July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Shopping for clothes online can easily turn into a downward spiral of frustration. “Buying engine” TheFind has unveiled its new iPad app that seeks to turn e-commerce into pleasant shopping experience.

TheFind was founded in 2005 back in the early days of e-commerce. It applies machine learning and semantic search to shopping, crawling the web, and collecting information on over 500 million products from 500,000 stores. Shoppers enter search terms and filters, and the system will find what you’re looking for and provide product comparisons. Sources like Amazon and Google feature content based on advertising, while e-commerce sites like Fab, Polyvore, Wanelo, and Zazzle rely on social activity to make recommendations. TheFind’s goal is to help shoppers find exactly what they are looking for, along with relevant discounts.

TheFind gets 18 million unique visitors a month. Director of corporate communications Usher Lieberman said in an interview with VentureBeat that 30 percent of TheFind’s traffic is now mobile, and its iPad traffic has grown by more than 250 percent in the last year. He said that the iPad will become the device that people use to shop but there are no apps yet that make the most of this opportunity.

“An app like this will be destructive in e-commerce,” Lieberman said. “Tablet shopping has exploded, but shopping in the browser just isn’t going to cut it. Our app can fundamentally provide a better experience by cutting across all stores with personalized search, making check out eas, and storing your information. We want this iPad app to become the de-facto starting point for shopping and, ultimately, a daily habit.”

EMarketer found that global e-commerce sales topped $1 trillion in 2012, and the numbers are continuing to rise. Mobile commerce is an important part of this trend. Gartner predicted that by 2015 more tablets will be sold than PCs, and Bank of America forecasted that American and European shoppers will spend $67.1 billion on smartphone and tablet purchases in 2015. Despite this momentum, a few key obstacles hold back mobile commerce. Many retailers do not offer sites optimized for tablets, and some find it annoying.

TheFind put a lot of focus into a creating a user-friendly, secure, and seamless checkout process within the app to create an overall experience that encourages browsers to buy. Behind the scenes, natural language processing technology helps to identify and cluster products so you only receive relevant results. By combining metadata about each product with your own preferences and social graph, TheFind could ultimately show you things you want, without even knowing you wanted them.

TheFind is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has raised a total of $26 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Cambrian Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Coupons may not be sexy, but IPOs are.

RetailMeNot, “the world’s largest digital coupon marketplace,” filed for a proposed initial public offering. The proposed maximum aggregate offering price is $230 million, and the stock will be listed on the NASDAQ as “SALE.”

In February, RetailMeNot announced that it crossed the 1 billion visits threshold since the site launched in 2006. The marketplace features coupons from over 60,000 retailers and companies, and it has contracts with more than 10,000 retailers. RetailMeNot brought in $113.4 million in net revenue in 2012 and in the first quarter of 2013 alone generated $406 million. Its Coupons app has been downloaded more than 3 million times.

RetailMeNot features digital coupons across a range of product categories. The discounts are accessible through web and mobile applications and consumers can easily search for, and redeem relevant offers for online and in-store purchases. Brands can use RetailMeNot’s channel to reach and engage consumers, and the business is built on a pay-for-performance model.

“We believe our marketplace benefits from network effects. As more consumers use our marketplace, we are better able to obtain high quality digital coupons from retailers and brands, which in turn attracts a larger consumer audience,” the company  said in its S-1 filing. “We seek to reinforce our position as the leading digital coupon destination by continuing to increase consumer traffic and growing the breadth and depth of our digital coupons, as well as our retailer and brand relationships.”

The company is growing fast. Retailers and brands are always looking for ways to attract consumers and encourage them to spend, and consumers are always looking to save money. A January article by eMarketer estimated that 48 percent of U.S. adult Internet users redeemed a digital coupon for online or offline shopping the past year.

By going public, RetailMeNot intends to increase traffic and monetization, growth depth of paid relationships with retailers, invest in technology and innovation, expand internationally, and pursue strategic acquisitions.

Austin company WhaleShark Media acquired Australian RetailMeNot in 2010. WhaleShark Media has raised $300 million to date and assumed the name of RetailMeNot. In 2011, the company started on acquisition spree and scooped up VoucherCodes.co.uk as well as other local coupon sites including deals com in Germany, bone-de-reduction and Poulpeo in France, and most recently, actiepagina.nl in the Netherlands.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Neighborhood boutiques thrive on foot traffic, but in today’s world, a digital presence is increasingly important for survival.

Boutiika is a startup that connects online shoppers to clothing available in local stores. Today the startup announced that it has expanded into three more cities, has more than 300 retailers available on the site, and added in a slew of new features.

Cities like New York and San Francisco are brimming with funky, unique local stores, but learning what clothing items and brands are in these stores at any given time is difficult without making an actual visit. Boutiika helps local store owners publicize their wares online. Users can search by specific stores and brands, new arrivals, and specific categories such as eco-friendly to see what is currently in stock.

Boutiika has updated the platform with a “gold dress” feature where shoppers can hold an item to try on in-store. It is also launching a same day delivery service in San Francisco called Dash by Boutiika. If you need a specific dress or a last-minute gift fast but can’t hit your favorite shops, Boutiika will help get it to you within hours. Major retailers like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and even Google are all experimenting with same-day delivery models to get an edge in the competitive e-commerce space. Boutiika wants to bring this degree of immediacy and convenience to small, local stores.

“Boutique retailers crave foot traffic to their stores and local customers who will come back again,” founder Ruchika Kumar said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Our local commerce platform helps them show off everything they have in store and attract local customers. Think OpenTable — but for fashion.”

Boutiika grew out of Kumar’s idea to develop a directory of local boutiques. She said her friends weren’t interested in buying from expensive designer stores or big-box retailers — they wanted to patronize local gems. But it was challenging to do this online or on mobile devices. At the same time, neighborhood boutiques are starved for foot traffic and struggle to reach smartphone users. The idea proved popular with store owners and Boutiika was born in July. The company is dedicated to putting customers in boutiques in the real world rather than helping them establish a full-fledged e-commerce platform like competitors Shoptiques and Farfetch.

Kumar said there are five reasons why e-commerce will never replace local commerce. People still want to try on clothes before buying. Fit matters. Secondly, consumers still want to touch, feel, and see items, and they still enjoy the sensory experience of shopping. Going out shopping is also a fun activity for many people — a social endeavor, hobby, or escape that you can’t get online. People also appreciate the instant gratification of buying something in store and the personal attention and expertise of sales associates.

The expansion and updates are all intended to make brick-and-mortar retail more efficient, convenient, and Internet-savvy, while maintaining the strengths and joy and in-store shopping. Boutiika is now active in Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle.

