Follow me on twitter: @michaelslevy

Well, work and twitter finally got the best of me: it turns out I'm now tweeting instead of blogging... Follow me at @michaelslevy to keep up with the latest social commerce, e-commerce trends and news, curated by your truly :)

A few stats about runaway success Groupon.com

According to its CEO Andrew Mason, straight from the TechCrunch CrunchUp (wow):

• 50% gross margin
• Launched in November 2008
• A year ago today, active in 5-6 cities
• Now running in 170 cities in 22 countries
• Over 1,000 employees now
• About 12 million people getting daily email. Adding 2 million a month
• 97% of businesses featured want to be featured again
• Breakage rate is probably around 10%, though Groupon doesn’t directly track it

TechCrunch Social Commerce Panel videos, feat. Groupon, LivingSocial, Payvment, gWallet, Eventbrite, Zong

TechCrunch's last Summer CrunchUp was all abour Social commerce: social currency, social savings, social coupons and social recommendations... See all about it here.

Study says Social Commerce pays off

Via the excellent Exciting Commerce blog:

"Unfortunately there are still too few scientific studies on networking effects in e-commerce. Understandable though, due to limited opportunities to make direct comparisons.

All the more exciting that a new study has been released (PDF) from France and the US with the title “Deriving Value from Social Commerce Networks”, whose results have been recently published in the Journal of Marketing Research. The study examines what happens when merchants begin to network with each other."

Download the study here.

Read the whole article at Exciting Commerce here.

Le Web Paris '09 social commerce / e-commerce highlights

Here's my personal selection of e-commerce / social commerce moments from this year's LeWeb conference worth checking out, pulled-up straight from the Ustream feed of the event!

1. From the Main Stage: Always insightful business, company culture and customer service anecdotes and advice from Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

2. From the Start up Competition:

- Storific, a set of tools enabling online retailers and their employees to manage their customer communications and promotions on twitter and Facebook in one centralized/shared dashboard (jump to 22:41 for their demo)

- Shutl, a cool service from the UK, turning competing courrier and express delivery providers into a real-time web service for online retailers, enabling online shoppers of retailers using the service to have their on-line purchases delivered within 90 minutes of checking out or selecting a 1 hour delivery window at a time of their convenience – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! (jump to 33:42 for their demo)

- Not e-commerce but still I had to plug them, they're awesome: Tigerlily, a CMS-like Facebook app to manage your Facebook Pages, so cool (jump to 28:53 for their demo)

3. Here's a way too short roundtable, with low-interest questions and answers, on "How has the real-time web changed your e-commerce business?", with Zappos (USA), Vente Privée (FR), Otto (DE). Too bad, the topic was well worth exploring fo real.

4. And here's a little bonus, Gary V's intervention, about "crushing it" and giving a crap about your customers, before the conference's closing remarks. Always hard-hitting and hilarious. Enjoy!

Can you make the cut? Luxury brand launches: online and by invitation exclusively

Von Rosen one ups closed-community shopping websites...

This 1-year old German luxury fashion label has launched a special business: it's online, with limited collections, and by invitation only.

If David Von Rosen has not invited you, well... you can send him a request, telling him who you are and what you do, and he will decide if you're worth being one of his customers...

“All customers have the right to choose a brand,” Von Rosen told Style.com. “We wanted to turn the perspective around and choose our customers. We don’t want money as the only hurdle to exclusivity. Yes, we’ve turned down people who’ve applied, like a good club would.”



A few figures:
- 10,000 requests since starting the site a year ago,
- has granted access to only 1,500 people,
- has sold about 4,000 items, average price of a sweater is €450, or about $675, shipping not included.

How's that for exclusivity?

I sent him a request... Will I make the cut? And can you?

UPDATE:
Hey I made it! :)
Here's the email I received in answer to my membership request:

"Dear Michael S. Levy,

You have asked for access to VONROSEN. Thank you for your interest.

Our customers rely on a high standard of exclusivity. In the interest of our existing customer base, we are only able to grant access to a limited number of enquirers.
Unfortunately, we are not acquainted personally. However, you have us interested by your professional background and the information that we have found about you. We believe that you fit VONROSEN.

VONROSEN brings you the best quality and timeless-urban designs. The VONROSEN-signet is individually engraved with your monogram. As a fashion label from Berlin, we produce exclusively in Italy and Germany. Also, you will never encounter any sales or discounts at VONROSEN. For all orders, including gifts and/or gift certificate purchases, we receive before Dec. 31, we offer you an extended money back guarantee (send back by Jan. 14., 2010). With code XXXXXXXX you can now log on at vonrosen.com.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Welcome to VONROSEN!

Yours Sincerely,
David"

Man, I feel so hip right now... See you later, I have some shopping to attend to :)

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

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."

