The load times of the top 2000 online retailers is down 22 percent in the past year, according to a study released today by web app delivery and security provider Radware.

And the more money you make, the slower you are.

“This is a massive drop in performance,” Radware VP Joshua Bixby said in a statement. “If this slowdown rate goes unchecked, we will see median load times of 9 seconds or more, which is simply unacceptable for online shoppers.”

The median or most common load time for retailers’ home pages was 7.25 seconds, which is up from 5.94 seconds in the previous year’s study. Those slow speed can cost retailers up to 9 percent of their traffic and as much as 13 percent of sales, says Radware. And the top 100 e-tailers’s web pages loaded in an even slower 8.23 seconds.

Why?

Radware says that pages webpages are getting bigger. In December 2012, the average page was over a megabyte — 1163 kB — while in December 2010, the average page was only 665 kB. That’s 75 percent bigger, and at this rate, web pages will be over two megabytes by the end of 2014. Internet access speeds aren’t keepin gup.

In addition, web pages are getting more complex, with dynamic elements, multiple scripts, and resources pulled from multiple servers in multiple locations from multiple vendors. Radware says that the average top retailer site contains seven third-party scripts for services such as analytics, social media, and ad engines. Each of them can slow down a website.

Three simple things can improve performance drastically, says Radware: using a content deliver network (CDN) to deliver pages from geographically-distributed servers, enabling keep-alives to reduce handshake time between browsers and servers, and compressing text to send data quicker. But 75 percent of the top 2000 retailers do not use a CDN, 13 percent don’t use keep-alives, and 22 percent don’t compress webpage resources.

Interestingly, despite getting a bad rep for its big pages, Amazon is a top retailer that is reversing the trend of slower pages. Amazon.com loads in 3.26 seconds, faster than last year and in the top ten retailers for speed.

Top 10 retailers by site speed:

1. CVS.com (1.02 seconds)
2. Polo.com (1.9 seconds)
3. eCrater.com (1.95 seconds)
4. Abebooks.com (2.05 seconds)
5. BHPhotoVideo.com (3.03 seconds)
6. JCrew.com (3.15 seconds)
7. Amazon.com (3.26 seconds)
8. ShopAtHome.com (3.74 seconds)
9. Etsy.com (3.88 seconds)
10. Gamefly.com (3.94 seconds)

And more data, in visual form:

photo credit: ….Tim via photopin cc

That’s up 18 percent year-over-year for the fourth quarter, and it’s up 21 percent for the full 2012 earnings.

“We had a great finish to an excellent year, with fourth quarter results exceeding our expectations,” eBay president and CEO John Donahoe said in a statement. “eBay Marketplaces in particular had a terrific fourth quarter, with growth in the U.S. accelerating three points, outpacing ecommerce.”

Source: Google Finance

eBay stock today

Key payments division PayPal, which has been a critical revenue driver for eBay in previous quarters, continues to do well, with payment volume up 24 percent … which, given PayPal’s fairly linear revenue structure, means that earnings were also up 24 percent.

PayPal clients sent nearly $24 billion to each other in 2012 — 250 percent more than in 2011 — and PayPal reported adding two million accounts a month in the fourth quarter, which the company says is PayPal’s fastest growth ever.

PayPal’s growth is important for eBay, as mobile payments is an increasingly growing market. PayPal put mobile commerce first explicitly in July of 2012, when mobile boss Hill Ferguson was elevated to VP of global product and saw a huge jump in mobile payments this past Thanksgiving. The company also teamed up with NCR to attack Square just a few days ago.

eBay as a whole generated $2.6 billion of cash flow in excess of expenses in the past year and is now sitting on a nice little nest egg of $11.5 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and non-equity investments. Not exactly Apple-sized, but certainly nothing to sniff at.

And for 2013?

eBay expects to earn $16-16.5 billion and make between $2.23 and $2.29 per share. The company’s stock is up $0.40 on the day.

photo credit: Ryan Fanshaw Photography via photopin cc

But there’s a dirty little secret that mobile commerce has been keeping. It’s slow — deadly slow.

Site monitoring and testing company Keynote tracks the speed and reliability of top U.S. e-commerce sites, and over the weekend things slowed down dramatically. Especially today, on Cyber Monday.

“The average page load time for a mobile retail site … on Cyber Monday is now slower than 18 seconds, or roughly twice as slow as normal,” Aaron Rudger, a mobile manager at Keynote, said in a statement.

Source: Keynote

Fastest mobile sites

That’s almost nine times slower than the average time on top e-commerce companies’ desktop sites: 2.27 seconds. And it’s an eternity while you’re standing there staring at your tiny screen. It’s something I’ve noticed personally even when it’s not Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and even when using fast LTE networks with an iPhone 5 or a Google/Samsung Nexus.

