Shopping startup EcoMom raises $2M from Facebook exec and others. EcoMom, a site where moms can shop for healthy and environmentally-friendly goods, just raised $2 million in a first round of funding. The Los Angeles startup first announced $1.1 million of financing in October, but by the time the round closed last week, the amount of money had nearly doubled. New backers include Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya and Google evangelist Don Dodge.
The site first launched in February 2009 under the name SproutBaby, then in May of this year the company rebranded as EcoMom. It sells baby food, diapers, toys, clothing, and more. In discussing the site, co-founder and chief executive Jody Sherman compared it to Zappos, the popular shoe shopping site that was eventually acquired by Amazon. In other words, when a parent visits EcoMom, they know that every product is going to be safe for their family, Sherman said. Sherman said investors were attracted, in part, by EcoMom’s numbers. [image via Flickr/jencu] Free-shipping day was one of the busiest ever for online retail sales. December 17, also known as Free Shipping Day because it’s the last day you could get free shipping for pre-Christmas online purchases, was the busiest spending day in online history. 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.
[photo credit: shopsland] American Apparel Source Raves About A $3 Million Groupon Deal – Reveals Sales Numbers That Will Erase "Ongoing Doubts About Groupon" We've all heard the scary stories of businesses getting clobbered by Groupon deals that brought in more customers than a business can deal with. These horror stories suggest that Groupon customers won't spend more than they have to in order to use their coupons.
But a source from American Apparel tells us he's seen sales numbers following his company's deal with Groupon "that disprove many of the ongoing doubts about Groupon. " He says customers who purchased the $25 Groupon – worth $50 – ended up spending an average of $70 once they cashed in the deal. Our source says the best part of the deal, though, was how American Apparel was able to add a whole bunch of Groupon customers to its own email list. "The killer was email address acquisition... Groupon ended up selling 133,000 Groupons at $25 a deal in the US for a total revenue exceeding $3.3 million. [jp] 日本のクーポン共同購入レースも新局面へーーキラメックスがKAUPON STORESをオープン. 急激な成長、短期間での世界的な展開、次々ときまる巨額投資に買収の噂。 世界で勃発したクーポン共同購入戦争は、2010年に日本に飛び火、4月のPikuローンチを皮切りに、猛烈なスピードでそのクローンを増やすことになる。
大手リクルートの参入や日本版Grouponの攻勢で業界はさらにヒートアップ、現場から聞こえてくる激しい営業合戦は「IT」という言葉のイメージからかけ離れた肉弾戦の様相を呈している。 各社の戦略も多少の違いはあれど、営業人員を増やして販売エリアを拡大させるパワープレイが主流、最近はテレビCMもバンバン流れるようになった。 そのような戦況の中、大きく舵を切るものが現れてきた。 国内で二番目にクーポン共同購入サービスKAUPONを始めたキラメックスは今日、店舗独自にクーポンの販売が可能なサービス、KAUPON STORESをローンチする。 KAUPON STORESは店舗独自で共同購入サイトを持つことができるサービスだ。 確かにモール形式の品品プレミアムモールや無料のASP、Pondeなどいわゆる「ウェブ的な」手法に目をつけたサービスはある。 代表の村田氏も「KAUPON STORESではすでに全国にいるKAUPON会員に対して流入を促すことで、サイトOPENからチケット販売が見込める」と話すように彼らの持つ販売力を有効活用できる点は参加する店舗にとって大きな魅力になるはずだ。 また、ソーシャルにも力をいれるという点も他との差別ポイントになるだろう。 そもそも共同購入の爆発はソーシャルウェブの活用で火がついたともいわれている。 従来型のウェブキャンペーンで実施していたユーザー獲得単価は劇的に下がり、スタートアップがこのビジネスをこぞって取り上げた理由にもなった。 クーポン共同購入のビジネスは爆発力があるといわれながら、実際のスケールには疑問が多く残されていた。 加えて代表の村田氏が元楽天という点も見逃せない。
これでレースは新しい局面に入った。 Taulia raises $3.2M to let companies get an early bird discount with suppliers. Taulia, which gives companies discounts when they pay suppliers early, announced today that it has raised $3.2 million in its first round of funding. Taulia lets suppliers opt into a program that offers discounts on invoices if companies are willing to pay early. The idea is to avoid excruciatingly long payment cycles, where larger and more unwieldy companies can take as long as two months to pay a supplier for goods. Suppliers don’t have to wait a long time to get paid, and businesses can shave of a little bit of their costs by paying early. The company claims to save other businesses tens of millions of dollars every year through these early bird discounts. The service is embedded into SAP’s business management software, so companies that rely on that software are able to take advantage of the large network of suppliers also using it.
