Viralogy

Pulling in nearly $11 million dollars last Thursday, Groupon’s Gap deal was by far one of the most popular and most publicized online ‘deals’ that the consumer market has seen in quite some time. In what looked like a frenzy at times with 534 Gap offers being sold a minute during the early stretch of it’s release on the daily deal site, the Groupon Gap campaign brought in $11 million dollars and and sold 445,000 vouchers for Gap all in one day. Groupon’s Gap deal was it’s first nationwide deal and is sure to set the wheels in motion for others.

It Wasn’t Just The Deal

While the deal itself was a bargain ($50.00 worth of Gap merchandise for $25.00), what made this offer explode and go viral was through the help of social media and technology. Through a combination of Digg’s, social networks Twitter & Facebook, along with an email announcement, Groupon was able to utilize their existing networks to expand the reach of the offer. (more…)

Personalized product recommendations can be done on any eCommerce website. As Darren Vengroff of Mashable points out, just about anyone can figure out how build an application that utilizes Facebook Social Graph to collect data for usage. He also points out, however, that not everyone knows how to leverage that data correctly - there is just too much information to be had.

The Problem for Personalization Tools (more…)

General vs. Social Recommendations – Getting More Personal

Ratings and reviews are consistently top-requested features by customers of ecommerce stores. In the last few years, huge companies such as Amazon have more than answered that call with sophisticated recommendation technology, and their answer has revolutionized the online shopping experience. Now consumers are able to not only see what others think of your products, but also see where else they can get the same product for lower prices. Being that online shoppers will believe customer recommendations over a company’s own brand and marketing message, this is a problem for many internet retailers. And this is where the new generation of social commerce – personalization tools – comes in to play. (more…)

A recent study by the Harvard Business Review shows that customers value self-service, whether online or at a kiosk, just as much as they value personal customer service.  The most important factor of the study is that “By and large, this indifference holds regardless of their age, demographic, issue type, or urgency.”

What this means for the brick-and-mortar

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(Note: the deployment of our equipment will happen next Monday November 24th, 2010. Please don’t download the App and use it before then!)

It’s been a while since we updated on our own progress, so we wanted to share some of the exciting things we’ve been doing, particularly a new project that is getting some decent traction.

Starting RewardMe

About 2 months ago, our team started to experiment with a side project called RewardMe, specifically a mobile app that uses gaming mechanics to get customers addicted to brick-and-mortar businesses. We wanted to take the success factors of FarmVille and apply it on the offline world. So we started working Rewardme in September. We finished the iPhone version of our app in a month, as well as our hardware design we give businesses.

Setting Milestones

Based on the Customer Development process, we decided that if we could convince 10 local businesses to launch with us and adjust their operations before we had anything tangible to show them, that would be enough validation for a viable business. Most of the ideas we had in the past took for ages for us to get a handful of business buy-ins since businesses don’t want to waste their time on unproven products. So with a goal of 10 in mind, we started to talk to businesses.

Huge Success

Surprisingly to us, after 1.5 months of customer development (part-time), we signed up 40 businesses to launch with us and 50+ moving forward in the pipeline. The places that signed up with us include Wahoo’s Fish Taco, Denny’s, Coco’s, Post Bagels, Chef Chu’s, and Coupa Cafe next to Stanford. We also have Togo’s, Johnny Rocket, Noah’s Bagels, and Extreme Pizza in the pipeline. That quadrupled our goal! That’s when we realized we potentially have a big hit in our hands that could change the industry.

Raising Money

We wanted to expand aggressively so we took this to the Band of Angels to raise a $600K round. We’ve already made it to their due diligence process (3 out of 100 startups) and we thought it’s a good time to reach out to other investors to see if anyone is interested in this potential big hit.

If you own a brick and mortar store, or are an angel investor who would like to participate and add value to this exciting startup, let us know!

Japanese clothes retailer Uniqlo understands that online shopping is no longer just about buying items. The new online customer is a social shopper motivated by emotion who looks for retailers that create positive experiences. Uniqlo’s new social commerce strategy captures the essence of this by making shopping fun with 2 basic tools: (more…)

With the success of deal sites like group-buying service GroupOn, brick-and-mortar retailers may find it useful to tie their deals and loyalty programs more closely to the web and mobile devices.

Recently, Discover, Barclays, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile announced that they would be working together to find a way to eventually eliminate debit and credit cards in favor of paying with smartphones. In the meanwhile, Verizon has put $400,000 into a mobile application called CardStar. (more…)