But there’s mobile, and there’s mobile.

Of that 16.3 percent of Black Friday commerce that came in over mobile, the lion’s share — 10 of those 16 percentage points — were purchases made on iPads. Only about a quarter of iPads are sold with cellular connectivity — most are Wi-Fi models. And only a very small fraction, about six percent, of iPad browsing sessions come over cellular networks.

All of which means that iPad numbers are very different from what we typically imagine when we think of “mobile commerce.” iPad-facilitated traffic and sales data gets lumped in with smartphones under the big tent of “mobile,” but the tablet experience of a large screen, beefy processor, and fast local Wi-Fi is very different from a tiny screen, over sometimes-jammed cellular networks, and a generally slower processor.

What that means is: mobile shopping on a phone isn’t exactly the best — or speediest — experience.

“This is quite detrimental and will certainly impact a customer’s experience negatively and can easily motivate a shopper to abandon a site altogether or go to a competitor’s mobile shopping site,” Rudger said.

The solution, according to Keynote, is better sites and better testing, especially testing under load.

Source: Keynote

Slowest mobile sites

photo credit: Michael W. May via photopin cc

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Amazon said tonight that it is hiring for 50,000 seasonal worker positions for the holiday shopping season.

The Seattle-based e-commerce company says it will hire the workers at its fulfillment centers (the warehouses that carry out orders from its web site).

“In addition to the thousands of people we’ve hired for full-time jobs this year, we’re proud to be adding more than 50,000 seasonal jobs this holiday,” said Dave Clark, vice president, global customer fulfillment at Amazon. “We’re hiring at our sites across the U.S. for talented individuals to help us deliver a great experience for our customers this holiday season. Temporary associates play a critical role in meeting increased customer demand during the holiday season, and we expect thousands of temporary associates will stay on in full-time positions.”

Amazon has more than 20,000 people working at 40 fulfillment centers around the U.S. It says it pays its full-time permanent employees 30 percent more than what traditional retail store employees earn, not counting stock grants that full-time employees earn. Over the past five years, those grants have added an average of 9 percent base pay per year.

Amazon launched Career Choice, a program designed to help employees with career choices. Applications are available online at http://www.amazonfulfillmentcareers.com.

[Image credit: mcall]

The online marketplace for pet food, pet toys, and everything but the pets themselves pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital in 1988, IPO’d in 2000, bought a Super Bowl ad in January of that year, and shuttered the company in November.

Perhaps the company was just 12 years early.

I’ve been seeing a lot of pitches for dog and cat product startups lately, including DoggyLoot, a daily deal site for chews, toys, and treats for dogs. The company says that 4 percent of pet products are sold online today, with a 12 percent annual growth rate.

With $2 million in venture funding from Sandbox Venture Fund, hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and several million in revenue in just its first year (which is probably more than Pets.com in all its ill-fated history) the company may just be proving that now is finally the time for pet sales online.

It helps that DoggyLoot is not focused on food, which is heavy and costly to ship. According to data the company assembled, more than three-quarters of dog owners have made online purchases, mostly of toys, medicines, and accessories or toys. Those are higher value and higher margin products which ship easily and efficiently.

The company put together an infographic showing the state of the industry, at least so far as dogs are concerned:

photo credit: Sebastián-Dario via photo pin cc

“We think we’re the next evolution of fast fashion,” Goldberg said when I spoke to him earlier this week.

I chatted with Goldberg just a few days ago to get the inside story on JustFab, which has rocketed out of nowhere to be legitimate competition for noted fashion labels such as H&M or Forever21.

“We’re building a new way for women to shop online,” says Goldberg, who’s forecasting $100 million in revenue this year. “We combine fashion curation and social commerce — it’s amazing.”

JustFab is not exactly a book-of-the-month club for fashion, but there are similarities. The company creates new and updated fashions at a furious rate, curated, selected, and designed by fashion celebrities and stylists. Women sign up at a monthly $39.95 to receive new items regularly, based on their preferences.

“There’s no obligation to purchase every month,” says Goldberg, “but … on average, our customers shop with us 20-25 times per year.”

Every month there are new collections — new “lookbooks,” as JustFab calls them. Sign up for the service and you might find six new shoes in styles and colors you like, or seven new bags.

Goldberg says that it’s like re-merchandizing a retail store dozens of times a year — that’s the “fast fashion” part. No traditional label or store replaces its styles so quickly.

The company owns its own fashion label and designs its products in-house, sourcing products in Asia. Inventory and logistics are always issues, says Goldberg, but not as much as you might think. The subscription model makes the business much more predictable.