Image credit: Boutiika

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

For many of us, shopping is about desire and the quest for products to fall in love with. Wanelo released the third version of its mobile application today to make online shopping a pleasurable and personal experience “for everyone.”

Wanelo is a social shopping app that has a community of eight million dedicated users. People collect items that they “want, need, or love” to save and share on their profile, so it’s similar to Pinterest.  Unlike Pinterest, Wanelo is intended to drive e-commerce. Clicking an image prompts you to save the item or redirects you where you can buy it. You can follow brands, designers, and stores that you love as well as other Wanelo community members (or build up a following of your own).

This makes Wanelo is a potential goldmine for things like kitschy home goods and inexpensive, on-trend apparel.

“E-commerce is exploding, yet the market has remained primitive,” said founder Deena Varshavskaya in an interview. “We make sense of the world through the people around us, and we have a social network for every basic human need except shopping. When we look at a piece of content, we want to know who created it, who likes or hates it, who uses it, and so on.

“That’s what Wanelo is building.”

Rather than ad-retargeting or recommendation engines, Wanelo uses social networking to find products you may like. Every member has an activity feed, and last year Wanelo introduced a trending feature that reigned in its “first wave of success.” The latest version puts the personalized feed at the forefront of the user experience, so opening up Wanelo instantly provides a variety of products from sources curated by the user, making it “even more dangerous for getting lost.”

The system includes products from over 200,000 stores, including major retailers like Urban Outiftters and Nasty Gal as well as small independent shops like Etsy sellers. The more stores and people you follow, the “smarter” your feed gets. Users are spending an average of 50 minutes per day on Wanelo, and over five million products are saved eight million times a day.

At a recent media dinner that Wanelo hosted, the company’s investors spoke about how significant the traction, growth, and levels of engagement are for the startup, but also for the world of e-commerce. Varshavskaya said Wanelo’s mission is to “democratize and transform the world’s commerce by reorganizing shopping around people.”

There are millions upon millions of products for sale on the Internet and they are difficult to search through. Wanelo is building a “meta-layer” on top of e-commerce to improve the process of finding stuff to want, need, and love. Wanelo’s investors, which include Floodgate, First Round Capital, Naval Ravikant of Angel List, and Forerunner Ventures, see this as the future of shopping.

Wanelo is based in San Francisco and has raised $3 million.

Photo Credit: Wanelo

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Buying clothes online can be a frustrating and difficult process, and it could take nothing short of technology built on computational geometry and virtual reality to improve it.

PhiSix launched its 3D simulation solution today that allows people to virtually try-on clothing before hitting “buy.”

Founders Jon Su and Jatin Chhugani earned Ph.Ds in computer science from Stanford and Johns Hopkins, respectively. Both men felt the pain of shopping online and rather than just dealing with uncertainty and returns (like most of us), they decided to leverage their expertise to digitalize one of the most important steps of shopping

“Despite all of the advancements we have seen in the past 10 years, we are really at the very beginning of apparel e-commerce,” said founder Jon Su to VentureBeat. “It would be great if we could purchase our clothes online without any doubts, but we really can’t at this point because it is too hard to find the right fit. Our goal with PhiSix is to change this.”

The proprietary technology digitizes articles of clothing from a two-dimensional photograph. Users provide basic information about their bodies and measurements and the engine will drape the 3D garment on an avatar using a physics-based simulation. From there, consumers can look at a 360 degree view, watch the clothing on a simulated catwalk, and check out a virtual fitting room. E-commerce retailers can integrate the technology into their sites with one line of code in an effort to improve conversion rates, drive sales, and cut down on returns.

Su’s background is in physics-based animation and cloth simulation, and Chhugani’s expertise is in interactive computer graphics, virtual reality, computational geometry, and high-performance computation. Together, they have developed advanced technology that maintains high visual quality, as well as customization, and scaleability. Competitors include Fites.me, True Fit, Clothes Horse, Metail, and Styku, but Su said PhiSix is better than its rivals because it can digitize and simulate garments 10 times more rapidly at prices three to five times lower than its competitors.

While e-commerce is growing, it is still dwarfed by brick-and-mortar retail, and abandoned online shopping carts are common. Part of this is due to consumer uncertainty about fit and hesitancy to buy something before trying it on. PhiSix seeks to bridge this gap between the online and offline world by creating a virtual fitting room experience. However, as with many fashion/apparel startups, success doesn’t only hedge on technology. It also requires understanding the personal and often illogical process of selecting and sampling clothing.

No matter how advanced the engine or how realistic the avatars, it may take more than 3D modeling to encourage someone to buy a pair of skinny jeans online.

During initial testing, PhiSix has digitized over 10,000 garments and over 6,000 user avatars have been created. The company is working with clients like the Tie Society and Le Tote as well as “large international e-commerce retailers,” and the tech is being used at “several major Hollywood studios.” PhiSix was founded in 2012 and the six employees are based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

NEW YORK — Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley was on the defensive again today, responding yet again to the persistent misunderstanding that his company doesn’t know how it’s going to make money.

“A lot of folks think we aren’t generating revenue or that we don’t care about revenue. They’re wrong,” Crowley said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup conference here, this morning. ”This past March was our highest-generating revenue month so far. We expect to see that going forward.”

In summary: Foursquare is making money, but no one actually believes it.

Foursquare’s plight contrasts strongly with the success of shopping app Shopkick, which is pulling in cash in ways that most location-based mobile apps — including Foursquare — have so far been unable to. The app, which rewards people for shopping in certain stores, helped Shopkick’s partners make $200 million last year. More notably, it also allowed Shopkick to report its first profitable quarter late last year.

“It seems almost embarrassing to make money nowadays,” Shopkick CEO Cyriac Roeding told me.

While Shopkick’s brick-and-mortar focus means that it’s tied the physical world, most of its conceptual strength comes from the world of online advertising. Similar to the average Google search (which Google sells advertising space against) Shopkick is all about measuring intent: If you walk in a store and open up the app, chances are you’re looking to buy something.

This screenshot explains a lot of Foursquare’s current problems.

“We are not a check-in app or a social app. We’re a shopping app. Everyone who’s using Shopkick is by definition interested in shopping. And that’s inherently monetizable,” Roeding said.

“Monetize” is, of course, the key word here: If Shopkick’s data prove that it consistently brings in customers who make purchases, retailers are going to be more likely to use it.

Foursquare, in contrast, is a lot of things. It’s a location app, but it’s a social app, too. It’s also a game and, most recently, a discovery app. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a lot of things to lot of people, Foursquare’s problem is that exactly none of that is what’s making it any money.

