Lucy Weiland is a recent graduate of Western Washington University, majoring in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. She's also the Content Marketing Manager at ZippyCart, a Seattle native, an avid consumer of all things mango, and something of a runner. She considers laughter as necessary as blinking. She hopes it occurs nearly as frequently as blinking, too. Website:
Lucy Weiland has written 19 articles so far, you can find them below.
Looking for that perfect holiday gift but can’t afford the full retail price? Want to know what top designers, tech giants and celebrities are dreaming of this year? Or maybe you need to reward yourself–since about 60 percent of shoppers admit they will buy themselves a gift this holiday season. If you’re in the NYC area, head over to 404 Park Avenue South between now and November 10 to check out eBay’s and designer Jonathan Adler’s new “Inspiration Shop.”
The storefront was unveiled on Friday, and it allows passersby to act on their impulses. Think of it as modified window shopping–except this time you actually make a purchase, even though you never enter the store. Potential shoppers walk by, and a name, product or pattern catches their eye. They read a little bit about it and raise their smartphones to the display. There, if they’ve downloaded the eBay app, they can scan any of the available QR codes to find similar items on eBay, allowing for price comparison. There are about 200 million eBay listings available on the app.
The window displays feature exclusive products selected by fashion favorites like Betsey Johnson, Charlotte Ronson, Molly Sims and more. It isn’t only designers, though: actors, editors, photographers and musicians were among those asked for their wishlist items. Jonathan Adler contributed his bold patterned designs to provide a visually exciting background for the showcase.
“Consumers today expect to shop how they want, when they want – and mobile technology is blurring the lines between online and offline retail to meet this demand. The Inspiration Shop brings to life how eBay enables people to immediately act on their passion for shopping in this new commerce environment.”
46.7 percent of surveyed shoppers plan to buy gifts online this year, completing about 36 percent of their total shopping via ecommerce solutions. Since about 48 percent of shoppers say they want to be able to purchase desired items immediately, and 46 percent like to browse window displays to get ideas, the eBay Inspiration Shop seems right on target. Consumers’ biggest issues with brick-and-mortar shopping, especially around the holidays, helped inspire (yes, inspire) the concept for the Inspiration Shop. A survey found that 57 percent of consumers hate long lines, 54 percent despise stores with too many shoppers, 52 percent are deterred by commission-driven or otherwise invasive sales people, and 65 percent feel there isn’t enough selection or availability in physical stores.
Although a majority of shoppers–62 percent–hope to spend less on their holiday gift buying this year, consumers are turning to digital shopping carts more frequently. E-tailers should focus on offering incentives like free shipping and discounts, and make sure their brand is top-of-mind so that people will spread the word about their store via social media. That way, the difficulties of the economy don’t have to be quite so difficult for all ecommerce solutions.
With a combination of impulse buys and comparison shopping, such as can be found at eBay’s Inspiration Shop, consumers and online retailers alike can get what they want out of this holiday season. What do you think about the Inspiration Shop and its limited engagement? Would you like to see something like this in your area, and in a more permanent capacity?
The world of mobile gaming is expanding all the time, along with mobile commerce and, well, everything mobile. There are tips and tricks all over for improving your mobile-optimized website and ensuring customer satisfaction and ease of use with your m-commerce platform. Everyone is getting involved, and with good reason–10% of visits to ecommerce websites now take place on mobile devices. New tablets and smartphones are high on everyone’s list for the holidays. And gaming isn’t just for PCs or consoles anymore. The rate of mobile gaming has increased from 8% to 38% of gamers since 2009.
For the first time, mobile gaming is making Guinness World Records history. The first mobile gamer to be entered into the Guinness Book of World Records has been announced. Twenty-one year old Philipp Shneckenburger, an accountant in Switzerland, earned a high score of 6,133,889 playing Mega Jump. In an e-mail exchange with the company, we found he is reportedly not your typical gamer: “It’s funny because I normally don’t play video or mobile games,” he said of the achievement. But that may just go to show that mobile gaming is accessible to everyone.
While visiting the United States about a month ago, Schneckenburger’s American cousin showed him Mega Jump. He took to the game quickly and downloaded it for himself when he returned to Switzerland. Then, between September 28 and October 3, he participated in the Mega Jump high-score competition set up by Kiip (a mobile gaming platform with real-world incentives to win) and Guinness World Records, beating out about 200,000 other players to take the winning title.
Kiip and Guinness plan to team up for similar events in the future, giving all gamers the opportunity to break records and earn a place in history. (Schneckenburger’s achievement will be recognized in the 2012 Gamer’s Edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, which will be coming out in January.) Kiip gamers earn nearly 2 million achievements daily, and players have the opportunity to automatically submit high scores to be pitted against others for a world record.
Kiip CEO Brian Wong is excited about the record and the partnership:
“We’ve truly upped the ante on what players around the world can now strive for; but it’s closer in reach than ever before in history. This truly changes how we perceive the significance of mobile gaming today.”
In other mobile gaming news, Zynga has just announced its next move: a step away from Facebook and toward its own independent platform. Project Z would allow Zynga to get away from Facebook’s rules and form its own, but it also potentially compromises the number of users and the amount of exposure. Many of the new games Zynga has released have been HTML5, which seems to be the wave of the future for mobile gaming. This all comes as Zynga prepares for its IPO.
