Shopping site Sneakpeeq raises $2.67M

Social daily deals and shopping website Sneakpeeq announced Friday is has raised $2.67 million in funding.

Sneakpeeq is attempting to replicate the shopping experience you’d have in a physical store. What type of experience? Well, think about walking into a fancy shop, picking an item off the shelf, turning it over, and checking the price tag. Sneakpeeq recreates that by, for example, making you click a “peeq” button to see a price rather than blatantly … Continue Reading

Shopkick is on a mobile shopping tear with 3M users, over 1B offers viewed

Shopkick, the app that lets you earn rewards and deals simply by walking into a retail store, is kicking butt.

The company has pulled in over 3 million active users since launching over a year ago, it said today. And over a billion of its in-app deals and offers have been viewed.

Shopkick’s app communicates with a patent-pending device in stores, letting customers earn rewards simply by strolling into a store and looking at products. … Continue Reading

Amazon acquires the talented team at shopping startup Quorus

Amazon has bought Quorus, a shopping startup focusing on bringing social interactions and conversations into e-commerce. The deal seems to have been completed in November 2011.

The acquisition, which may be a talent grab, brings Quorus co-founders Michael Dougherty (pictured) and Sameer Rayachoti into the Amazon fold.

Currently, all Quorus employees are now working at Amazon, we’ve learned from an anonymous source with close ties to the deal.

While the team can’t comment on what … Continue Reading

Holiday shopping season: Kmart loses, Amazon wins (infographic)

This holiday shopping season produced winners and losers for retailers, the entertainment industry and restaurants. Some companies — including Amazon and Walmart — recorded high sales numbers and increased customer satisfaction. Others didn’t fare as well.

With record-high Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales, online retailers came out as winners this year. The music industry, especially because of the sales of holiday music, had a strong season as well. Given that many people flock to … Continue Reading

What recession? Holiday shopping online finishes at a record $35.3B

Online holiday shopping for 2011 finished at an all-time high of $35.3 billion, up 15 percent from last year’s sales figures.

According to comScore, which tracked online consumer spending between November 1 and the week beginning December 25, year-over-year sales figures for online retailers were higher for every single week for the final 56 holiday shopping days of 2011.

“Holiday e-commerce spending has remained strong throughout the season,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni in a … Continue Reading

Flash sales site Fab.com racks up $40M, now at 1.2M members

Fab.com, the flash sales site for design-oriented products, is seeing its pivot pay off in a big way.

The company, which initially started out as Fabulis, a social network for gay men, announced yesterday that it has raised $40 million in a second round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Additionally, Fab says it has grown by a 300,000 new members in the past two months, with a subscriber base of 1.2 million today. In … Continue Reading

FindTheBest upgrades with even more visual comparisons of almost everything

FindTheBest, an information site that lets shoppers compare everything from apartments to dogs to venture capitalists, is unveiling a new design.

The new look, created by design firm KKLD, aims to cut through the sometimes cluttered and text-heavy datasets that are FindTheBest’s bread and butter.

“Like any product, you keep adding new features and new features and it winds up looking like Frankenstein over time,” said founder Kevin O’Connor in an interview at VentureBeat’s offices. … Continue Reading

Cyber Monday? It was more like Mobile Monday, according to eBay & PayPal

If the name “Cyber Monday” makes you think of your shameful AIM exploits in the late ’90s, a new trend may make your day.

According to data from eBay, PayPal, IBM and GSI Commerce, mobile activity spiked yesterday as early holiday shopping took off.

Traditionally, the Monday after Thanksgiving has been a heyday for online retailers. But with more and more consumers accessing the web from smartphones and tablets, a fair amount of Cyber Monday … Continue Reading

Not content to wait for Black Friday, mobile shoppers spent big on Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Day 2011 will go down as a day when many of you opted to indulge in more than just an extra helping of turkey. A growing number of shoppers opened up their mobile wallets for online deals too good to pass up.

The U.S. holiday saw a 511 percent jump in global mobile payment volume from Thanksgiving 2010, with a majority of folks in the U.S. shopping via mobile between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. … Continue Reading

Mapping Black Friday insanity on Twitter (infographic)

Now that the majority of you have stuffed your bellies with multiple helpings of a delicious Thanksgiving meal, it’s inevitably time to start scoping out deals for Black Friday.

Of course there are plenty of people who don’t care much for Black Friday –  avoiding it at all cost due to the massive crowds. However, last year, at least 212 million shoppers did participate to generate an estimated $45 billion in sales.