To understand the bind that Foursquare constantly finds itself in, consider the screenshot to the right, which shows what happens when a big chain like Taco Bell pays Foursquare to promote its locations. Most people don’t open up the Foursquare app to find a local chain restaurant —  they do so because they’re looking for somewhere new and different to go.

The problem is that those “new and different” local spots aren’t at all the companies that are going to pay Foursquare the money it needs to grow. Foursquare, then, is caught between two desires: those of its users and those of its partners.

Shopkick, in contrast, combines the desires of customer and company: When Shopkick users open up the app, they want to shop — and brands and retailers obviously have lots of things to sell them. It’s an ideal merger of inclinations.

The lesson here for Foursquare is simple in theory, but woefully difficult in execution: If Crowley really wants to get the critics off his back, he has to prove that he can consistently lure in partner companies (and $$$) while not alienating all of Foursquare’s users — many of whom who are recently revisiting the app.

As with most things, that’s easier said than done.

Photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat; Foursquare screenshot via Rocky Agrawal

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Honey doesn’t just make tea better, it also helps you save money on shopping.

Honey is a Chrome extension that surfs the web for discounts when you are checking out of an online store. Today, the startup announced it has closed a seed round of an undisclosed six-figure amount from angel investors.

In the days of yore, budget-conscious shoppers would go through newspapers to clip coupons before taking a trip to the store. People are buying online now more than ever; however, Hudson said this shift is both “a blessing and a curse” for consumers, as “the convenience of online shopping is accompanied by the paradox of choice.” The Internet has hundreds of thousands of merchants selling an endless array of products. Prices fluctuate, and there is always the lingering fear, once you hit checkout, that you could have held out for a better deal.

Honey’s mission is to eliminate this fear by helping you find the best deal on a product you have selected.

“Honey was created to solve a problem that we have all been dealing with for the past 10-15 years,” said founder Ryan Hudson in an email. “Honey is unique because of its design philosophy — the product was designed to add value when users need it most. We loved the idea of creating a shopping companion that helped you only when you needed it, which is very different than most plug-ins, which are often ever-present.”

Most e-checkouts ask users if they have a promo code. More often than not, the answer is no. Honey places a “Find Savings” button on the checkout page of hundreds of online shops. Clicking on the button will automatically find and apply coupons, without redirecting you away from the original site. It is coupon clipping for the Internet era.

Hudson earned his MBA from MIT and formerly worked as a venture capitalist. His cofounder, George Ruan, has worked for five startups, three which had exits. They “accidentally” launched Honey around Thanksgiving, after someone they hired to help bug test the technology posted it on Reddit. Honey now has over 200,000 users and works with over 100 sites, including big brands like Amazon.com, BestBuy, Macy’s, Lowes, Target, and Walgreens.

Honey is by no means the only coupon clipping tool out there. Google recently announced Zavers, a digital coupon based on your phone number,  as well as Coupons at Checkout, which works in multiple browsers and 100,000 online retailers, and there are others like RetailMeNot, Coupon Tweet, Coupon Gravy, and KT Coupon that offer some variation on the same principal. With so much saturation, Honey has a battle ahead of it to catch customers, retail partners, and investors.

Honey is based in Pasadena, California and has 10 employees, including an engineering team with experience working at Apple and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Coupons are almost as cool as rockets. Almost.

Photo Credit: Honey

While some may still balk at entering credit card information to buy something on a smartphone, it seems the fashion community has taken to it like a pair of peep-toes and a good pedi.

Poshmark, the used-fashion mobile marketplace, says people are uploading $1 million in inventory each day, and launched an iPad app to take advantage of the growth.

“Since the listings will be viewed in a larger format and browsing becomes more seamless, we do expect to see Poshmarkers making faster purchases and more of them,” said Manish Chandra, founder and chief executive of Poshmark, in an email to VentureBeat.

Poshmark allows anyone to upload listing of various fashion items for sale. This includes worn items to items that are still new with tags. The app focuses on photos and curates the listings into “Posh parties,” or themed mobile “events” where people can contribute their items in hopes of striking a deal with a more targeted buyer.

Chandra explained that in the last 100 days alone, the app has grown ten times in terms of its run rate in the last three months and is looking toward having $350 million in inventory uploaded this year alone. At the end of last year, the company was only projecting a $100 million run rate.

Because of how photo-focused the app is, I am surprised that it took Poshmark this long to come out with an iPad app. The Menlo Park-based company was launched in 2011 and was originally only available on the iPhone. Now, the company has expanded to the Web, though you cannot attend posh parties on the website.

“We spent a lot of time carefully redesigning some of the most-popular sections of the Poshmark iPhone app in order to maximize the iPad’s screen, including the main news feed, our Posh Party feed, and user profiles,” said Chandra.

With the iPad app also comes the new ability to search for items by size — a desperately needed feature in an app that truly does have thousands of submissions to weed through.

Poshmark recently received a $12 million round of funding from Menlo Park Ventures, and will likely put more fund and energy into updating the app after receiving user feedback. We can also expect to see Poshmark come to Android soon, which will likely create the infrastructure that could make it an international business.

Images via Poshmark

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Chances are good that you’re guilty of showrooming, or scoping out a product in a physical retail store before buying it online (likely at a significant discount). Now a new study from the location analytics company Placed shows which retailers are most at risk for showrooming from Amazon customers — and the results might surprise you.

In “Aisle to Amazon: How Amazon is impacting brick-and-mortar retailers,” Placed found that showrooming affects Bed Bath & Beyond, Petsmart, and Toys “R” Us more than other retailers typically associated with the phenomenon, like Best Buy and Target.

The study is based on 14,925 survey responses in the U.S., coupled with nearly 1 billion location data points measured by Placed across the country in January. With the proliferation of smartphones, price-matching apps, and other tools, showrooming is one of the biggest concerns for traditional retailers.

“Amazon was the clear winner in e-commerce 1.0, and unless brick-and-mortar retailers shift from reactive to proactive, Amazon will win e-commerce 2.0 on the backs of offline retailers,” said David Shim, Placed’s founder and chief executive. “All the attention to date has been on Target and Best Buy as the early victims of showrooming, but significantly more retailers are at risk. Retailers need to know that it’s not a question of if or when showrooming will impact their business, as an aisle to Amazon is already in their store.”

As you can see from the chart, Bed Bath & Beyond faced a 27 percent higher risk of showrooming than the average, while Petsmart had a 25 percent risk. In comparison, showroomers were only 20 percent more likely to visit Best Buy and 15 percent more likely to visit Target.

Both Best Buy and Target recently announced that they would match prices from online stores, a clear sign that they’re ready to take on the issue of showroomers. Placed’s study shows that plenty of other retailers will need to follow in their footsteps.