So it’s an interesting business. But why is it growing at 500,000 users each month?

“JustFab is a very, very viral business — shoes are a very viral business,” says Goldberg. “Shoes to women are like cars and electronics to guys … they can’t stop talking about them.”

In fact, 25 percent of JustFab’s six million sign-ups are “socially influenced.” But a large portion are from paid online advertising and — in an unusual move for internet startups — traditional TV spots. In addition, JustFab is very dialed into the fashion scene and is visible in magazines like People and 17. Add it all up, and the company has created a very unique blend of a traditional category and an innovation company.

“We’re a hybrid between a technology company and a fashion company,” says Goldberg. “We track 15 million data points on our customers to get our recommendations right.”

Source: JustFab

Part of the JustFab new user sign-up quiz determining user preferences.

Now that the company has raised $76 million in funding from Rho Ventures and other participants, Goldberg has turned his sights overseas.

“We raised this round for aggressive international expansion,” he says. “We started an office in Berlin several months ago, and we’re opening in the UK in September.”

And that $100 million in annual revenue? Goldberg’s got his eye on half a billion by 2015.

“We think more of offline competition than online,” Goldberg said when asked who his biggest competition is. Labels such as Forever21, Zara, and H&M came to mind.

The market for women’s shoes and bags is worth $40 billion in Europe and North America.

All Goldberg wants — for now — is a little less than two percent.

Image credit: Subbotina Anna/ShutterStock

How are Amazon’s sales growing so dramatically — 30 to 40 percent quarterly for the last umpteen quarters — when even the big retailers are struggling to grow 1 to 2 percent? In record time, Amazon has taken on the Goliaths of retail yesteryear with their massive resources, nationwide store footprints and well-known brands, and turned them into isolated Davids.

In 17 short years, Amazon has grown to be the 12th largest US-based retailer, larger than even Macy’s or Staples.  Amazon’s 2011 online sales of $48 billion dwarf every competitor’s online sales, and are larger than the next ten online competitors combined including Staples.com, Apple.com, Walmart.com, Dell.com, OfficeDepot.com, QVC.com, Sears.com, Netflix, CDW, and Bestbuy.com.

What is driving Amazon’s amazing growth is a network effect, the likes of which have never been seen before in retail. For many customers Amazon is the one-stop shop where they start and end their shopping.

This suggests the question: how did it get that power?

Amazon’s incredible network effect has exponentially sped up, allowing it to enter new categories with ease thanks to a massive customer base of at least 160 million customers and tens of millions of items from thousands of retailers (and Amazon itself).  Amazon is indisputably winning the war for online market share. But this war is not just an online war.

Amazon’s wickedly effective loyalty program, Amazon Prime, has made it really easy to buy across product categories too. Netflix now faces a formidable foe with Amazon’s entry into video (conveniently bundled into Amazon Prime).  And the entire B2B sector is wondering about its fate with Amazon’s recent B2B launch of AmazonSupply.com offering 500,000 industrial and commercial items at launch.

For these diminished Davids, a trail of dead and struggling retailers in books and consumer electronics is just the beginning. And thus far, nary a retailer could stop formerly loyal consumers from leaving their stores.

With mobile devices entering into retail stores, the war has also become a physical store war which will affect retail survival.  Few retailers have the customer base and product selection to go up against Amazon alone.  Retailers have their backs against the walls trying to defend their higher cost structure and often higher prices against Amazon’s likely lower prices accessible on every smart-phone in the middle of their stores.

In this war for retailer survival, retailers can employ four stand-alone strategies to improve their odds:

1.       Offer exclusive products that aren’t easily found elsewhere – Retailers can’t just sell commoditized products and hope to be successful.  They need to sell custom products or unique products that are exclusive to them.  This will require retailers to vertically integrate and become product designers and not just product sellers.

2.       Add services that can’t be shipped in a box – Retailers that invest in services which customers value have a defensible proposition. As one example, pet retailers now offer in-store grooming, vet care, boarding and day care, all services that can’t be duplicated online.

3.       Retailers need to double-down on their digital focus and investment, not brand legacy. Whatever they’re doing now, it’s just not enough.  Retail CEOs spent far too much time on their legacy business of retail stores and not enough time on their future business of online and mobile retail.  Digital strategy cannot just be delegated to the “SVP of Digital” but rather needs to be part of a CEO’s day-job.