Be Your Own Social Media Director | via Practical Ecommerce

In this edition of "Ecommerce Know-How", Kevin Patrick Allen from Practical Ecommerce shares three roles the owner and de facto social media director of an ecommerce company can play and how, by incorporating those practices within his business, he can better reach the new age of consumers online.

French private shopping club Vente-privée.com, an e-commerce European success worth USD 1.5 billion

From Techcrunch Europe, an update on private shopping clubs in the US (a.k.a. closed-community shopping websites), on the interest from e-commerce power players on this awesome business model... and on the mother of all private shopping clubs, Vente Privée.

"TechCrunch Europe thus understands, from some very good sources, that Gilt, Amazon and eBay are all actively looking at acquisitions in the European private shopping club space. The price for Vente Privée alone is being talked about in terms of a $1.5 billion sale. Some sources even put the figure at between $2 billion and $4 billion.

One VC I spoke to said Vente Privee was “very attractive” to the big ecommerce beasts like Amazon and eBay, and a roll-up of these types of clubs is potentially in the offing across Europe. Another said “It would be a good move – depending on price – from either Amazon or eBay.”

Read the whole article here.

"Faceshopping": Carrefour launches exclusive live shopping deal application on Facebook

Here's a little social commerce app we designed and launched at Publicis K4 for Carrefour, the #2 retailer in the world.

It's called "Faceshopping" and it offers daily shopping deals for Facebook members only.

Launched on September 22nd, it is the first application of its kind.

Reviews are starting to show up accross the Web...

Go ahead and try it for yourself...
All of your comments and ideas are welcome, so we can make it better over time.

(A special shout-out to the fine folks at KRDS for the great work!)

Gilt Groupe CEO Susan Lyne Interview at Shop.org

A very interesting interview of the CEO of one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in the US, based on the private sale model born in France, during the Shop.org annual summit which ran from September 21-23, 2009 in Las Vegas.

Susan Lyne talks about why the Gilt Groupe website is so addictive to shoppers, how retail is just repackaged entertainment, and announces a new venture...

Read it all here.

Top 10 Web 2.0 Activities for Ecommerce | via GetElastic

"Retailers often wonder what Web 2.0 / social media activities to be involved with, so this post ranks what I believe are the top 10 Web 2.0 activities for ecommerce based on their business impact."

1-800-FLOWERS.COM Sets Up Shop Inside Facebook

"In another testament to the notion that Facebook is quietly turning into the internet on top of the Internet, online flower retailer 1-800-Flowers.com has launched an e-commerce store inside its Facebook Page."

On step further into True Social Commerce after launching their Alvenda shopping widget...

Once again, 1-800-Flowers leads the way in this type of ventures.

Can't wait when Facebook launches their proprietary payment platform. There are going to be a LOT of shops popping up WITHIN Facebook...

From Techcrunch.

... And Zappos launches my.zappos

Check out my.zappos.com:

- Add stuff to your closet

- Share items with friends

- See what your friends think!

At eBags.com, video and social marketing go hand in glove - via Internet Retailer

"At eBags.com, about 1,700 unique visitors view videos each day and the retailer distributes its videos liberally across a wide variety of marketing channels, including e-mail campaigns, affiliate programs and on various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Videos from eBags.com posted on YouTube since last fall have been watched by almost 19,000 unique visitors."

eBags.com's videos are product demos, hosted by category/product managers, with the occasional event video (overstock sale, brand advertising or the 10 millionth bag delivered...)

One cool feature is the 'BUY NOW' button in the video player control panel, which enables viewers to browse product thumbnails from the featured product to help jumpstart the shopping process. The video center and player are provided by LiveClicker.

The whole story from Internet Retailer is here.
And the eBags.com video section is here.

And hereunder the video of the 10 millionth bag delivered :

1-800-Flowers Claims First Retail Transaction Inside Facebook - via GetElastic

1-800-Flowers has embedded its e-commerce widget into its Facebook Fan Page, and goes down in history by claiming the first retail transaction within Facebook.

At 11:50 am EST on July 8, 2009, it sold a “Slice of Life” for $34.99.

The whole story from the GetElastic blog here.

Augmented Reality Video Social Shopping!

Augmented Reality meets Motion Capture meets Social Networking meets Online Shopping :)

Zugara, a California-based interactive marketing agency, has just released a new product called the "Webcam Social Shopper".

It's an online shopping application, which couples the features of Augmented Reality and Motion Capture. The Webcam Social Shopper app allows to seemingly hold articles of clothing up in front of yourself, while it tracks your movements so you can interact with the site's content when standing several feet away from your computer's controls. And it's Facebook Connect enabled, so you can share pictures of yourself wearing the reality-augmented clothing with your friends.

Here's a video demo from Zugara: