Q&A With Wanelo CEO Deena Varshavskaya. By Homa Zaryouni | 24 November 2014.
Le Monde. The Spring App: Did the Fashion World just get Uber-ized? By Hayley Pearce Instead of hitting New York's Soho after a crazy day at work, I switch Spring Street for the new Spring app.
I simply sit down on the subway and swipe, filling a digital shopping bag with clothes. It's a calmer, more efficient hit of retail therapy. With Spring, I can follow the brands I love (so far, a selection of 150 independent designers and major labels) in the same way I follow things I love by scrolling through my Instagram feed. I can share gems from the thousands of Pinterest-worthy fashion photos with my followers and select what I like with a tap and swipe, just like I do with my dating prospects on Tinder. A clean, clear and optimized user experience has become the norm to which we accustom our everyday activities. M-Commerce Made Simpler Mobile commerce apps are the new ecommerce websites, which were once the new bricks-and-mortar malls.
Gone are the days of shop 'til you drop. Smart Shopping For Everyone. Apple’s iBeacon Potential Emerges in Shopkick Macy’s Initiative. An Interview with the Cofounder and CEO of Shopkick, Cyriac Roeding. Swirl, A Beacon-Fueled Marketing System, Raises $8M So Retailers Can Track Shoppers. With the goal of closing the gap between retailers and shoppers, the SaaS startup Swirl Networks, Inc. is rolling out a system of in-store beacons to notify consumers of specific deals according to where they stand in the store.
A little Big Brother? Yes. But it’s happening: Swirl has just closed an $8 million Series B round led by Hearst Ventures, the strategic investments branch of the Hearst Corporation, to fuel the expansion of their platform. SoftBank Capital and Longworth Venture Partners also participated in the round. Macy's to Roll Out Beacon Technology in All Stores This Fall. Beacons And iBeacons Create A New Market. To state the obvious: Modern, smartphone-toting humans spend most of their time indoors. But indoor spaces often block cell signals and also make it nearly impossible to locate devices via GPS.
Beacons are a solution. Beacons are a low-cost piece of hardware — small enough to attach to a wall or countertop— that utilize battery-friendly low-energy Bluetooth connections to transmit messages or prompts directly to a smartphone or tablet. Welcome to Forbes. Shopkick Surpasses $1 Billion Generated for Partners. REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Oct. 15, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- On the heels of its acquisition by South Korea-based mobile and commerce leader SK planet, shopkick, the most widely used real-world shopping app, today has reported it has driven more than one billion dollars in revenue for its partner retailers since its launch in 2010; more than half of which occurred in the past 12 months.
Shopkick Report: iBeacon Technology Helped App Drive $1B in Revenue. Shopkick users have earned $25M in rewards, scanned 70M products, and viewed 4B offers. Shopkick is kicking ass and taking names.
The company has rewarded shoppers with $25 million and delivered $800 million in sales to its partners, it said today. Shopkick is a mobile app that you use to earn rewards and deals, known as “kicks,” simply by walking into a retail store. You can redeem Kicks for store gift cards, free coffee or dinner, accessories, song downloads, movie tickets, donations to charity, etc. Today, Shopkick shared some key metrics about just how well it is doing. Shopkick is the most used real-world shopping app, with the most active users and time spent in the app per user per month, according to Nielsen ratings. Shoppers have earned $25 million and redeemed 7 million gift cards since Shopkick launched in 2010. Bookatable Tests Foodies’ Appetite For iBeacons In UK, Shopkick Passes 7,500 Beacons. iBeacon, the Bluetooth Low Energy technology that is being used by businesses to push offers and other messages to customers’ smartphones when they are in the physical vicinity of a small pinging device, is starting to see some decent traction.
Businesses like Shopkick (recently acquired by SK planet for $200 million) have now rolled out some 7,500 of the devices across its retail footprint in the U.S., with ambitions to have the largest Beacon-based network for retailers in the country. And over in Europe, the technology is now also starting to see deployments in earnest.
Bookatable, and online booking platform with operations across Europe, is now rolling out a system of iBeacon devices across its partner restaurants. Starting first with a service developed with American Express for a small group of establishments during the London Restaurant Festival, Bookatable will expand iBeacons out to 119 restaurants in the city. Shopkick Starts 100-Store iBeacon Trial For American Eagle, Biggest Apparel Rollout Yet. Apple’s iBeacon technology, which uses Bluetooth LE to send notifications to users when they’re inside a physical store, is making another mainstream advance today: Shopkick — the location-based offers startup that was one of the early movers with its shopBeacon service — is today announcing a new retail deal, installing iBeacon functionality in 100 American Eagle Outfitters stores nationwide, including locations of sister brand Aerie.
This will become the largest deployment of iBeacons in apparel sales to date — although there have been others in different retail sectors, with Apple started rolling them out across all 254 U.S. stores in December 2013, and inMarket is adding iBeacons to some 200 Safeway and Giant Eagle grocery stores. (Eagles appear to figure prominently with iBeacons.) Spring, a new mobile marketplace from David Tisch, connects you directly with fashion brands.