4.       Lead digitally, support physically – Retailers need to flip their mind-set from using websites to support stores, to using stores to empower websites to compete against Amazon (and all competitors).  Retail stores can be potent weapons in retailers’ business plans.  Hundreds/thousands of retail stores provide the proximity to customers that Amazon lacks despite dozens of fulfillment centers.  With buy online, fulfill from stores, online customers get next day gratification.  With buy online pick up in store today, online customers enjoy same day gratification, a superior option to Amazon’s delivery times.

And if any or all of the above stand-alone strategies aren’t good enough (and they likely aren’t), retailers need to find allies in the customer loyalty war.  Taking a historical perspective that retailers should heed: great wars in history are rarely won alone, but rather with the help of allies.  There’s no reason to attack each other when they share a common foe. In an alliance, they have a fighting chance of survival.

Retailers should join a network solution like ShopRunner – a growing consortium of over 60 retailers harnessing that alliance including ToysRUs, PetSmart, American Eagle, Sports Authority, Newegg and Blue Nile who are cooperating to provide a wide product assortment to ShopRunner members driving sales across the network.  ShopRunner’s members are motivated to buy across the coalition’s websites with unlimited free 2 day shipping and return shipping, and across retailers’ stores with the option to pick up packages at designated ShopRunner PickupPoint locations.  As such, ShopRunner members end up buying more from ShopRunner participating retailers (which of course, don’t include Amazon).

Fiona Dias is the Chief Strategy Officer at Shoprunner and was formerly the head of e-commerce at Circuit City.

Photo via Robert Scoble/Flickr

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Video e-commerce startup Joyus announced Monday that it has raised $7.9 million in a bid to make video a more powerful tool in online commerce. Along with the funding announcement, the company’s site opens today for an invite-only public beta with a focus on high-end women’s products.

Headed by former Google executive Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, the company seeks to work with well-known brands to create premium videos. These videos will be embeddable anywhere around the web and will include a buy button and analytics functions.

“We’re building a video platform that is entirely based around buying a product rather than entertaining a viewer,” Singh Cassidy told VentureBeat. “This is a way to make conversion to sales higher, and brands are interested in that.”

Accel Partners and Harrison Metal are the lead investors for this funding round, with smaller investments coming from Wal-Mart executives Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman and CurrentTV’s Joel Hyatt. Singh Cassidy left Google to work for Accel in 2009, so its no suprise the company was first on her list when she was looking for significant funding.

Another major component of Joyus videos are analytics. Joyus says it offers its brand partners better ways to find out how their customers are responding and engaging with videos. One early measurement the company highlights is an optimal video length between 2:30 and 3:30 minutes to get a customer to engage.

So far, Joyus has only worked with smaller Internet commerce sites, including Azalea Boutique, Prtty Peaushun and ModCloth.

“The Joyus platform allows us to reach a broader audience of passionate, fashion savvy women with our new, in-season inventory,” said Catherine Chow of Azalea Boutique, in a statement. “We see video on Joyus being an exciting new component of our online marketing strategy.”

No major brands have been announced yet for Joyus, but Singh Cassidy said the company will reveal bigger partners in the fall.

Singh Cassidy said she sees no direct competitor in the online space right now. She suggests TV home shopping is the closest thing that exists to Joyus. “Channels like HSN and AVC are the most direct comparisons, but they are on a closed platform,” she said.

I asked Singh Cassidy whether YouTube videos, which already feature ways to link products to video, covered the space Joyus intends to reach. She said other companies featured elements similar to Joyus’, but no single company offered as comprehensive a tool set for video-based commerce.

“Joyus mixes commerce, social, and analytics into a video platform like no other company,” Singh Cassidy said.

We’ll have to wait for the fall to see if Joyus can rustle up big-name clients and see how the product evolves.

Do you think Joyus can change or improve video-based online commerce?

Market researcher comScore said that Free Shipping Day generated $942 million in online sales, up 61 percent from a year earlier. The numbers so far show that this season has been the busiest ever for online retail sales. That’s both a good leading economic indicator for the overall economy, as well as an indicator that online sales are taking market share away from physical retail stores. It shows that online retailers are figuring out how to promote their goods so that consumers make their last minute purchases online instead of in crowded malls.

Online shopping has been strong all season. Free Shipping Day (when 1,500 online merchants offered free shipping) was eclipsed by Cyber Monday (Nov. 29), which saw sales of $1.028 billion, and by Green Monday (Dec. 13), at $954 million. Year to date, the first 47 days of the November-December shopping season generated $27.46 billion in sales, up 12 percent from a year ago. Cyber Monday is now expected to become the busiest shopping day of the year; that’s a first for the first Monday after Thanksgiving.