The release of the iPhone 4S, with graphics comparable to that of the iPad 2, is also good news for mobile gaming. The Gaming Center app now lets users connect with friends and get suggestions on games, as well as offers more achievements. The screen size has remained the same at 3.5 inches, but facial recognition technology may offer some interesting developments in the coming months and years.
Where would we be without the ability to play Zuma on the subway? Scrabble as we cross the street? Mafia Wars in a lunch meeting? (Just kidding about that last one. Sort of.) We’d be bored; that’s where we’d be. As we gear up for the holiday season, keep these mobile developments in mind and consider the gift of game.
As if you needed reminding, Halloween is almost upon us. Yes, the time of year where you make some pretty valuable decisions: “Do I give out fun-size candy bars, or regular size? What about… king size?” “How many jack-o-lanterns can I carve before I can’t fit any more pumpkin guts in my compost?” “Should I be the Wicked Witch of the West again, or something different?” There’s another important question you should be sure not to forget:
“What the heck is my kid going to be for Halloween this year?”
Well, if you don’t want to showcase your kid in a predictable, pricey and pre-made costume, and s/he doesn’t want to be a sheet ghost for the third year in a row, consider something a little more modern. We compiled some technology and internet-related costumes for a fresh approach on the holiday.
1. Smartphones, Tablets, MP3 Players…
These are the kind of costumes you can do with a cardboard box if you’re crafty. To determine the design, you’ll have to figure out what product you want to make–Kindle Fire? Zune? iPod nano? Droid? iPad 2? Maybe the brand new iPhone 4S? So many to choose from.
Honor the achievements of Steve Jobs with an iPhone 4S costume: paint a thin box (not so thin that your child can’t fit inside and get his head through) white, add your Home button, and draw the screen in with your desired background and selected apps. Don’t forget the camera and Apple logo on the back. If you’re feeling ambitious you can write out all the fine print that’s there, too. Bonus points if your child carries around his or her own phone and plays the ringtone at various intervals throughout the night. (Make sure you keep that in check, though. We all know how annoying it is to hear the same person’s phone ringing repeatedly.)
2. Memes
It’s possible that your kids are more familiar with memes than you are. You’ll need to be the voice of reason if you bring this idea up and your kid suggests something age-inappropriate, like the angry man who is screaming the first two letters of a very bad word. Probably that wouldn’t be the best idea for your 11 year old. But there are plenty of fairly innocent or easily made innocent memes, like Hipster Kitty and Troll Face, that your child could imitate without problems. People spend hours on the net looking at these things, so your kid is sure to get a lot of compliments from people who are in the know!
3. QR Code Easy and fun. You can do this on a t-shirt, sweatshirt, box, whole outfit, whatever. Just make it white, get some black pens or paint, and splotch away! Try to make your splotches vaguely square-shaped, though, so the child doesn’t get mistaken for a Dalmatian or something. You could also print out your own QR codes using a QR code generator–send people surfing on the web all night this Halloween! For extra fun, get your kid’s sibling or best friend to dress up as a smartphone. (This would also make a great couple’s costume idea, by the way.)
4. Internet/Tech Figureheads
You’ll want to use your best judgment to decide how a Steve Jobs costume would come off, but there are plenty of other people to choose from. Go for FB mogul Mark Zuckerberg (a dark t-shirt and hoodie with some jeans is pretty anonymous, so consider a Facebook logo on the shirt, or go the easy route and fashion an employee name tag) or Microsoft founder Bill Gates (glasses, smooth short hair, collared shirt underneath a sweater, and a name tag or Windows logo mug). If you want to go the mascot/logo/commercials route, consider the Mac and/or PC guys, the Twitter bird, or even our very own Zippy, the curious orange guy you see on our pages!
(If you or your child dress up as Zippy, please, please send pictures! You’d just wear all orange and carry around a magnifying glass with a shopping cart drawn on it. We’d love to see it.)
5. When In Doubt, Go For The Classics
It’s always cute to make fun of the technology of the past. Dress up your kid as a late 80s/early 90s CEO with a laughably huge cell phone! Dig up and hollow out that ancient iMac or PC and use it as a candy basket. Or, go back to the giant cardboard box and craft an old PC, or giant NASA-like vintage supercomputer. Cardboard box robots are always in fashion, too. Use your imagination, and have a fun, safe, techie Halloween!
Macys.com is partnering up with a software company that’s looking to change the way consumers feel about shopping for clothes online. The True Fit SaaS asks for body type, size and brands of clothing the consumer already owns that fit well, height, and weight. There’s no need to break out the measuring tape for this. It can then analyze how well a style and size of clothing will fit and provide a 1-5 rating on the suitability of any given item. Macys.com is using True Fit for its Denim Finder jeans section of the website.
“Macy’s is a recognized industry leader, committed to implementing the newest technological advancements that will resonate with our customers. [...] By partnering with True Fit, we are able to provide a unique online shopping experience that brings a new level of personalization and service to customers that shop macys.com.”
True Fit has plans for future partnerships with other ecommerce solutions, and this brings more good news for consumers who like the technology–you only need one log-in. The same log-in will work across all partnered online stores, so you won’t have to enter your information more than once.