It may be simple for brands to create their own web storefronts today, but doing the same for mobile is a far more difficult task.
With that challenge in mind, David Tisch, an angel investor at Box Group and former TechStars NY managing director, set out to create Spring, a mobile marketplace that gives brands a simple way to let consumers shop with them. After a year of development, Spring is launching today on the iPhone. And while there’s no shortage of shopping apps out there, it’s actually doing something truly different. 10 French startups disrupting the way you experience fashion online. It may sound like a stretch to say that French people are the reference for fashion.
But as we say, “il n’y a pas de fumée sans feu” (there’s no smoke without fire). In addition to having a very prolific fashion sense, the French are also very creative when it comes to the shopping experience. The landscape of French fashion startups is flourishing those days: 6 of the 10 companies presented in this article closed a round last spring/summer season and the results of their investments are released now. Let’s open the catwalk. 1.
Wanelo founder Deena Varshavskaya is building a new, social American mall. Snap, Automatically ID And Buy The Clothes You Like With Asap54. Fashion has been one of the most promising and most dynamic categories of e-commerce in the past several years.
But it has also been one of the most problematic. Thanks to virtuality, we now have at our fingertips more choices for what to buy and wear than ever before. [Bon App'] Vente-privee lance une nouvelle application, sans surprendre - FrenchWeb.frFrenchWeb.fr. Flayr : la start-up qui vous fait faire du lèche-vitrine depuis votre canapé. Style-Focused Community And Shopping Service Polyvore Arrives On Android. Polyvore, the style-focused community whose members regularly pin collages of outfits and accessories to Pinterest, has now arrived on Android. The app follows the company’s iOS debut by roughly a year and a half, indicating, perhaps, its largely female user base’s preference for iPhone and iPad when working with their fashion creations. The company today sees 20 million uniques per month, and says that over 3 million of its members have since downloaded the iOS version of Polyvore. Despite the long delay in between mobile platform releases, the Android app is not quite feature complete with its iPhone counterpart.
We’re told that while, for the most part, the features are the same on Android as on iOS, Polyvore had to prioritize some over others in order to “get the app in the hands of our users faster.” That means the company’s decision to finally address its Android user base was a more recent one, clearly. Favr.tt Brings On CEO To Raise Funding For Its Social Shopping App. Back in 2012, London and New York based Shopa launched as a “social marketplace” where users were rewarded for promoting products they like. The company raised $1.4 million from Notion Capital and Octopus.
Another in the arena is Shopcade, which has raised $4 million, or Nuji which raised $2 million. There’s something about these social shopping startups that European investors like – probably because of the early access to revenue models. Pinterest Is Sneaking Up on Twitter and Facebook. As social networks go, Pinterest doesn't get a whole lot of respect. You don't see lengthy dissections of its news feed algorithms, worried hand-wringing about its future, or personal essays about the emotional solace it provides during times of trouble.
Maybe this is because Pinterest's user base is overwhelmingly female and largely lives between the coasts, far from the tech press's purview. Lyst, A Fashion E-Commerce Aggregator, Raises $14M More, Plans Beacon Rollout With PayPal. Lyst, a platform that aggregates different fashion commerce sites in a single place with a “universal shopping cart”, is today announcing a $14 million round of funding — money that it will use to ramp up its marketing and to hire more data scientists and other engineers to keep building out its algorithms to compete against the likes of eBay, the Fancy and other one-top-shop online marketplaces. It is also forging ahead with an interesting progression on its e-commerce model by taking the experience out to brick-and-mortar stores as well, starting with a partnership with PayPal around Beacon, its Bluetooth LE in-store initiative that will give users location-specific alerts when they are in the vicinity of a particular section of a store where there is an item they may want to buy.
“We have some exciting things coming up here,” founder and CEO Chris Morton tells me. “At this stage we can share our plan to launch a partnership with PayPal around the use of Beacon devices.” Naval Ravikant joins board of Wanelo as the fast-growing social commerce site expands beyond its mall rat demographic. La plateforme de social commerce Luvocracy lève 11 millions de dollars - FrenchWeb.frFrenchWeb.fr. L’ère du « Shopping Entertainment » 7 choses à savoir sur Wanelo le phénomène social des Apps de shopping.
Taking on Shopcade, Fancy & Pinterest, Flayr raises €5 Million to do Social Shopping smarter. Flayr gets $6.1M for specialized online shopping in France. Flayr se lance sur le discovery commerce et lève 5 millions d'euros. Do Things that Don't Scale. Why Urban Outfitters wagers on Wanelo for mcommerce - Applications. Millennials, Mobile and Multichannel. Retailers Look to Merge Offline and Online Shopping Experiences in 2014. Wanelo: A Social Media Shopping Site. Wanelo: Deena Varshavskaya's Site Takes Over Social Shopping. Social Curation Start-ups Target Fashion Industry. Social Curation Start-ups Target Fashion Industry.