Here are a few other intriguing details from the report:

• Users of Amazon’s Price Check app were 53 percent more likely to visit T.J. Maxx than the average consumer and 49 percent more likely to visit Costco.
• Wal-Mart was relatively safe from showroomers — they were 10 percent to 15 percent less likely to visit Wal-Mart, compared to Target and Best Buy.
• At the same time, Wal-Mart is the most popular destination for Amazon customers (not just showroomers); 25.2 percent of Amazon customers surveyed visited a Wal-Mart store in January. Target was a distant second at just 10.7 percent of Amazon customers.

Photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Greek mathematician Euclid understood the importance of numbers, as does a modern day startup by the same name.

Euclid has raised $17.3 million in its second round of funding to bring data analytics to physical retailers. Euclid gives brick-and-mortar businesses the ability to better understand their customers by monitoring their behavior while in the store. Merchants install a small sensor and connect it to the Internet. The sensor measures the behavior of all shoppers carrying a Wi-Fi enabled smartphone and then turns this data into understandable, actionable form.

The company refers to its approach as “Google Analytics for the real world” and seeks to give offline businesses the same advantages as online business when it comes to understanding consumer behavior. Store owners can capture information about which window displays receive the most attention, what times of day see the most foot traffic, and so forth.

Benchmark Capital led this round, with participation from NEA, Harrison Metal, and Novel TMT Ventures. Euclid officially launched in 2011 and announced $5.8 million in funding. Its founders previously started Urchin, which was acquired by Google and set the foundation for Google Analytics.

Now, the company has reportedly installed its sensors in over 30 apparel chains, quick-serve restaurants, shopping malls, department stores, and other brick-and-mortar locations. This national traction was fueled by the release of Euclid Zero earlier this year, which requires no dedicated sensors, but rather enables IT managers to turn on the Euclid feature in their Wi-Fi management console. All together, Euclid detects an average of three billion events per day.

Euclid is based in Palo Alto, California.

Photo Credit: D’oh Boy (Mark Holloway/Flickr

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

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This VB Store deal won’t be around for long. Take advantage of the instant savings that we’re delivering on Instacanvas today – just $28 for a 12“ x 12” canvas – and start admiring your memories as they hang on your wall for years to come.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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In it’s never-ending quest to take on Amazon, Google has snapped up Channel Intelligence, a company that offers a variety of products to drive online shopping sales, for $125 million.

Channel Intelligence announced the news on its website this morning. The company was a launch partner with Google Shopping, and it claims that  it tracks nearly 15 percent of U.S. online transactions and drives $2 billion in annual sales online.

Channel Intelligence’s products include “Where-to-Buy,” which brands can use to link any digital asset to retail locations, potentially increasing sales by letting consumers know when their favorite retailers offer a product. It has also developed technology for Google shopping to “maximize sales and Return on ad spend.”

Ultimately, buying Channel Intelligence would be a simple way for Google to make Google Shopping more useful to both customers and retailers. I’ve used the service occasionally, but most of the time I would rather deal with a retailer I like (Amazon or Newegg) rather than find the best deal in a sea of options. If Channel Intelligence can make Google Shopping more worthwhile, it’d be a big step up for Google.

The company’s customers include Target, Philips, HP, and Best Buy. Google has been strangely quiet about the deal, so we’ve dropped a line for more information. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter. Channel Intelligence is one of ICG Group’s consolidated companies, and ICG says it will receive around $60.5 million from the deal.

Via Business Insider; Photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

That fancy new app the marketing department wants so you can sell more paperweights may not be your best investment. In fact, unless you’re lucky or really, really good, the app might just end up being the digital equivalent of a paperweight itself.

A new report from Research 2 Guidance says that in 2012, most online stores made less than 5 percent of their revenue via a mobile app. Fewer than a fifth made a significant percentage of their revenue from mobile — only 19 percent of companies realized more than a quarter of their revenue via their mobile shopping apps.

However, the market has some optimism that things are improving.

Of the more than 600 mobile-commerce companies surveyed, Research 2 Guidance says that almost a third of companies expect to see more than a quarter of their revenue from mobile within the next five years. And 15 percent of them plan to bring in a full half of their revenue via mobile apps.

Some very successful mobile apps generate significant revenue,  Research 2 Guidance said, but that’s not the story for most.

“Successful [mobile] commerce apps achieved download numbers of more than 2 million, but the long tale with apps that make only a few thousands downloads is long,” a company representative told me via email.

So, what is working?

Not shockingly, stores that sell virtual goods are doing well. A slice of the market makes most — if not all — of its revenue via mobile apps (see the graph above with the two short bars near the right side). Companies like Kabam or Rovio, which almost exclusively make mobile apps — generally games — and sell upgrades and virtual goods inside them, are notable exceptions to the rule.

photo credit: Stephen Poff via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Furthering its quest to bring Google Analytics-style metrics to the real world, Palo Alto-based Euclid announced a new product today that will let retailers use their own wireless networks to grab useful analytics from any shopper with a Wi-Fi enabled smartphone.

Dubbed Euclid Zero, the product is an evolution of Euclid’s initial offering, which required retailers to purchase sensor hardware. Since Euclid Zero uses existing wireless networks, retailers don’t have to buy any new hardware. Euclid has partnered with business Wi-Fi providers like Aruba Networks, Aerohive, and Fortinet to offer its analytics with just a single click.

Euclid collects aggregated data on shoppers, including their visit duration and engagement rate, and presents it in an online dashboard for retailers. The company’s technology can grab information about a shopper even if they never connect to an in-store Wi-Fi network. Just like online metrics, Euclid’s data could help store owners learn useful details about their customers. For example, it could let a retailer know if something about their store is causing a significant amount of customers to leave quickly.

Like most companies that collect consumer data, Euclid claims all of its data is grabbed anonymously, and consumers can opt out as well.

After launching last fall and snagging $5.8 million in funding, Euclid has gone from processing a million analytics events a day to handling more than three billion, according to chief executive Will Smith. The company now powers analytics for a dozen of the top 100 retailers.

“Our data set and scale has grown tremendously,” Smith said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Euclid Zero could potentially serve as a selling point for enterprise Wi-Fi networks to retailers, so it’s no surprise to see the big Wi-Fi providers jump aboard.

Eventually, Smith notes the company could eventually bring its tracking technology to other spaces. “There are all sorts of spaces that need to be quantified,” Smith said, citing event venues and conference centers as future targets.

Photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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A simple Swingline stapler from the office supply chain Staples could cost you either $15.79 or $14.29, depending on where you live.  And the same is true for other products from Staples, as well as at Home Depot’s online store and other retailers, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal.

