoppers. “Shopping and advertisng has always been the same to us,” says Kim. “Merchants are trying to connect with users and users are trying to connect with advertisers. It is a two sided problem.” Next Jump creates algorithms to reward not only good shoppers, but also good deals. Every time an opt-in offer email goes out, Next Jump measures the response rate. If someone stops responding that merchant is quarantined from that consumer. If the offers turn into spam, then everybody loses.

Merchants are willing to participate because the conversions are great, they get a lot of data to help them decide whether to step up their deals, and for the most part the deals aren’t terribly public so premium brands can use it as channel without diluting their premium pricing.

Kim knows his advantage lies with his data and improving the matches between buyers and sellers. That 11 to 1 conversion rate was 100 to 1 a year ago, and he wants to get it down to 3 to 1. In order to that, he needs better offer algorithms and is on an engineer hiring binge. Of his 225 employees, 150 are engineers. He hired 50 engineers last year, and plans to hire another 100 this year. Next Jump is one of the top engineering recruiters at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgia Tech.

If Kim keeps perfecting his shopping algorithms, you may never shop the same way again—and you won’t even know that you are doing anything differently .

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The New Year brings with it the much awaited numbers from online holiday spending. And its good news. For the full holiday online shopping season, $29.1 billion was spent online, showing 4 percent increase versus the same period last year, according to comScore. It looks like consumers spent just over $2 billion online over the past week, as $27 billion was spent online as of last week for the shopping season from November 1 through Christmas Eve. The day consumers spent the most online happened to be on Tuesday, December 15, a.k.a, “Green Tuesday,” with consumers spending a total of $913 million in one day. In fact, Green Tuesday was one of nine individual days to surpass $800 million in spending during the 2009 holiday season. Not too shabby, considering the economy has yet to fully recover from a crippling recession.

With respect to individual product categories, online sales of jewelry and watches rose the most, growing 20 percent from 2008. Consumer electronics came in second with 15 percent sales growth from the previous year. Consumer electronics saw strong sales of flat panel TVs, mobile devices and e-readers. Other product categories that showed a strong performance were event tickets, computer hardware and books/magazines.

From reports over the past few months, the numbers indicated that the total online spending would be higher this year than last, when the U.S. spending was blindsided with a crippling recession. The final shopping weekend before Christmas saw a 13 percent growth rate in online spending from the previous year, thanks to the wintry mess that hit the Eastern Seaboard. And the full week posted a 6 percent yearly increase in spending, setting a one-week sales record with more than $4.8 billion in spending. Online sales numbers from Black Friday and Cyber Monday also appeared to be stronger than last year.

ComScore also reported that larger e-retailers like Best Buy and Walmart outperformed the smaller online shops. The web analytics company says that sales from larger retailers were buoyed by promotions, and offers of free shipping later in the holiday season. Social media was also used as a strategy for retailers. 28 percent of shoppers surveyed by comScore reported that social media promotions from retailers influenced their purchases.

Of course, it’s important to note that these sales numbers are being compared to those from last year, when spending was at a low thanks to the bleak conditions of the economy. But online retailers have reason to be optimistic for next year as the economy steadily recovers, and consumers increasingly look online to find for holiday deals.

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With more than 100,000 apps available for the iPhone and iPod Touch and more than 3 billion downloaded, figuring out which apps to try out is a real challenge. Those top 100 lists in iTunes just don’t cut it. Ben Keighran thinks that what we need to solve this problem is another app. And he built one called Chomp, which should be available in the App Store sometime in the next few weeks. Here’s my sneak peek.

Chomp is a Yelp for iPhone apps. It shows you a live stream of app reviews from other Chomp users, which you can filter by everyone or just your friends. The app uses Facebook Connect to get you started with friends, or you can just follow people as you read their reviews. You can also sort by top reviewers of the week or expert “app celebrities.”

When you click through from the realtime stream of reviews to an individual app, you can review the app yourself, bookmark it or get it. Chomp gets an affiliate fee for each paid app downloaded through its recommendations. Reviews can also go viral by being shared on Facebook or via email.

As you review more apps, Chomp starts to recommend apps to you Netflix-style. It’s built up its own recommendation algorithm probably based on what other people who agree with your ratings also like. The up-till-now stealthy startup is backed by Ron Conway and other angels. Here are more screenshots:

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In-flight movies might not be the only form of airline-provided entertainment on KLM flights.

Original post: 
KLM considering handing out e-book readers to passengers (bad idea)

Perfect for Black Friday: JustBought.it lets you share what you’re thinking of buying – or what you’ve already picked up – with your Twitter and Facebook friends in just a couple of steps.

When you sign up for the service, you can have it connect directly to your Twitter and/or Facebook account, giving you the opportunity to share your shopping experience with your social graph by letting your friends and followers know what you’ve purchased where (including pictures and product links). You can hook up with other people who have similar interests, and easily determine if you have friends who are already using the service on Gmail or Hotmail.

So if you stumble on what looks to be a good deal today, inform you friends and have them help you decide using the website or the accompanying free iPhone app (iTunes link), if you’re into the whole social shopping thing.

