Tag: Shopping

The Future Of Retail Won’t Be So Good For Consumers | TechCrunch

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Shopping — both online and offline — is a great luxury of the modern era. People can enjoy a great selection at lower prices and shop from the convenience of their home, while still having the option of going to a local mall or retailer to peruse the aisles for instant gratification.

But consumers can’t have their cake and eat it, too, and the retail world as we know it today can no longer give it to them.

Retail Will Change Forever

Technology is killing the traditional retailer. Victims will include those selling commodity brand-name-type products like consumer electronics, appliances, sporting equipment and furniture, and may even include those selling consumable goods.

Price wars, combined with technology shifts, will eliminate national, regional and local competitors who just can’t keep up. Many of today’s vendors will cease to exist as online shopping takes larger shares of all sorts of markets. Just look at the trends in companies like Best Buy, Staples, Radio Shack and Sears.

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Shopping Ads Test: Is Google Stealing Traffic Again? | Small Biz Trends

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

How would you feel about paying more for your Shopping Ads on branded search terms?

A new Google Shopping test, spotted recently by Andy Taylor at RKG, actually directs branded search traffic to a Google Shopping results page, rather than back to your website or your own Shopping Ads.

In this test, the Anthropologie shopping results are organized by category in the top right. The “Shop from anthropologie on Google” link takes the user to a Google Shopping page. In fact, clicking on any content (images or categories) in that ad box will deliver the searcher to the category on Google Shopping, not the Anthropologie website.

In the example RKG found, at least, all of the products on the results page were offered for sale by Anthropologie, the brand from the original query. However, Ginny Marvin at Search Engine Land found this additional test result – querying “David Yurman” and drilling down into the “Rings” category surfaced shopping results from multiple retailers:

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Personalized Shopping Startup The Hunt Adds Tyra Banks As Investor | TechCrunch

~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

The Hunt, a website designed to help shoppers find specific items to buy online, has added Tyra Banks to its list of high-profile backers.

This is not the first time Banks has expressed interest in the tech startup community. The former model added an investment sector to the Tyra Banks Company, Fierce Capital LLC, and told Betabeat she would have liked to have invested in startups such as Uber and Airbnb when they first launched.

The amount of Banks’ investment was not disclosed, but The Hunt CEO Tim Weingarten tells TechCrunch the money will go to improving functionality and user engagement. While Weingarten also declined to give specifics of the direction The Hunt is heading, he says users can expect to see new developments within the next few months. Prior to its most recent investment, The Hunt raised $2 million from Javelin Venture Partners and another $700,000 from Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary (Madonna’s manager) and Rohan Oza.

Weingarten’s website functions through “hunts” that users post to find items they want to purchase. Weingarten tells me 75 percent of the time that a user is satisfied with an answer and declares the hunt “found.” However, this majority is solved by the minority of users — 15 percent of registered users aid in others’ hunts. With over 300,000 registered users and  250,000 products added to submitted hunts, a simple and generalized calculation comes out to an average of 55 hunts from each person in that percentage. That’s not necessarily representative of what actually happens, but it’s still a lot of hunts to be solved.

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