The funding was led by Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures. Taulia is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2009. Why check in to TV shows? Miso’s new answer: For the deals. With Exploding Traffic, Digital Chocolate Plans New Facebook Games and Mobile Convergence. The fastest-moving game developer on Facebook recently has been Digital Chocolate, which has raced ahead of other mid-sized developers over the past month with a gain of over seven million new monthly active users. The company is rapidly becoming one of Facebook’s biggest platform companies; with 24 million MAU and four million daily active users, it is poised to overtake Playdom, whose traffic has slowed since its acquisition by Disney.
Throughout its growth on Facebook, Digital Chocolate has been eager to define itself as a different sort of company, and it’s certainly not slacking off on that message now. “There are a lot of interesting companies out there, but a lot are actually products, not companies,” president Mark Metis told us yesterday. “The ones that are companies were built in a different era, when virality was easier and lightweight apps could slide.” “Far and away our biggest source of user acquisition is virality,” Metis said. Yardsellr raises $5 million to reinvent e-commerce (and enable my dog-sweater habit) I just bought a dog sweater from a stranger who lives across the country from me.
And I totally blame Yardsellr, a year-old startup backed by a team of eBay veterans who may well be inventing the future of social commerce. Yardsellr CEO and founder Danny Leffel just announced his company has raised $5 million from Accel Partners, the venture-capital firm best known for investing in Facebook, and Harrison Metal Capital, the investing vehicle of former eBay executive Michael Dearing, who’s quietly backed AdMob, Aardvark, CafePress and others. Besides Leffel, ex-eBayers on the team include Jed Clevenger, who ran paid search at eBay, and Rachel Makool, former head of eBay’s community team.
While Yardsellr has a website — Yardsellr.com — the shopping experience isn’t built around it. Take my dog sweater, for example: I found it on the Yardsellr Doggie Block, a Facebook page built for canine obsessives like myself. And where trust exists, commerce usually follows. ReplyBuy shows text messaging can make some serious bank with daily deals. Apparently, there’s still money to be made in text messaging. ReplyBuy, a startup launching today that uses text messaging to deliver Groupon-like daily deals, is a perfect example of just how much life the technology has left. Backed by a number of former YouTube employees, ReplyBuy lets users sign up to receive text messages for daily deals with partner merchants. ReplyBuy users can also text back to purchase the deal, after signing up and saving their payment information on the company’s site.
It operates in the same space as Groupon in the sense that users have to purchase the product through ReplyBuy, rather than use the text message as a flat discount and buy from the vendor. That’s all fine and dandy, but I’m also a fan of the (really) little guy. So here we have a tale of two startups. Granted, smartphone sales are crashing the mobile phone party at an alarmingly increasing rate. The logical extension of that is to bring e-commerce into the equation. Milo.com sweetens its product listings with coupons.
Milo.com, a startup that lets shoppers see online which products are available on the shelves of local stores, is giving users even more reason to go shopping– it’s adding coupons to its service. Shopping deals seem to be a big focus among location-based services. Facebook, for example, just announced that retailers can offer deals through its Places service. But Milo founder and chief executive Jack Abraham argued that the payoff from those deals isn’t obvious, since shoppers will often only see the deals after they’ve already checked into a location. In other words, those coupons may not bring in new customers, he said. People browse Milo, on the other hand, at the most valuable time to retailers — when they’re thinking about buying something but haven’t decided where to buy it from.
So if you’re searching for a specific toy, stores can lure you in with a coupon for that toy. Palo Alto, Calif. For Milo, this is more than just a nice addition. [top image via Flickr/dmdonahoo] Click it and book it: MerchantCircle brings appointment making online. The days of having to know somebody who knows somebody to get an appointment at the local chi-chi salon could be over, as using the online ecosystem as a way to make your life easier and find deals rapidly becomes localized. International business network MerchantCircle today launched its new Appointment Scheduler, a free, easy-to-use online tool for customers to book appointments with local businesses online. Founded in 2005, over 1.4 million merchants currently use the MerchantCircle network to upload pictures, blog, create coupons and newsletters, and connect with customers and other merchants.
In addition, regional consumers can find more than 20 million business listings through the company’s homepage or major search engines in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. More than 1.4 million members of the site can now set up appointments online, with businesses then receiving email notifications that a meeting has been booked and a confirmation is required. Dealspl.us ups the ante for holiday shoppers looking to make money as they save. User-generated shopping site dealspl.us is upping the ante for the holiday shopping season, on Wednesday it’s launching a Money Makers Program that will allow deal and coupon enthusiasts to earn money for each deal or coupon they share, the company told VentureBeat.
