eBay with the coolness: interactive USA map of all Black Friday transactions !

ebay forays into physical retail and private sales

eBay announced plans to open "pop-up" boutiques in 12 cities across the USA in an effort to service holiday shopping.

Pop-up retail is IT right now...

Its first ephemeral store popped up on November 20, in a 5,500-square foot Manhattan location, and will close its doors on November 29.


Also, eBay has launched its very own closed-community event sales website, Fashion Vault... except it's not closed :)

Fashion Vault is open to all eBay members and offers free US shipping. As usual, sales events last for two to three days only, and quantities are limited. Currently on sale: DKNY.

Cool e-commerce & social commerce info this week

Argh. Can't bring myself to post all this info I found this week...
So here's my very own weekly review of things worth noting:

Thanksgiving / Black Friday: US online retail picking up?
According to Mint.com
According to Forrester
According to ComScore

eBay targeting $500m GMS by mobile users this year!
That's a lot. And they're launching a new app called 'Deals Today'.

Woot! launches deals.woot! and it's awesome
A wooters-powered deal finding community website

Milo.com: a very well designed product finder driving traffic to local stores
Complete with price comparison, real-time inventory in stores near you, and consumer reviews straight from the stores' websites. It's Milo.com.

Noteworthy social media tactics by major retailers
Toys'R Us's cool Facebook-only Black Friday catalog and mystery deals campaign

IKEA's genius Facebook campaign:


That's it for this week!

xoxo

Michael.

Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: E-commerce - Via ReadWriteWeb

In this post, ReadWriteWeb reviews the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends:
- Advances in recommendations technology,
- The explosive growth of social media and social commerce
- The slow but promising emergence of mobile commerce

Social Media ROI: Socialnomics

Design treasures from Amazon

Commerce Search: a search engine for your e-commerce website, courtesy of Google -finally!

Google has just released Commerce Search, their search product for e-commerce websites.

If it's as efficient as Google Search, then maybe it is worth testing, to see if its conversion rate is better than the current search engine you have implemented on your website...

Usage cost is based on the number of products/items (SKUs) in your data feed and the number of search queries entered on your site each year.

I'm looking for e-commerce sites that have switched and are testing it out. If it is your case, drop me a note!

Here's a video from Google explaining the basics:

Storenvy.com, the social store community, is live and it's awesome.

Gorgeous design.
DIY stores.
Community-enabled shopping features.

I love it.

Check it out: http://www.storenvy.com

"On one side, Storenvy is a series of online stores run by independent sellers. "The little guys." Stores are fully customizable, with a feature-rich store admin panel, and completely FREE.

On the other side, Storenvy is a network of shoppers who can shop across all of those stores at once, interacting with each other by watching what notes and ratings they leave on products and stores throughout the site. It's like following your friends and style icons on a shopping spree, watching what they pick up and what they actually buy."

E-commerce deals update: Zappos, Ruelala.com

Well, it turns out Amazon will shell out $1.2b instead of the anticipated $928b to purchase Zappos, according to today's official press release.


Also, GSI Commerce Inc., the blueprint for PIXmania's e/merchant business I helped build, purchased US-based Retail Convergence, owner of Smartbargains.com and Ruelala.com, a 1,5 year old closed-community shopping website... for a whopping $350m. Official news release is available here. GSI Commerce now has private sales capabilities to round out its complete array of e-commerce services (customer acquisition and online marketing, storefront design, order fulfillment, customer support, technology and infrastructure, fraud prevention... you know the drill).

It has been a Happy Halloween for Zappos and RueLaLa :)