Such pricing differences are common in brick and mortar retail stores, but it’s a new development on the web, where physical location has traditionally mattered less (except when calculating taxes, and in some cases shipment costs). Inspired by academic research in online price discrimination from Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and Telefonica Research, the WSJ built a custom solution to test out precisely what influenced prices at online retailers.

In addition to a customer’s general location, Staples offered discounted prices to customers within 20 miles of rival stores like OfficeMax and Office Depot, the WSJ found — which ended up being the single biggest factor in price differences. As a consequence of that, Staples ended up offering higher prices to less wealthy customers in rural and urban areas, where there aren’t many stores.

Rosetta Stone, which offers language learning software, also offered significant discounts to customers based on their location. The company admitted to the WSJ that it tests different bundles and prices in different areas, and it also personalizes deals based on how people reach the site.

As we move towards a more personalized web experience for ads and shopping recommendations, it’s inevitable that we’ll see even more creative pricing from online stores. For the most part, they’ll come in the form of deals and discounts. But the WSJ’s research is a good reminder that, in certain cases, you may end up spending more than other online shoppers.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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For intrepid deal hunters, there’s nothing better than finding the perfect coupon code right before you click “Buy.” But finding valid coupon codes for online retailers usually requires a bit of click-work, and plenty of trial and error.

Enter Coupons at Checkout, a free browser extension from the folks at the deal site CouponFollow, that makes finding and testing coupon codes dead simple.

Once installed, the extension uses a patented process to find coupon codes when you reach the checkout page at more than 100,000 online retailers. Simply click the appropriate coupon code section of the checkout page and choose from a dropdown of known codes. The extension gives you an idea of how valid a coupon may be, and if it fails you can give feedback to warn other users.

Coupons at Checkout supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. And unlike those dreaded shopping toolbars, the extension is invisible until you reach an online checkout page. The company says it may occasionally launch a browser tab when you click a coupon to track usage, and it will occasionally ask for feedback.

According to its privacy policy, Coupons at Checkout analyzes and collects your browser behavior around e-commerce pages, but no identifiable information is collected. Unlike many other companies, CouponFollow is at least clear what it’s doing with your data.

Marc Mezzacca, the New York City-based creator of CouponFollow, tells me that the extension’s users saved $22.45 on average (10 percent more than just manually fishing for coupon codes),  and it takes only around 21.1 seconds to find a working code, versus 80.7 seconds manually. So far Coupons at Checkout has been downloaded more than 12,000 times.

I’ve been testing out the extension while Christmas shopping, and so far it’s saved me a decent chunk of change. While there aren’t always working coupon codes at every retailer, at least with this extension you’ll know before wasting time searching the web.

Mezzacca notes that it’s not only helpful for consumers, the extension also benefits retailers: 87 percent of surveyed users said they would be more likely to complete a purchase if they saw a coupon when they were checking out. Currently, 27 percent of customers abandon their carts to seek out coupons, and only a third of those actually return, according to a recent PayPal study. Discounts also lead consumers to become an online fan of specific brands, and they also lead consumers to reconsider purchasing unbought items.

Next up for the extension: Mezzacca wants to improve the algorithms behind validating coupons, as well as track working coupons and their expiration dates better.

Photo via sdc2027/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Shopping, as we know it, is changing. During the holiday season, shopping centers are still packed with people choosing gifts for their loved ones, but now technology plays an increasingly significant role in how those choices are made. And paid for.

PayPal today announced the launch of PayPal My Cash Card. It is the company’s first “fully branded cash loading token”which easily converts cash into secure online funds.

People purchase a My Cash Card, which are available as of today at more than 30,000 retail locations across the U.S. They then create an account on the companion PayPal site and load the funds into their PayPal account using the PIN number on the back of the card. From there, they can online shop to their hearts’ and wallet’s content.

This is a useful option for people who prefer or only have access to cash, but want to make purchases online. Those folks in cash-flow heavy professions (bartenders, strippers, and so on), people wary of large financial institutions, or those who simply do not have a credit/debit card can now join in the fun of online shopping.

PayPal joined with InComm for this initiative, a company that provides a suite of prepaid products. It is part of PayPal’s overarching mission to be the method that people pay for everything, online, offline, and the netherworld in-between. In August, PayPal announced a partnership with Discover that will bring its technology to the point-of-sale (POS) for millions of merchants. Once the integration is complete, consumers will be able to pay using their PayPal accounts in-store. Rather than pulling out a wallet, all they need to do is type in their mobile number and a PIN.

During a roundtable chat yesterday with Hill Ferguson, PayPal’s VP of global product, he said that all these consumer engagement initiatives are in an effort to create a one-stop-shop for retail payments.

“We have spent the past year and a half reinventing and reinvigorating the brand to give it a personality,” he said. “We have 117 million active users. We help offline users get online and online users get offline to make the shopping experience as secure and convenient as possible. Our vision is to be the global digital wallet.”

PayPal started out as an internet payment service way back in the 1990s and was acquired by eBay in 2002. Like any savvy company in the e-commerce/payments space, it has put a heavy emphasis on mobile transactions and has seen record mobile shopping numbers over the past few weeks. Whether physical wallets are to be relegated to the domain of pocket watches and monocles is still up in the air. PayPal, however, is hard at work to create options for all shoppers, regardless of their payment proclivities.

You’re standing in the changing room at REI, looking at a sweater you’re thinking of buying. “Does this make me look dorky?” you wonder. Or is it just hipster-ish enough?

Ordinarily, you’d pull out your smartphone, take a photo, and send it to your significant other. But you probably won’t call on a wider circle than that: Facebook responses take too long, Twitter’s too impersonal (and you have too many creepy people following you there anyway), and it’s too time-consuming to send photo messages to all your friends.

Enter Seesaw, which will help you “make decisions with the help of the friends that matter most,” according to its cofounder and chief executive, Aaron Gotwalt.

“Seesaw is designed to help you make those decisions quickly with the help of people you know and the much smaller number of people you care about,” Gotwalt told me by phone recently.

Seesaw picked up a seed round of funding in on September 21, led by Freestyle Capital, with contributions from Baseline Ventures’ Steve Anderson, Betaworks, and a handful of other angel investors. Exact terms weren’t disclosed, but sources tell me it was in the neighborhood of $1 to $1.5 million, valuing the company at somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 million, pre-money.

“Seesaw has a visually unique way to present things you would like,” said Freestyle principal Josh Felser. Besides, he said, he believes in the team and thinks they’ve identified a real consumer need.

“I don’t really care if this product takes off or not,” Felser said. “I love this problem they’re trying to solve.”