The site has also launched an easily installable dealspl.us Widget that allows users using Money Makers to monetize their websites or blogs with relevant, money-saving coupons. Both moves are a sign that competition in an increasingly crowded online coupon space is heating up, as cash-strapped users become savvier about finding deals on everything from groceries to haute couture clothing online. The San Jose, Calif. -based dealspl.us is a user-generated social shopping site where consumers come to find, share and talk about great deals and coupons from thousands of retailers. Launched in 2006, the site draws an average of 3 million users per month, with 319,696 deals and 149,650 coupons shared thus far. Shopping startup Retailigence stocks up with DFJ and Dave McClure. Shopping startupRetailigence says it’s creating a “bridge” connecting real-world “brick-and-mortar” stores with mobile and web applications.
Now the Palo Alto, Calif. company has enlisted some well-known investors to fund its efforts: Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund. Retailigence takes inventory data from both sophisticated software (like that offered by SAP and NetSuite) and basic spreadsheets, then makes the information available through an application programming interface (API) to developers of location-based apps, shopping apps, and so on.
So if a location check-in app is trying to lure you to a nearby store with the promise of a hot new product, it can use Retailigence to track whether that product is actually in stock. In addition to DFJ and 500 Startups, ZIG Capital, Global Brain Corporation, and various angel investors participated in Retailigence’s $1.5 million seed round. The company was incubated at the Founder Institute. Superfish reels in $4M to go window shopping in your browser. Visual product search company Superfish has received $4 million in third round funding, the startup told VentureBeat Thursday, an infusion it says it will use to muscle up its market position and focus on developing its “visual DNA” search technology. The San Mateo, Calif., company was in stealth research mode for several years before rolling out its first prototype, Window Shopper, in April.
The Firefox and Internet Explorer browser add-on allows users to search for images instead of text to find a broad range of similar products across thousands of sites simultaneously. At this time, the company doesn’t offer add-ons for other browsers like Google Chrome, Safari. “The Superfish visual search system can take any image as a search query, analyze and convert that image into a series of vectors, and compare those vectors against our index of over 100 million images to find identical or similar matches within seconds,” Head of Product Joe Dew told VentureBeat.
This isn’t Pets.com: PetFlow scores $5M for automatic pet food delivery. New York-based PetFlow is aware of the stigma around pet-centered startups, but it believes it can avoid the fate of spectacular flameouts like Pets.com. The company announced today that it has landed $5 million in funding from Westwood Ventures. PetFlow offers automatic pet food delivery. The company offers flat-rate $4.95 shipping for any order over $20, and it offers simple tools to let you easily choose food, treats, litter, and other pet supplies.
Once you’ve built your order, you can schedule it to automatically ship to you every 2 to 14 weeks. The site has over 70 brands of pet food and treats (thankfully, it has all of my spoiled cat’s favorite stuff). PetFlow is definitely eating shipping costs to get large items shipped for $5, but co-founder Alex Zhardanovsky tells us that it’s not doing anything stupid like selling food below cost. Photo via Xuilla. Vipshop grabs $20M to expand flash sales site in China. Food Delivery Service GrubHub Raises $11 Million. Online food and restaurant delivery service GrubHub has raised an impressive $11 million in a Series C round of funding led by Benchmark Capital, an investment group that has also provided early funding for the likes of eBay, Twitter, Yelp and OpenTable.
Online consumers can use GrubHub's service to view menus, coupons and reviews, and place orders from roughly 13,000 restaurants in the U.S. via its website and mobile apps (available for both the iPhone [iTunes link] and Android devices). The startup currently operates in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, D.C., San Diego, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, Denver and Boulder, and plans to double the number of cities it serves in 2011. The new capital will be used to further build out GrubHub's online and mobile offerings, as well as its marketing and sales team.
Image courtesy of Geoff Peters 604. Amazon to Acquire Diapers.com for $540 Million [REPORT] ComScoreレポート：第3四半期のオンライン小売は好調。年末商戦も期待できそうだ. Walmart Follows Groupon Model On Facebook. Ning Gets Its Groupon On. 【EC事業者必見】米国のECサイトは続々実践！6つのソーシャルメディア活用術！:GaiaXソーシャルメディア ラボ. 【データ】Facebookの1シェアの価値を公開！Levi'sに続くソーシャルコマース成功事例、年間160億円のチケットを販売するEventbrite。:GaiaXソーシャルメディア ラボ. VCs get onboard with design-it-yourself offerings. 買い物をソーシャルに楽しむShopSocially、シリーズAで$1.1Mを獲得. 楽天と百度が中国にオンラインモールLekutianを開店.