In the most recent week, online sales were $5.50 billion, up 14 percent from a year ago. Four days this season have surpassed $900 million in sales. Free Shipping Day occurs later in the season each year as retailers get more efficient at shipping goods. At least half the transactions of the past five weeks have used free shipping, said Gian Falconi, chairman of comScore. Free shipping has enabled consumers to shop longer and get better deals before they finally decide to place online orders.

For the season, computer hardware is the top-growth category, with sales up 25 percent compared to last year. Purchases of Apple iPads, eBook readers, and laptops drove much of the growth. Low pricing on flat-panel TVs continues to drive sales in consumer electronics, which grew 22 percent. Books and magazine sales were up 21 percent, computer software was up 16 percent, and toys were up 15 percent.

[photo credit: shopsland]

In the first 43 days of the November-December shopping season, consumers have spent $23.82 billion online in the U.S., according to market researcher comScore. That’s up 12 percent from the same period a year ago. For the week ending Dec. 12, spending was $5.31 billion, up 12 percent. And on Monday Dec. 13, online sales were $954 million, up 12 percent from a year ago. Green Monday is the day when online sales typically peak, as after this date many online retailers can’t guarantee they can ship goods for arrival before Christmas. But this year, retailers are guaranteeing on-time delivery and free shipping for sales through Dec. 17.

Most of the big shopping days have been strong this year, with Thanksgiving Day sales up 28 percent, Black Friday (Nov. 26) sales up 9 percent, and Cyber Monday (Nov. 29) sales up 16 percent. Green Monday was the second-heaviest online spending day on record, behind Cyber Monday, which topped $1 billion, said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore. The rest of this week should see an online shopping frenzy, as two-thirds of consumers still haven’t finished their holiday shopping, comScore said.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that physical retail sales rose 0.8 percent in November from a month before, reaching their highest level since 2007. Sales are up 7.8 percent for the three months ending in November. The surge pushed stocks to a new two-year high.

[Top photo: Reuters]

Privalia, which already holds majority market share in Italy, Mexico, Brazil and Spain, says it intends to use the funding to tackle new markets after its sales jumped 158 percent over the first half of 2010.

The latest round of fund-raising far outpaces Privalia’s initial four rounds of funding, which had netted the company only $21 million over the last four years. The credit crunch and increasingly savvy fahionistas have given a boost to the site — as international shoppers turn to web retailers as a way to find the latest styles at the lowest prices.

Targeting the rapidly growing markets of Brazil, which ecommerce tracker eBit projects has 18 million online shoppers at the end of 2009, and Mexico, where Privalia saw sales leap 300 percent year-over-year, is a smart move for the 5-million member club.

Privalia said the money would now help it lock down its market leadership in Latin America, while simultaneously allowing it to grow through mergers and acquisition in the region. Founders Lucas Carné and José-Manuel Villanueva have long said they would be looking abroad when the group eventually expanded — presumably in Argentina and Colombia — and this considerable chunk of funding should certainly lend them the international cachet to do so.

Venture capital firms General Atlantic and Index Ventures joined current shareholders Highland Partners, Nauta Capital and Caixa Capital in backing the Barcelona-based fashion brand club. Highland currently has $3 billion invested in 200 companies and explained to VentureBeat earlier this week why VC in Europe is of particular interest right now.

Photo via Chris Willis

Gemvara

Gemvara, previously Paragon Lake, has continued over the last year to move toward selling directly from its website, but was still working with jewelry stores (50 in total) in an attempt to create ongoing relationships with the sellers and reach customers already in the market for jewelry.

I asked founder and chief executive Matt Lauzon why Gemvara has now decided to stop working with jewelry stores completely. He said the company believes the real opportunity for customized jewelry is online and that the amount of success the company has seen in such a short time frame is the validation.

Since selling online, Gemvara has seen quicker growth than in stores. The company claims to have seen a 47% increase in revenue from July to August and is averaging $1,000 per sale. Lauzon said the company’s main demographic is women that are 30 plus and buying 2 to 5 pieces per visit. Those pieces range from $200 to $12,000.

Gemvara has landed a second round of funding for $5.2 million, and the company wants to spend that online, not in stores. Paragon Lake spent much of its first round of funding in jewelry stores with limited success.

Lauzon also mentioned customer care as a large reason for continued growth. Something customers may not have been receiving in stores with jewelers. Gemvara appears to have gone the extra mile to differentiate itself from competitors like industry giant Blue Nile. Over the past few months, the company has rolled out live online chat as well as email and phone support. Customer service is available 7 days a week, and apparently around 50% of customers speak to a representative before buying, says Lauzon — who also mentioned that return rates are less than 1%.

The Lexington, Mass. company, founded in 2008, has raised two rounds of funding totaling $11 million from Highland Capital Partners and Canaan Partners.