To find out … Continue Reading

Online holiday shopping jumps 14 percent

Thousands of people are taking to the streets to protest the sad state of the economy, but online, it appears that business is booming.

Online shoppers are spending more than ever, dropping $9.67 billion between Nov. 1 and Nov. 20, according to a new comScore report. That’s a 14 percent increase over the same period last year.

By the time the dust settles at the end of December, comScore, predicts that online shopping will be … Continue Reading

Shopkick partners with Visa to give customers more incentive to shop at a physical store

Mobile rewards startup Shopkick has partnered with credit giant Visa to incentivize purchases made within a brick and mortar retail store, the companies announced today.

Customers who shop at a handful of partnering stores now have the ability to accumulate “Kicks” (reward points) when they use their Visa card. To participate, users need to download the Shopkick Android or iPhone app and link it to their Visa accounts. Participating stores include Toys “R” Us, American … Continue Reading

Decide’s new iPhone app will make you a Black Friday ninja

Should you buy that new digital camera at Best Buy, or order it on Amazon? Or should you hold off altogether for a new model?

Decide has been answering those sorts of questions with its website for the past few months, but today the site has finally gone mobile with the launch of its free iPhone app. With the ability to compare consumer electronics prices across nearby stores and the web, as well suggestions on … Continue Reading

Old Navy doles out deals to Shopkick app users

Discount shoppers, rejoice. Mobile shopping startup Shopkick has added Old Navy, a Gap Inc. brand, to its arsenal of retail partners, the company announced Tuesday.

With the Shopkick iPhone or Android app, you earn rewards points, called “kicks,” by just walking into any one the startup’s partner stores — no purchase necessary. These can be redeemed for special offers and deals. Participating retailers are provided with a small hardware box capable of verifying an application … Continue Reading

Centzy crowdsources price info for local comparison shopping

New York City-based Centzy makes it easy for you to find the best place to get that haircut you’ve been putting off. And unlike Yelp, it has accurate pricing about local companies to let you make a fully informed decision.

The company was a part of NYC’s Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator’s first class, which presented on stage during ERA’s demo day today.

Centzy says less than 25 percent of local service businesses put their prices online, … Continue Reading

Google dresses up its Product Search page

Google launched a new version of its Product Search page today that’s far more visually driven than any of its other search pages.

With the new Product Search site, it seems like Google has finally realized that retail store windows displays are an effective means of selling products.

The visuals came from Boutiques.com, a site focused on shopping for women that was created by the team behind Google-acquired site Like.com. Google plans to shut down … Continue Reading

Demo: Compare store inventories in a flash with Wantlet

Wantlet is a new social shopping site that lets consumers compare product listings across several retail stores.

The service, which launched today at the Demo Fall 2011 conference, helps consumers who are looking to purchase something compare prices and find the exact model they want. That can range from finding the right color laptop to a specific kind of camera. Users compare prices and model types at nearby retail stores without having to drive to … Continue Reading

Decide.com knows precisely when you should buy a new phone

Decide.com, a service that tracks consumer electronics prices and release dates to let you buy without regret, now also tracks mobile phones, the company announced today.

Additionally, the site now makes it easy for you to follow the multitude of iPhone 5 rumors floating around the web with a newly launched Twitter account, @d_iphone, featuring information culled from hundreds of sources.

“Like wristwatches a generation ago, mobile phones are the gadget status symbol of our … Continue Reading

Former DoubleClick team raises $6M for comparison-shopping engine

DoubleClick cofounder Kevin O’Connor has a new startup, FindTheBest, aimed at helping you compare everything from air purifiers to venture capitalists.

Now, with a $6 million funding round from Kleiner Perkins that closed Tuesday, FindTheBest should be in a good position to build out its “data driven content platform,” which combines computer-driven semantic analysis with human-powered tagging to build data sets quickly and efficiently.

“‘Human’ is dirty — it’s not scalable,” O’Conner (above, left) said … Continue Reading

Ideeli raises $41 million for members-only social shopping

New York-based Ideeli, a members-only shopping community — known commonly as a “Flash sales” site — has raised $41 million in its third round of funding.

The site, which has over 4 million members, offers limited-time offers on apparel, accessories, shoes, and jewellery, intended to target men, women and children. Starting at 11am each day, sales last for 36 hours or until sold out, and have featured prominent brands such as Calvin Klein, D&G, French … Continue Reading