Gotwalt acknowledges that others have tried a similar approach to collaborative, social advice before, including Shallibuy (currently defunct), the Scott McNealy-backed WayIn, and even Thumb (formerly known as Opinionaided). None have been exactly smashing successes. Gotwalt said that Seesaw will stand out by helping people get immediate feedback rather than making them wait for that all-important buying advice.

While Seesaw’s main action will take place through an app, it won’t require everyone whose advice you seek to have the app, since it will send requests for feedback through SMS.

That way, you can designate a core circle of advisors for a particular question and blast your query out to all of them, without regard for whether they are also Seesaw users. If it’s well-designed, this means Seesaw will have a built-in viral engine, encouraging people to sign up when they see how useful it is for their friends.

Gotwalt and cofounders Jesse Engle and Kyle Sollenberger are serial entrepreneurs, having seen success with CoTweet, which ExactTarget acquired in 2010. Engle was CEO of CoTweet, but he and Gotwalt have swapped roles for this startup.

In addition to the two founders, Seesaw lists four other employees on its “about” page. The company is planning to launch its app in early 2013.

Photo: Seesaw founders Sollenberger, Gotwalt, and Engle; courtesy Seesaw.

Disclosure: Gotwalt is married to VentureBeat writer Jolie O’Dell. We did not communicate with O’Dell about the writing of or research for this post.

Online wunderstore Fab.com says it racked up million-dollar daily sales during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday rush that kicked off holiday shopping.

Between November 23 and yesterday, November 29, Fab.com moved a total of $6.5 million in design-forward products. On Monday, November 26 — Cyber Monday, if you will — the site hit an all-time record with $1.3 million in sales, and the daily average for sales was $933,500 during that entire week-long period.

And as for every retail outlet, late November is just the beginning — the beginning of a four-week period that yields some of the highest volumes they’ll see all year.

“This coming Monday December 3, 2012 is the official Cyber Monday in the United Kingdom,” said Fab CEO Jason Goldberg in a post on the flash sales site’s flashy stats. Fab recently launched via acquisition in the UK, so Goldberg et al. are expecting big numbers from Europe, as well.

In preparation for a blockbuster holiday, the startup launched a new lineup of mobile apps back in October. One offshoot of that effort, Goldberg noted, was that a full third of the company’s sales came from mobile devices.

The company also launched holiday shops to eliminate analysis paralysis and increase sales, and it also introduced free shipping for all orders — a sweet bennie that won’t go away when the holidays end.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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In the battle between made-up consumer holidays, it looks like Black Friday still reigns supreme on mobile devices.

When it comes to increases in usage, mobile apps from Amazon, Newegg, and Gilt all saw significantly higher gains on Black Friday compared to Cyber Monday, according to data compiled by the mobile data compression company Onavo.

The findings throw some water on the hype from eBay and Paypal, which were trying to make the term “Mobile Monday” replace Cyber Monday given the performance on their apps. Onavo’s data, which is compiled anonymously from more than 100,000 US iPhone owners running the company’s compression app, shows that eBay’s mobile app did see a rise on Cyber Monday — but for other popular shopping apps, that was far from the case.

For example, Amazon saw a 222 percent increase in app usage on Black Friday, compared to a 171 percent bump on Cyber Monday. And Gilt saw a massive increase of 185 percent last Friday, compared to 87 percent on Monday.

No matter what you think of annoying shopping holidays, it’s hard to deny the increasing importance of mobile shopping for online retailers.

Pinterest blocked traffic from Amazon and other websites on Black Friday last week, according to Pinfluencer, a Pinterest analytics service. Socialtimes reported today that extra holiday traffic — and suspected malicious activity — prompted Pinterest to refuse queries from the sites.

Update 9:38PM — Pinterest PR gave me the following statement:

During the holidays, we believe a third party was using Amazon Web Services to scrape our site so we temporarily blocked a specific traffic source, which is a common measure taken by web services. Some legitimate services may have been affected momentarily, but we do not believe that traffic to or from Amazon.com or other Amazon properties was impacted. 

Pinterest drives massive referral traffic that can drive impressive sales for online retailers. And though its growth has slowed in 2012, and the site is virtually ignored by small and medium-sized businesses, it is still on track to be the fourth-largest source of referral traffic on the web.

Amazon added Pinterest buttons to its website earlier this year (although it can be a massive where’s-Waldo exercise to find the social sharing buttons on Amazon’s busy pages). Presumably so many product pages were being viewed and shared by shoppers, Pinterest’s automated danger signals were activated.

The blockage lasted for 15.5 hours, from 11:30 PM on November 23th to 3PM on November 24th. Since Pinfluencer tracks pins, repins, likes, and comments, its services were affected as well.

I’ve contacted both Pinfluencer and Pinterest for more details, and will update this post as those companies respond.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Almost 250 million Americans visited stores on Black Friday weekend, spending an average of $423 each for total holiday sales of almost $60 billion, according to the National Retail Federation.

That’s a new record, the NRF said, and 28 percent of those weekend shoppers were at stores by midnight on Black Friday.

The numbers are up from last year’s figures (226 million people spending $398 each last year), and includes 89 million shoppers on Black Friday alone. They also may blow earlier predictions of $32 billion in sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday out of the water, although Monday sales, of course, are not yet included in these figures.

Close to half the amount spent — 40.7 percent, or $170.42 — was spent online. That’s also up from 37.8 percent last year. Half of all Black Friday shoppers did at least some shopping online.

“There’s no question that millions of people were drawn to retailers’ aggressive online promotions this weekend, making sure to research and compare prices days in advance to ensure they were getting the best deal they could,” said Pam Goodfellow, BigInsight’s consumer insights director. BigInsight conducted the poll of 4005 consumers, on which the numbers are based, for the NRF.

It may indeed be better to give than to receive, but not everyone was shopping for Christmas gifts.

In fact, 80 percent of shoppers bought non-gift items, with 60 percent buying clothes and accessories. Popular gifts included toys, media, electronics, and jewelry.

Unfortunately, when there are great deals and lots of people, some have trouble keeping it classy:

photo credit: Michael Holden via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Editor’s note: Keynote Systems’ Startup Shootout Index provides some insight into the three-screen challenge now facing anyone with a web presence. We’ll be bringing you a fresh set of data from Keynote every month. Check out previous Startup Shootout results.

With the holidays upon us, we thought we’d take a look at how ready our index startups are for two great holiday traditions – shopping and travel. Between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday vacations, and winter storms, these sites are about to get a workout.

As part of the Keynote Startup Shootout Monthly Index we track some of the top travel and online retail sites, across desktop, smartphone and tablet devices. We’ve discussed before the impact of this “three screen” world, especially in adapting to mobile. Let’s see if our index startups are ready for the holiday challenge.

