The M-commerce Challenge You may not have heard of Shopkick yet, but it’s one of the best examples of the dramatic changes facing retailers now. An application that runs on iPhones, Shopkick pays consumers “kickbucks” — reward coupons — just for checking in when they enter Best Buy, American Eagle, Macy’s, or other participating retailers. Additional kickbucks are available for performing particular actions — for example, scanning a poster on a store’s dressing room wall into the iPhone camera. The kickbucks can be redeemed for gift cards and donations to charitable causes. Moreover, when shoppers at Best Buy show their iPhones running Shopkick to the cashier, they receive instant discounts.
Easy Random CSS Backgrounds Update: Since I no longer rotate the header images on this site, I have updated this tutorial. Also, I figured I should set up an example page to show how this CSS + PHP tutorial works. You can check out the demo here: This article was prompted by a question asked on the Textpattern forum, regarding how to randomize CSS backgrounds. After googling around for a bit, and checking various forums for better solutions, I decided to just write up my own article on how I do it. Online holiday shopping bumps up The amount of money spent shopping online during the holiday season increased this year compared with last, say two recent reports, another sign of the Internet's continuing permeation of American life. SpendingPulse, a report from MasterCard, pegged the year-over-year rise at 15.4 percent. The report, released this week and covering the period from October 31 to December 24, looks at sales in the MasterCard payment network and combines those figures with survey-derived estimates of non-credit-card purchases. According to the report, apparel sales led the field among e-commerce categories, a sign, perhaps, that shoppers are becoming more comfortable with buying clothing sight unseen. Electronics also made a showing, and jewelry managed to log an increase as well. In general, the results show that the Web seems to be continuing on its way to becoming as American as apple pie--or the shopping mall.
120 Tips, Tricks, and Tuts from 2009 Worth your Time Now that we're down to the end of 2009, what were some of the best web development and design tutorials and articles from the year? We'll take a look at 120 of them! Jump to a Month January How to Build a Login System for a Simple Website In today's video tutorial, we'll be building a login system with PHP and MYSQL. Shopping Online via Cellphone for Holiday Gifts Shopping on cellphones and portable tablet computers like iPads accounted for about 5 percent of online sales in November, while last year mobile shopping sales were too insignificant to measure, according to Coremetrics, an e-commerce measurement service owned by Many more shoppers are using their phones to research items and compare prices before making purchases offline or on computers. “There were early adopters last year, but it’s absolutely real this year,” said Kelly O’Neill, director of industry marketing for ATG, which provides online and mobile commerce technology to retailers like and . And mobile shoppers are buying high-ticket items like diamond rings and cars, not just virtual goods and ring tones. On Dec. 12, ’s busiest mobile shopping day of the year, worldwide mobile sales nearly tripled from last year to $13 million, according to the company, which expects $1.5 billion in mobile sales this year. “It’s saving me time and saving me money,” Ms. English said.
30 Inspiring iPhone Application Websites Back in February we published a list of 50 Inspiring iPhone Application Websites showing some really inspiring app websites. Since great iPhone apps are always being launched and their websites are usualy beautiful and have a unique style, we decided to gather a new list for you. This time we followed your tips and included a small ‘about’ on each one of the apps. Once again, I have to say that I really like iPhone (and everything related to it) apps websites, their visuals are usualy simply awesome. They get your attention and before you notice, you’re already at the Apple Store. Template Language - SolidShops.com Template Language Introduction The Solid template language is based on the Twig template language, a very famous template engine that is fast and really flexible.
mCommerce: What You Can Learn From Amazon You may have heard the recent news that Amazon has topped $1 Billion in mobile commerce sales over the last 12 months. Though this figure may be highly exaggerated because it includes digital goods purchased for the uber-popular Kindle device, the announcement gets us hyped up on the potential of mobile commerce again. Judging by retweets and backlinks, Get Elastic readers enjoyed our recent posts on why you shouldn’t blindly copy Amazon, and 5 things Amazon does that everyone should consider doing. So in light of this news, today’s post examines 3 areas where Amazon excels in m-commerce. Personalization Amazon’s famous for personalizing the shopping experience of registered and non-registered users alike on the Web.