Do you have an Android-powered phone? Check out the startup’s augmented reality application, which shows you what others have purchased in the stores you visit.

JustBought.it is an initiative from Adarsh Pallian, who has in the past started other projects related to Twitter such as Tweetizen and Chart.ly. It was first launched a couple of months ago, but just recently relaunched with a new design and some additional features.

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We reported today that Digital Garage, Twitter’s partner in Japan, is ready to roll out a new, Japan-only way to monetize the service. The way it’ll work is pretty simple: Japanese Twitter users will soon be able to charge their followers to view tweets – on a monthly basis or per single tweet. Otherwise they will only see excerpts or no text in the postings at all. Digital Garage gets a 30% cut.

Not charging companies for holding accounts but having users pay to view tweets? What may sound like a bold move at first actually makes sense, as the web in Japan (where I am based) features a number of peculiarities that play into the hands of Digital Garage’s Japanese operations:

• Japan is the only market in the world where Twitter offers an official mobile client (launched last month). And in this country, the mobile web is bigger than the fixed Internet, with no signs of a reversing trend (not too few people even expect the gap to be widening in the future).
• Japanese mobile web users are used to pay for content. The possibility to conveniently pay through the monthly phone bill makes it easy for content providers to charge fees ranging from a few cents to many dollars (more background). And tweets are nothing but content.
• Charging for premium access on the fixed web isn’t unusual either. Japanese social networks like Mixi or special interest sites such as super-popular recipe site Cookpad have been doing this for years (paying monthly unlocks premium features on both the mobile and fixed Internet). Roughly speaking, between 5 and 15% of all members usually opt for these premium models in Japan. Twitter is estimated to have around 2 million registered users in Japan – enough critical mass to make a payment model experiment worthwhile.
• Writing in Japanese and Chinese characters, Japanese Twitter users can squeeze considerably more text into single tweets than those posting in English, for example. This theoretically boosts the potential for posting tweets that are “valuable” content-wise. It might also be part of the thinking behind the pay-per-tweet option.
• In sharp contrast to the West, Japanese web users are generally way more interested in what celebrities (singers, actors, TV stars etc.) “are doing” or “what’s happening” in their private lives. Some posts on their official blogs can contain simple content such as a picture of a lunch meal and still draw thousands of comments – on a single posting (click here for an example with 10,000 comments). Digital Garage explicitly says the payment model is geared towards fans of those “famous” Twitter users.
• Fueled by coverage in the press and even on national TV (unusual for any web service in Japan), Twitter’s growth in Japan has been accelerating in the past weeks. Elsewhere it seems to be flattening currently.

It’s unclear at this point if only users of the Japanese interface will be able to see if Digital Garage’s experiment (Twitter Japan doesn’t exist as a separate entity) turns out to be successful or not. Another question is how the payment option will be handled in the API and how closely Twitter in the US is watching what’s going on in Japan. We’ll stay tuned.

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Japanese stationery maker King Jim announced the Pomera DM20 [JP] today, an ultra-compact handheld device that’s based on a “less is more” concept.

See original here:
Pomera: Digital notebook with foldable keyboard (video)

Internet commerce juggernaut eBay is unveiling a brand new iPhone application dubbed Deals today, alongside an upgraded version of its shopping app for the iPhone and iPod Touch platform and an enhanced mobile website. And there’s a good reason for eBay to bolster its mobile offering: the company says its mobile GMV (value of goods sold) via its iPhone app and mobile website (m.ebay.com) is on track to top half a billion dollars by the end of this year.

Impressive number, and that’s not the end of the story. eBay also shared that its mobile GMV is growing at a double-digit rate month-over-month, and that approximately half of its 750,000 unique mobile users per month are situated outside the United States. Another interesting tidbit: eBay says 1 item is purchased every 2 seconds through its mobile offering.

Earlier this year, eBay CEO John Donahoe told a conference audience that the value of goods sold through the eBay iPhone app alone would exceed $400 million, and that an upgraded version of the app was imminent. That updated app should now be available, and it gained a little brother, too.

Version 1.5 of the eBay iPhone application (iTunes link), which the company says has been downloaded 5 million times to date, should now be live on the App Store – in 8 languages and in 77 countries. It boasts a streamlined interface that lets buyers and sellers manage their eBay activity and accounts directly from their iPhone devices, Daily Deal access, social media and e-mail sharing options (new), ‘Buy It Now’ capabilities, push notification alerts (also new) and a more powerful integration with PayPal.

The e-commerce giant is today also debuting a new app, called Deals (iTunes link – US store only), that basically gives iPhone and iPod Touch users a way to access the seemingly never-ending stream of bargains among hundreds of millions eBay listings. The app has built-in integration with social networks like Facebook and Twitter, making it easier for buyers to share their shopping activity with other and even build consensus around deals with their friends. Nice touch: you can shake your device to refresh the deals on display.

eBay has released the new app just in time for its ‘12 Days Of Deals’ program, that will commence this Friday, November 27.

Anyone still believe e-commerce via mobile isn’t worth the effort?

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