The Virtual Shopping Experience

Creating positive online shopping experiences used to be so straightforward: have the right products at the right price, a smooth checkout process, good overall site performance, and the sales will come rolling in. Mobile sites are becoming increasingly popular for shopping and it is important for retailers have a strong mobile presence. But mobile sites present a whole different set of challenges to ensure they look good and function efficiently. The shopper, of course, just expects a consistent level of performance, regardless of device.

Fab.com offers a native app for the mobile visitor, but it is buried at the bottom of the site. Even if a user does manage to find it, it has taken them a while to do so, which slows down the shopping process. Key takeaway? Put that app right up top if you want to get it used.

None of the retail sites offer tablet-specific pages, but some are designed for better performance.  The two fastest home pages for tablet users, RueLaLa and Ideeli, load about three times faster than the others on the retail index. Keeping pages lightweight and less complex, whether the page is specifically optimized for tablet users on not, is key to earning their loyalty rather than driving them to frustration.

Beware of the online retailer that fails to provide a mobile or tablet-specific experience. Otherwise, they are loading incredibly large (desktop) pages across a usually much weaker network and screen experience.

Travel-log

As with shoppers, travelers tend to be in transit if they are accessing these sites from their mobile device. If they are on the road, they may have varying degrees of network support – sitting in an airport or station, driving, on a train, or finding themselves in rural locations with limited access.

Again, we see a number of the travel sites delivering a full desktop page when accessed via a tablet. Companies sometimes assume that tablet users have stronger wi-fi connections than mobile users, but this is not always the case.

Tripology, interestingly, has neither a mobile-optimized site nor app, never mind being optimized for tablets.

AirBnB has an iPhone-optimized site, but the loading time is slow. It loads an excessive element count – which means too many http requests. We can offer a couple of best practices here.

• Keep to ten or less HTTP requests. These each involve round trips from the browser to the server which add to a site’s latency. On the AirBnB site, we are currently seeing 47 http requests. That will definitely slow you down.
•  Redirections can be painful in the mobile world, and again we’re talking about slowing down the service dramatically. With AirBnB, there are two redirections from the original URL – first from a non-secure to a secure to a secure mobile site. Ironically its front page appears to be a secure site, which is unusual for a home page. Secure pages are usually reserved for transaction areas and credit card/billing-type pages.
• We recommend at most two or three domains for mobile or tablet apps due to the network issues they can have. We saw 12 different domains on AirBnB’s home page, each of which can add a quarter of a second to loading time.

Conclusion

We continue to see tablet-specific sites fall somewhere in between the full desktop experience and the mobile experience. A startup might have the desktop and the mobile covered, but not the tablet. It makes a big difference when it comes to the customer experience.

The holidays will keep pushing the web performance of these retail and travel sites, plus we’ll assume many people will receive new devices which will only increase the demand. Let’s hope 2013 brings “three screen success” to all out Startup Shootout companies.

Aaron Rudger is the senior manager of web & mobile performance and Ken Harker is the mobile evangelist at Keynote Systems.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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After making a name for itself as a useful smartphone app for in-store shopping, ShopSavvy is finally launching on the iPad today — a shift that has forced the company to think beyond its current price comparison strategy.

The free iPad app comes as part of the ShopSavvy 6 update, the latest version of the company’s iOS app. On the iPhone, the update brings the usual performance improvements (the company says about 30 percent of the app’s code is new). But this release is truly about the iPad — just in time for a holiday shopping season where ShopSavvy predicts consumers will be heavily relying on their tablets.

ShopSavvy started out as a simple price-comparison app on Android phones, but it has quickly grown into one of the most popular in-store shopping apps on the iPhone and Windows Phone, with more than 40 million downloads and 10 million active users. When it comes to the iPad, the company had to shift gears a bit to take advantage of its bigger screen, as well as the fact that people will be using tablets at home more than in stores.

“It [the iPad app] was a complete rethink,” ShopSavvy co-founder and CEO Alexander Muse said in an interview with VentureBeat.”On the iPad it’s more of a product browser,” Muse said, while the company’s smartphone apps generally serve to compare specific products across multiple retailers.

While smartphones ruled mobile shopping last year, ShopSavvy believes that tablets will have a major impact this holiday season. That’s not exactly a bold prediction: We’ve seen time and again that consumer engagement on tablets is higher than smartphones (especially smaller tablets). And now that there are a wealth of cheap tablet options available, I’m sure they’ll end up being a popular way for consumers to shop.

“Instead of focusing on price comparison, now we’re focused on offering you one option [on the iPad],” Muse added. He noted that the biggest challenge for the company was figuring out a way to give consumers access to multiple products at once, instead of just comparing a single product’s price.

If you’re already tired of holiday shopping before you’ve even set foot in a store, ShopSavvy’s iPad app could be your savior. Instead of bouncing around multiple retailer websites, you can do all of your shopping within the iPad app. ShopSavvy currently works with major retailers like Best Buy, Home Depot, and Target, plus it offers pricing information for a plethora of online retailers.

ShopSavvy has offices in San Francisco, Calif. and Dallas, Texas, and has thus far raised a total of $11.5 million.

It may be shocking to some men — or at least advertising art directors — but not all women have the stereotypical Barbie dimensions. Or the Twiggy lack thereof.

That’s what BeauCoo, a play on the French word beaucoup, meaning lots — was created to solve. Co-founder Victoria MacLean puts it this way: ”Why should a woman take style advice from someone who looks nothing like her?”

A quick google for images that match “fashion stylist” suffices to make her point:

Source: Google

Fashion stylists, according to Google image search, are not average women

So Beaucoo aims to connect women who look alike, allow them to share fashion tips, ideas, and finds with each other, and discover cool new looks. Along the way, they can earn rewards from fashion retailers: targeted promos and discounts based on what they’re sharing and viewing.

The social network lives mainly in Beaucoo’s mobile apps. iOS is available at launch, Android and web apps are coming in November.

The Beaucoo team of four founders are all successful entrepreneurs, having sold their previous company Decoder. They’ve raised $1.1 million in funding from Zinc Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Online shoe store Spartoo is stepping into €25 million.

Known as the “Zappos of Europe,” Spartoo is a straightforward e-commerce site that sells affordable footwear. The inventory contains roughly 30,000 options provided by 700 brands, including popular retailers Ugg, Nine West, and Dolce and Gabbana. The selection is wide, spanning women’s high-heeled stilettos, men’s work boots, and children’s flip flops, as well as bags and other accessories. Delivery is guaranteed, and free returns are possible for up to 30 days.

Spartoo was founded in France in 2006 and has since expanded to 20 European countries. It sold 2 million pairs of shoes last year and is growing fast. This investment will go towards sustaining the rapid growth and entering new markets.

Sofina, A Plus Finance, CM-CIC Capital Privé, Highland Partners, and Endeavour Vision contributed to this round, which brings Spartoo’ total financing to €45 million. Read the press release.

In an effort to step up its game against other online retailers, eBay debuted a brand new website design today to match its updated company logo.

eBay’s previous design is similar to something you’d recognize from late ’90s websites, with products/auctions arranged into boring vertical lists. The only eye-catching elements were thumbnails for each auction listing. By contrast, the new web interface concentrates much more on product images. The homepage adopts the familiar pinboard-style design used on Pinterest, while the product and profile pages are much less cluttered.

“We’re delivering a cleaner, contemporary look and feel; a more intuitive, convenient way to browse, decide, and buy,” said eBay president Devin Wenig in a statement, adding that the new interface will also allow users to curate and share products more easily.

The new site design should begin rolling out to eBay users over the next few weeks, but if you’re impatient, you can check it out early via eBay’s official announcement page. (Or, check a gallery of redesigned eBay screenshots embedded below.)

The company also officially announced it’s new eBay Now same-day shipping service, which it first launched in beta back in August. The eBay Now service is currently only available in San Francisco and will allow shoppers to gain same-day shipping on goods sold by local retailers. Purchase orders must be at least $25, and users can only shop via the official iOS app at the moment. The real perk is that orders should orders arrive within an hour.

Via AllThingsD

The conventional wisdom about retailers nowadays is that they’re getting wrecked by the Internet-borne virus that is online retail. And mobile phones are making matters much, much worse.

Mobile marketer InMarket, however, tells a different story. It says the rise mobile phones isn’t a death knell for retailers but rather could be their savior.

“We’re right at the turning of things swinging toward mobile in a pretty big way,” InMarket communications director Dave Heinzinger said.

But, he said, retailers are so afraid of showrooming for Amazon that they’re not embracing some of the biggest strengths of mobile devices: Creating personalized ads to consumers as they shop.

“The mindset of people in-store is completely different from when they are sitting on the couch,” Heinzinger said.

According to InMarket data, shoppers spend an average of 90 seconds interacting with products in store. That’s three times as long as the average commercial. This, Heinzinger said, means there is untapped potential for retailers to meet shoppers head on with mobile apps and in-store contextual advertising.

It’s shopper 3.0, Heinzinger said.

Of course, InMarket has a big horse in this race. The company’s trio of shopping rewards apps — CheckPoints, List Bliss, and Extra Extra — allow brands to advertise their products via coupons and deals.

But Heinzinger’s conclusion remains relevant: Retailers are struggling to meet consumers head on. “We’re spending more time on our phones, but the brands aren’t following. This is something they have to fix” he said.

Photo:Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Shopsavvy is about to get a lot more useful for Best Buy shoppers. The two companies will announce tomorrow that the Shopsavvy mobile app, which you can use to scan and compare items from retail and online stores, has tapped into Best Buy’s API to let you research items faster and make purchases from the retailer’s online store.

Best Buy is already working with ShopSavvy to bring its product information and reviews into the mobile app, but this integration with the company’s BBYOpen API is a major step forward. Now you’ll be able to search for items on ShopSavvy within a Best Buy store and get them shipped to you within a few clicks. And thanks to the API integration, searching all of Best Buy’s data is much faster. (In-store pickup for purchases isn’t available yet, but that will likely appear down the line.)

“We really try to bring our products to where customers are,” Steve Bendt, the director of Best Buy’s emerging platforms (the group behind the BBYOpen API), told VentureBeat in an interview. He pointed out that partnering with apps like ShopSavvy is a major growth area for Best Buy, and the company has also built up a strong developer network taking advantage of the API.

“There’s more choice than ever today in how you shop for things,” Bendt said. “We need to be there. We’ve got an amazing store network that provides realtime fulfillment that we’re taking advantage of.”

The Shopsavvy app also offers mobile purchasing within its app from retailers such as Walmart, Home Depot, and Barnes & Noble.

The app started out as a simple price-comparison tool on Android, but it has since grown into one of the most popular options for mobile shopping on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. The ShopSavvy app has been downloaded more than 40 million times and has more than 10 million active users, the company claims. ShopSavvy is also exploring new territory with its mobile app — earlier this year it launched a mobile marketplace to take on Craigslist.

ShopSavvy has offices in San Francisco and Dallas and has thus far raised a total of $11.5 million. Its latest funding round was led by Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Fab.com, one of the world’s most popular flash-sale retail sites, has just announced a new “Fab Europe” hub for its operations on the continent, integrating fully to the North American platform and introducing a raft of new social shopping features plus fully mobile versions in the next couple of weeks.

Previously only operating in Germany (and in the German language) as Fab.de, today saw the online retailer launch eu.fab.com, a full-blown European site specifically targeted for the EU market. In a mailout to European customers Fab announced: “A few seconds ago, we expanded Fab in Europe to include all the features and benefits that Fab has seen in the States to make it the leading social shopping platform.”

The move follows Fab.com’s acquisition of Casacanda.de in February of this year – a move which gave the company a tactical entry-point into Europe. Since then, it has acquired Llustre in the UK and has seen its European base grow to a reported two million users. It will now serve 24 European countires.

Previously running on the Casacanda platform, the new Fab Europe site has been switched to operate fully on Fab’s Social Commerce Platform, meaning that from today it will feature the same social shopping benefits as North America, such as full Facebook integration, a live feed of best-selling items, new product pickers – in fact, a reported 500 new features.

Moreover, the move to the full Fab.com platform signals a new mobile rollout in the coming weeks too. European customers are promised iPhone, iPad and Android compatible services within the fortnight.

Fab Europe’s 200-strong team will continue to run out of Berlin. Former Casacanda CEO 23-year-old Roman Kirsch, who became Fab.de co-founder and CEO, is now Senior Vice President for Fab.com Continental Europe.

Earlier this year, Rocket Internet’s Fab copycat Bamarang closed its doors as the company decided to focus its energies on slightly more traditional stylings of Westwing.com instead. Fab.com raised a further $105 million, in a round led by Atomico – Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom’s international venture firm – in July this year. The deal valued the company at between $600 million and $700 million and brings the total invested to $156m.

For related articles, check out:

• Exclusive: The fabulous life of Fab.com’s Tom Claessens
• Bamarang closes shop – Samwer Brothers drop Fab clone in favour of West Wing

This story originally appeared on VentureVillage, one of VentureBeat’s syndication partners, in Germany.