Only about 10% of all clothing and accessory purchases are made online. One of the reasons for this is, of course, that you can’t try things on before throwing them in your shopping cart. Consumers worry about purchasing the wrong size or whether the item will flatter them the way it does the mannequin. Sure, there are decent return policies, but the time it takes to order, ship, receive, try on, return, and wait for a refund or exchange… well, all that can be skipped with a trip to the mall’s physical fitting rooms. So how successful might True Fit be, given that similar technologies have launched without much buzz?
In 2009, MyShape.com premiered a personal shopping solution. It asked for some measurements, assumed the rest, and predicted size, fit, and flattery level for each item for every shopper. With nearly $23 million in funding in its first two years, all predictions pointed to success. And while a visit to their homepage promises the new 2011 website is coming “summer of 2011,” it’s now fall, and they’re rumored to have gone out of business following financial issues.
Fits.me is a European personal fit technology that asks for customers’ measurements and then uses a bio-robotic model to apply the measurements. Consumers can then “try on” clothes and see how they might fit based on the information given. Fits.me seems to be faring better than MyShape–CNBC named it one of the 20 breakout brands for 2011, and earlier this year it launched a fembot to meet consumer needs.
Given the ever-changing nature of technology, only time will tell if True Fit is truly a good fit (we couldn’t resist) for ecommerce. Consumers can test it out on the Macy’s website and see for themselves. Maybe a new pair of jeans can go down next to tablets on your list of great gifts for the holiday season.
As the world gears up for Q4, ecommerce solution managers have bigger things on their minds than managing backlogged accounting work. It’s a time to look at the present and forward, focus on marketing, and daydream about the holiday feasts to come. (Okay, that should be restricted to your break time… but who can help themselves, really?) You don’t want to get stuck wallowing through QuickBooks, worrying about human error and the cost of the time it takes. But how can you get around that obligation? Webgility has a few ideas. We talked to Marketing Manager Brenda Le to get some insight on the possibilities.
So what exactly does Webgility do for online stores?
Webgility provides eCommerce and QuickBooks integration software for online businesses. Our flagship product, eCommerceConnector (eCC), is a desktop app that integrates your online store with QuickBooks, shipping processors, payment processors, etc. so you can manage your entire online business from one central application. We also have a mobile app, eCC Mobile, that connects with your online store so you can manage your store activity and performance on the go. We’re QuickBooks Gold certified, and work with numerous shopping carts and marketplaces and major shipping providers. So instead of being caught up in the day-to-day tasks, online sellers can use eCC and eCC Mobile to increase their operational efficiency, giving them time to focus on other aspects of their business.
What is eCC, and what makes it so great?
eCC streamlines and automates your business operations by connecting your online store, QuickBooks, shipping and payment processors.
Many online businesses face these challenges, which involves a lot of man hours and incur costs:
Processing shipping involves manually transferring data back and forth between your online store and shipping processor.
Entering orders into QuickBooks is done manually, so for larger orders, this could take a long time to complete.
Keeping track of inventory is challenging, especially when you have multiple stores.
eCC eliminates the redundant work that could lead to data entry errors. With eCC, you can sync your orders, customers, products and inventory between your eCommerce management systems. eCC automatically downloads your online orders, generates shipping labels, creates sales receipts, invoices, etc. in QuickBooks, and updates the order status on your online store. eCC will also update your inventory and customer details. For a full list of our features, visit http://www.webgility.com/quickbooks-integration-feature-list.php
eCC supports over 25 shopping cart and marketplace platforms (Magento, BigCommerce, 3dcart, Pinnacle Cart, Volusion, Amazon, eBay, etc.), all PC editions of QuickBooks (Pro, Premier, Enterprise and Point of Sale), popular shipping processors (Endicia, FedEx, UPS, and Stamps.com), and major payment processors (Authorize.net, PayPal, and QuickBooks Merchant Service). For a full list of our compatibility, visit http://www.webgility.com/ecommerce-connector-compatibility.php
How did you guys get started?
Webgility was founded in 2007 by Parag Mamnani, who has over 11 years of experience in the technology and eCommerce industry. Working closely with many eCommerce companies at his previous jobs at Gate6 (a web design and interactive company) and Amazon.com, he noticed that many of them were taking a long time manually entering their store data between multiple software. A strong believer in eliminating redundancy through software, Parag started Webgility and developed eCC. During the first year, he put together a team of developers to build eCC to be QuickBooks-certified, and partnered with top eCommerce software providers including Intuit, X-Cart, Magento, Endicia and Stamps.com. Today, Webgility has thousands of customers worldwide.
What size stores best fit the service you offer?
We work with a broad range of customers, from startups to large eCommerce companies that process thousands of orders a month across multiple online channels.
How has the explosion in mobile web and apps affected your business?
The explosion of the mobile web and apps has given us an opportunity to provide mobile services to online merchants. We provide a free iPhone app, eCC Mobile, for eCommerce merchants to manage their online store on the go. Our website is also optimized for mobile visitors.
Technology is constantly changing. What’s the future look like for Webgility and eCC?
We’ve more than doubled our customer base and staff in the last 12 months, and the growth is only accelerating. We’ve formed partnerships with leaders in the space, including Intuit, Magento, BigCommerce, Pinnacle Cart, Endicia, FedEx and UPS, and continue to expand the product feature set. We see tremendous growth in our core products and have lots of exciting new technology integrations on our roadmap.
What’s a typical day like in the Webgility office?
Webgility is a close-knit, cross-regional family. We’re headquartered in San Francisco, CA and have a Development and Support Center in Indore, India. Even though we’re separated by regions and time zones, we’re able to work effectively and maintain a clear communication line. It’s an open-door policy here: if you have any questions, you can always directly ping the person for help.
A typical day at Webgility:
The Sales and Support team is always online and on the phone helping customers.
The Marketing team is busy with creative ideas for our website, emails and social channels.
The Tech team is launching new features to our products and all our internal systems constantly.
We have frequent team meetings where we bounce around ideas and come up with creative business strategies. These are open forums: every idea and any comment is taken into consideration.
We work hard and play hard. There are movie events showing the latest blockbusters from Bollywood and Hollywood. There are karaoke parties, where some members showcase their vocal talent. You can challenge some to a game of miniature golf in the office, and hang out at the bean bag lounge area during our regular happy hour.
One of the most common reasons for shopping cart abandonment is that people fear high shipping costs. Customers are often tempted to look up where they can get the same product in a retail store, and consequently overlook the additional costs implicit in in-person purchasing. They don’t often consider how much gas they will use, or even have a way of properly estimating that cost. Visible Delivery calculates the distance between a shopper’s home address and the nearest store where their products are available for purchase, and contrasts the shipping cost with the total cost of driving (right down to the MPG of their vehicle). The idea is that when people see how much they’ll really be spending on their own “delivery costs,” the shipping charge seems the better option. We talked to Visible Delivery’s founder, Dave Bell, to find out more about this smartly unique service.
What is Visible Delivery?
Visible Delivery offers an eCommerce solution to increase website conversions by reducing cart abandonment rates. It’s the world’s first & only eCommerce Real Delivery Price Calculator, reducing shopping cart abandonment. And it drastically increases visitor conversion rates.
How does it work?
Our application runs in the background of a website and queries the end-customer delivery address & basket items, then makes a real time virtual route map, which displays directly in the cart. This map displays a time & cost comparison between buying those same items in person from local retailers, and the delivery price charged by the website.
What gave you the idea for the company? What was your motivation?
Visible Delivery was founded by technology entrepreneur, Dave Bell. After running several successful eCommerce websites and becoming increasingly familiar with streamlined operations & time-management, he set out to see if there was a way to visualise the true cost of customer delivery charges using mapping data. The benefits of such a solution would be that online stores could provide a valid comparison to retail outlets when selling the same goods. Using simple mathematics combining factors such as travel time, fuel prices and shortest route finders, it became clear that such a calculation could help offset the one main inhibitor to online sales vs. retail sales – delivery costs.
How do retailers and ecommerce solutions incorporate your service into their site?
We currently support three carts (Volusion, X-Cart & Magento), with details on how to install each here: http://www.visibledelivery.com/carts.html. [We’re] also actively developing other cart support and listening to customer requests in order to prioritise.
Any current clients?
Yes, since our recent launch we’ve had over 200 online stores sign up.
Is your service available for clients worldwide?
At present we support UK & USA addresses, with other countries following shortly.
How many people are working on Visible Delivery? What’s your office atmosphere like?
There’s currently 6 people in our office, with 3 other remote developers located in other countries. The atmosphere is great! We’ve had a really positive launch response and websites seem to like our idea.
It’s exciting to see your ecommerce solution grow into a profitable success. Admittedly, though, all that money and all those orders can be difficult to manage, especially when you want to continue growing your business. You’d rather put energy into marketing and bettering your services than fumbling around with messy financial records, order histories and business purchases. Ordoro provides services to help you organize these aspects of your business so that you can get back to working on your brand. We chatted with Ordoro’s CEO and Co-Founder Jagath Narayan to find out more.
What does Ordoro do for ecommerce solutions? Ordoro streamlines the backoffice tasks for small and medium sized ecommerce retailers. Our customers use Ordoro to keep track of their orders, to print shipping labels, manage dropshipping, manage inventory and manage suppliers. Ordoro integrates well with ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce, Amazon, Interspire, 3dcart, Shopsite etc. where our customers typically set up their webstores.
When an order comes in on any of those storefronts, the order automatically flows through into Ordoro. Next, Ordoro can automatically create a shipping label from Fedex, UPS, or USPS. Ordoro can keep track of inventory level across different store fronts and alert the merchant when they are running low on stock on a product. And Ordoro can automatically create a Purchase Order and notify the supplier to restock the merchant’s warehouse.
Is Ordoro a good fit for any size online store?
Ordoro is designed for small to medium sized stores – merchants who process under 500 orders every day. Our focus is on automation and ease of use. Merchants typically sign up for our service when they outgrow their spreadsheet-based order fulfillment processes and are ready to streamline their operations. The biggest benefit we have heard from our customers is that Ordoro frees up so much of their time and lets them focus all their energy on sales, marketing and growing their business.
We’ve seen ecommerce solutions have issues with inventory tracking (the HP TouchPad, for example). What does Ordoro do to make sure customers aren’t disappointed when they order from your clients?
Ordoro’s goal is to ensure that every order is getting tracked and fulfilled on time. Particularly for those retailers who rely on dropshipping, it is very easy to have orders fall through the cracks. With Ordoro, every order goes through certain steps and checkpoints, and merchants will get to know when something is delayed. When a customer calls enquiring the status of an order, the merchant can search for that order in Ordoro in just one click – no more searching through emails or spreadsheets. Many of our clients use dedicated customer support staff, and with Ordoro they have real-time access to the order status. This level of visibility boosts the customer service level of our clients many fold.
Is it difficult for an ecommerce solution to integrate Ordoro if they are already using another order management utility? Basically, how hard is it to switch?
One of the things we are very proud of is how easy it is to get started with Ordoro. You can get started and be processing your first order in under 5 minutes. All of this works so smoothly for us because we are fully integrated to the webstore systems. During the sign up process, we ask you for the connection details to your webstore. Then we automatically import all your products, your inventory, and your orders from the webstore. We have put a lot of thought into designing the user experience from the very first step onwards, and all that effort has really paid off.
How did you guys get started?
Ordoro really started off as a side project. I worked as a supply chain consultant for 8 years and my experience is in solving supply chain problems at large corporations. Three years ago, I had a chance to help out a small business owner who was selling toys online, as a side project, to help him solve his order fulfillment problems. While helping him out, I realized that even small businesses face some of the very same problems that big companies face. So I got together with some friends and we started talking to many more online retailers to understand their problems. We quickly realized that the options for these small businesses were very limited, and we launched Ordoro to address some of the opportunities that we identified.
What makes you so different from your competition?
Ease-of-use and world-class support. Those are our corner stones and the big differentiators of Ordoro.
We have taken a design-oriented approach from the very beginning, and as a result Ordoro is the easiest, most intuitive order management application available. We keep hearing this feedback from our users every day. The fact that Ordoro is web-based is a bonus, because there is nothing to install, no data to backup. It just works!
And, we firmly believe in fanatical support. We don’t charge anything additional for phone support, and our phone number is listed right on the front page. Our focus is to build a product that makes it so easy that users don’t have to call our support line. But if they do, then we are there to help. And this has resulted in many happy customers who love our service.
An online shopper is comparing cases for one of her most precious investments: her laptop. She wants to be sure she’s getting something that will do the job, and not just for a week, so she reaches out to her fellow ecommerce customers for opinions. Will our heroine solve her dilemma before it’s too late? Will her laptop be cozy and scratch-free, or will her search continue into the holiday shopping frenzy? Join us in this highly theoretical–but entirely plausible–journey down Ecommerce Q&A Lane.
(Potential) Customer: “I’m thinking about buying this laptop case, but I’m wondering about the durability of the zipper. It looks a little flimsy in the picture, especially for the price tag. Can anyone vouch for it?”
Q&A Forum: [crickets]
[Two Days Later]
(Apprehensive) Customer: “…Hello?”
[Another Day Later]
Q&A Forum: “Hi there, I’m Dave from [website] Customer Service. I can assure you this product is a great value and comes with our 30-day no-risk return, standard on all our items. If for any reason you’re dissatisfied with the product, we’re happy to help.”
(Not a) Customer: “Thanks. For nothing.”
The Customer Service Rep has thwarted our heroine. There is certainly nothing wrong with getting the opinion of an employee; let’s make that clear. Sometimes a customer’s question could only be answered by someone who works for the store, such as inquires about return policy or shipping costs. Other times either a CSR or a consumer could help, such as with a clarifying question about materials. However, in this case, it’s obvious CSR Dave was not the right person to contribute his opinion. Dave has only provided assurance that if her suspicions about the product are correct, she can return it. But really, wouldn’t you rather just buy a durable product in the first place? So would our heroine. That’s why input from actual consumers on a Social Q&A is so valuable to shoppers.
Why not just trust product reviews? According to George Eberstadt, CEO and Founder of social ecommerce solution TurnTo, reviews can be a good tool when available and employed properly. However, Q&A offers some advantages in conjunction with reviews.
“We’ve … done sentiment analysis on social answers and found that it tends to run more positive than for customer reviews,” he told us, adding that “reviews tend to come disproportionately from those who have had extreme experiences – the 5s and 1s.” The ability to ask a specific question and get targeted answers can reduce that bias that comes from an employee or general product review. And “exposing sincere criticism has been shown to have a net positive effect by building credibility,” according to Eberstadt.
TurnTo released some exciting data for the Q&A world this week. They posted questions to four different categories of online stores across three different Q&A providers: PowerReviews, BazaarVoice, and themselves. They asked four questions per site. TurnTo’s Social Q&A forums generated 117 customer answers over four weeks. PowerReviews and BazaarVoice combined only got 16 consumer responses in that time. That’s less than 14% of TurnTo’s results. (The two of them also got a total of 15 replies from store employees.)
With this kind of success, where’s Social Q&A headed next? How might it play into Q4 and the upcoming shopping season? Eberstadt has a good feeling about the future:
“My guess is that 2012 will be the year that social Q&A starts to become commonplace on ecommerce sites, and by the end of 2013, sites that don’t have it will be the exception rather than the norm – much like customer reviews are today. As far as the 2011 holiday season: there are a number of sites out there using social Q&A today, but consumers haven’t yet become accustomed to it the same way they have to ratings and reviews.”
We know, it’s not even October yet. It’s a surprise every year when the holiday ads start to roll out immediately after fall hits, and we haven’t even gotten our Halloween costumes. (Some of us haven’t finished back to school shopping, either.) But realistically, preparing your ecommerce solution for a successful holiday season needs to start as soon as possible. Q4 starts in October, so crunch time is sooner than you’d think. Even if most consumers aren’t doing their seasonal shopping yet, they may be browsing already, and it’s important for your brand to look its best. The world of ecommerce is growing all the time, and as technology surges forward and consumers grow less patient with the crowds and hassle of brick-and-mortar shopping, online retailers have the advantage. To make your business stand out from the crowd during the holidays, you need to make some key changes. After the numbers, we’ll discuss what some of these changes are, with the help of Matt Winn from Volusion.
2010 Online Shopping Facts
By December 23, 2010, consumers had spent $36.4 billion just on their online holiday shopping that year. That was a 15.4% increase from 2009. Cyber Monday 2010 saw 9 million online shoppers making purchases; these shoppers made history by spending $1.028 billion that day, the first time the billion dollar mark has been surpassed in a single day. That record meant Cyber Monday was 19.4% more profitable for retailers in 2010 than it had been in 2009. This seems to be great news for ecommerce, but let’s see what shoppers said about their spending habits for this year.
How Will Consumers Buy Online This Year?
While 62 percent of shoppers who said they would change their holiday shopping habits also said they would be spending less money this season, nearly a third of shoppers surveyed said they would be depending on online browsing more than going to stores. Also nearly a third said they wouldn’t buy anything that wasn’t on sale or offered with free shipping. These numbers are higher in higher income brackets, and with families and women. (Free Shipping Day sales were up 61% in 2010 from the sales in 2009.) This means your ecommerce solution needs to be prepared to be competitive. Remember that you can choose optimal times during the shopping season to offer free shipping–it doesn’t have to be from now until the end of the year–and the way you present your deals has a big effect on how they will be perceived by your customers, both new and returning.
Last year, ZippyCart brought you some holiday preparation tips from Matt Winn at Volusion. The 101 tips we condensed into a few bullet points for you have been revamped for this year. Volusion’s got a new video offering you their top 5 tips to optimize your ecommerce solution and get the most out of the 2011 holiday season. After you’ve made a partial recovery from the consumer stats you’ve read, click on the video and let Matt walk you through the ways you can make this year a success for your business.
70% of U.S. shoppers won’t purchase via online shopping cart systems if the shipping costs more than $4.99
75% of ecommerce shoppers are planning to buy when they use a major search engine to find products online
60% of consumers purchased a gift card online in 2009
Bottom Line
Retailers offering ecommerce solutions have a distinct edge in this economy, but nothing is a given. Making the appropriate impression is vital if we want Cyber Monday to go up another 19.4% this year–or at least hold steady. There are simple changes to design, promotion, SEO, and exclusive offers that you can make to ensure customer loyalty this year, but as Matt says, “by ASAP we mean N-O-W.”
With just over a month before Halloween, consumers are running out of time to pick a costume. New York retail chain Ricky’s has ensured you have one less to choose from. Public outcry about “Anna Rexia,” a costume poking fun at a serious eating disorder, prompted Ricky’s to pull it from their website. It was set to retail for $49.99 on the ecommerce solution, but a trip to Ricky’s website now reveals just a note: “The page you requested was not found, and we have a fine guess why.” The costume featured a skintight black dress with a skeletal outline in “glitter screenprint” and a red nametag reading, of course, “Anna Rexia,” as well as a cutesy bone barrette and a measuring tape, presumably to keep track of that three-inch waistline. It was available in sizes from extra small to plus size (irony?). The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa & Associated Disorders doesn’t find the costume so cute. Board member Trish Jones-Bendel weighed in:
“I’m just appalled because eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. [...] Depending on the rates, and how long people have had the disorder, mortality [for the illness] can be from 10 to 15 percent. There are also high suicide rates with people that have anorexia.”
Costumes in poor taste are no doubt a staple of Halloween antics, but many feel one that makes light of a deadly illness is going too far. It’s worth noting that this particular costume is also nothing new. It earned the title of “Most Socially Insensitive” in a 2009 list of tacky costumes, where it was revealed that a former tagline for the costume was “You can never be too rich or too thin.” (Or too insensitive, apparently.) There’s a history of appalling costumes to recall.
Last year, two men offended dozens at a Halloween party in Ontario when they arrived as a Ku Klux Klan member and a lynching victim in blackface. The KKK-costumed man pulled the “lynched” man around the party on a string. “It wasn’t meant to be anything racist. I’m not prejudiced. It was a Halloween costume, it was a joke,” the man said when interviewed. (He then pulled the “my best friend is black” card. No, seriously.) Two years ago, Target sold an offensive “illegal alien” costume, featuring an orange jail jumpsuit, an alien mask, and a green card. A store in Carlsbad, California received complaints about inappropriate and suggestive costumes being displayed too obviously, where children could easily see them.
If you (and your partner) are still looking for a Halloween costume, you’ve got five weeks till the big day, so click around and fill up your shopping cart. You can probably find something out there that’s a little–or a lot–less offensive.
Whether you’re into the tacky or the classic, you’ve got about five weeks left till the big day: Halloween! You might be getting anxious around this time if you don’t have a costume–or even a costume idea–yet. Your girlfriend’s got one, that cute couple in your office won’t stop talking about theirs… Well, never fear, ZippyCart is here! We’ve got suggestions on the best ecommerce solutions with the best deals for your costume. You’re already on the internet anyway. You might as well get Halloween taken care of while you’re here.
Costume Kingdom
From movie favorites and cartoon classics to the completely absurd and humorous, Costume Kingdom has your Halloween hooked up. There are over 1000 men’s costumes to choose from, and you’re sure to find things your friends will envy. Don’t forget to use coupon code CK10 (through September 30 only!) for 10% off your purchase. Imagine showing up to your Halloween party as:
80s Rock Star God
Big Foot (not Sasquatch..)
The Joker
Captain America
Popeye the Sailor Man
Sexy Cowboy Gun Slinger
Halloween Express
Halloween Express has tons of new costumes for 2011, meaning you can avoid showing up in something you realize (all too late) that guy you despise wore last year. There’s no shortage of familiar costumes, though, including your favorites from classic horror movies like Friday the 13th and Chucky. Before checking out, enter coupon code CJTAKE10 for 10% off your purchase of $75 or more, and get free shipping too.
Thor
Mortal Kombat: Scorpion
Despicable Me
Papa Smurf
Zombie Pirate
Cobra Commander
Costume Discounters
With party time fast approaching, who wants to brave the stores during the inevitable pre-Halloween rush? Employ an ecommerce solution for your holiday accessories instead. Costume Discounters aims to help you do that with ease and savings: when you use coupon codes35SPRING for 10% off your order of $35 or more, FREE60 for free shipping on your purchase of $60 or more, or 15MORE for 15% off a total of $150 or more, you’ll have extra money for candy this year. Celebrate the season as:
Mister Monopoly
Batman (with muscle chest!)
Burger King
Daffy Duck
Baron von Bloodshed
Ghostbusters Inflatable Stay Puft Man
Buy Costumes
If you’re looking for good prices on quality costumes, Buy Costumes might be the place for you. They boast a wide selection and a costume for every price range, and at this time of year they offer coupon codes to help you get the best deal on what you want. If you find a great costume, make sure you use SAVE15 to get 15% off your order of $75 or more. Apply that discount to any of these choices (and to the rest of the site, of course):
Optimus Prime Super Deluxe
Wolverine
Oktoberfest Guy
Musketeer
Cobra Kai Replica Gi
Cuddles the Bear
Spirit Halloween
Another good choice if you can’t stand the thought of a crowded Halloween store in October: Spirit Halloween has an online store with the same stuff you’d find in their brick-and-mortar. In fact, not all of it would fit in one physical store, so you’re actually better off shopping online. To sweeten the deal even more, use coupon code SPAFF20 and get 20% off an item in your shopping cart–if you buy before October 26th. Then you can sit back and wait for one of these to arrive at your door:
Green Lantern Light-Up
Top Gun Flight Suit
Spy vs. Spy
Headless Horseman
Zombie Hunter
Sir Steampunk
Amazon
Besides everything else you already do on Amazon.com, it makes sense to grab your Halloween costume there, too. One shopping cart for holiday shopping and everyday shopping. No hassle, no entering your credit card info multiple times… Check out their selection in between browsing for DVDs and cookware.
BookRenter is a unique ecommerce solution for textbook savings. One book for one college course can easily be over $100 (or even $200), and students don’t find every textbook useful for their future. Prices for selling books back are extremely volatile, and often a new edition comes out in the mean time that renders the edition you possess obsolete and unsellable. Who wants to be out an extra few hundred dollars every quarter, in addition to tuition and all the other expenses of life? BookRenter has your back: rent for cheap, ship back for free. We spoke with co-founder Chris Williams to get the inside information on this service.
So, you’re a co-founder. That puts you in a unique position to tell us about how BookRenter’s tech needs have changed and evolved over the years. Can you take us briefly through the history? What was the initial system like? When did you realize that you were “on to something” and it was time to change, upgrade, and improve?
Sure. We had only a couple of servers when we first started. However, we always made sure to have more servers than we needed. In our case, it was beneficial to overprovision since it meant we could focus on building our core product instead of spending precious time babysitting the system and solving performance issues. As our business grew, we purchased more servers in order to meet demand and increase redundancy. With the increase in number of servers, the day to day management becomes more complex. Once you get about 5-10 servers, it starts to become a time consuming and error prone process to maintain the servers without some automation. So we started to look at solutions that would help us maintain our growing set of servers. Since our team already had a Ruby background, it was natural to choose Opscode Chef.
What does the teamup with Opscode mean to you personally and to BookRenter?
Personally, I’m a big fan of their product since it makes my life a lot easier from two perspectives: 1) I spend a lot less time managing the servers since so much of the maintenance and deployment is automated, and 2) I can sleep better at night knowing our application will perform consistently on all of the servers, and that there aren’t some servers where I accidentally forgot to make a critical configuration change, etc. This is both a win for me and BookRenter.
“The Cloud” is everywhere. What made it so attractive for you and your team? Was it a hard decision? What can our readers learn from your experiences with the cloud when adapting it to their own online businesses?
Currently, we utilize Amazon EC2 for our staging and testing environment. We built a self-serve system for engineers to spin up servers with the click of a button that run an identical stack to our production servers. Not only does this give obvious benefits, such as teams can quickly show their work to product stakeholders, but it also helps in surfacing any potential problems before they ever get into production. One of the great things about Opscode Chef is that we are able to build these staging servers in the cloud the same exact way that we setup our real production servers by reusing the same recipes. There’s peace of mind in knowing you can test your project on a system that will behave identically to the production environment before it ever goes live.
They say “change is the only constant.” How do you and your team get breathing space for yourselves when trying to outpace growth and the changing needs of your company?
Well, one thing that comes to mind is automation. Since the beginning of the company, we’ve always invested heavily in automating pieces of our business. Once you start doing too many things manually, you get bogged down and aren’t able to get any breathing space. You never get a chance to think about the big picture if you’re always focused on the minutia. Opscode Chef is one way that we are able to automate our infrastructure.
How big is your “tech team” (however you want to describe them)? Can you take us through the journey of how you’ve grown the team, what you look for in a teammate, etc?
We started with two engineers, spent about a year developing the initial product, and then have spent the remaining years improving on that product and building the team. Year after year, we’ve been blessed with phenomenal growth and are always looking for more people to join our team. Right now, we’re especially looking for engineers who have a background in Ruby on Rails and/or Opscode Chef.
As a textbook-rental company, I feel the need to ask you about learning: what’s your learning process been like, both in your professional life as a whole, and with BookRenter – what are some lessons our readers can take with them?
First, we’ve always had a “best idea wins” culture in our team. We listen to all options and try our best to learn from and make decisions based on sound data instead of our own biases. Secondly, an important quality is to stay humble and not be afraid to challenge your ideas and assumptions constantly. Lastly, I’d say don’t be afraid to take chances on learning new technologies and methodologies. When we first started, we chose Ruby on Rails as our development framework, which at the time didn’t have a big following, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions we made early on due to its agility.
What’s the coolest non-BookRenter thing that you’ve learned recently?
Lately, I’ve been learning about espresso and purchased a manual level espresso machine. As an engineer, it’s fun to learn about all the different variables that go into making the perfect cup of espresso: beans, grind, dose, temperature, tamp, preinfusion time, etc.
It happens every year without fail. On the morning of November 1st, you jolt upright from slumber, smack yourself on the forehead, and shout, “I SHOULD’VE BEEN _____ FOR HALLOWEEN!” And maybe your cat looks at you funny, but that could be because you dressed her up as Yoda for the fourth year in a row. Then you: a) fall back asleep and forget your idea, b) overturn half your room looking for a pen and/or your smartphone to record this stroke of genius, c) tell your best friend, who immediately calls dibs, or d) all of the above. Well, not this year. This year you’ve got a great idea, you’re keeping your mouth shut (no way Janice is stealing your sexy Janet Reno idea again), and you are going to leverage an ecommerce site to make sure you get an awesome deal. Make sure your significant other, best friend, blind date, or whoever gets their corresponding costume so you don’t outshine them this Halloween.
At Buy Costumes you can find an array of storybook and cartoon costumes to make the little kid inside you squeal, but you can also kick some butt as a superhero or slasher. Buy Costumes has one of the largest selections of Halloween costumes in the ecommerce world, so don’t miss out on coupon code SAVE15 to get 15% off a purchase of $75 or more. This coupon expires 9/30, but at least you’ll be prepared a full month in advance. You can spend the rest of that time hiding fun-size candy bars all over your house so that you (hopefully) don’t eat them all before the trick-or-treaters arrive.
German Beer Girl
Red Riding Hood
She-Ra (Masters of the Universe)
Hello Kitty
Highschool Horror School Girl
Check out Halloween Express for a fresh combination of classic spooky and modern sexy. Coupon code CJTAKE10 gets you 10% off your purchase of $75 or more and free shipping. In addition, there are other coupon codes to use, depending on your order size. They offer men’s, women’s, and kids’ versions of many of their costumes. Here’s some to get you started:
Big Bad Wolf
Sexy Nerd
Dorothy (Wizard of Oz)
Thor
Rainbow Brite
You’ll see the brick-and-mortar Spirit Halloween stores pop up in your town around late August, but their website is open all year. Unfortunately, these savings aren’t, so get your costume now! You have until 10/26 to use coupon code SPAFF20 and get 20% off one item in your shopping cart–but make sure that gives you enough time for your costume to arrive. The only thing worse than coming up with a great idea on 11/1 is seeing your costume arrive on your doorstep that day, too.
Miss Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre)
Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland)
Sexy Marine
Bad Habit Nun
Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader
Costume Kingdom covers it all, from cult movies to reality TV to music icons. Don’t miss out on your Snooki wig, or the many, many Gaga wigs and costumes to be had. We’re pretty sure you don’t want to commit to actually styling your hair that way, so give yourself a break: be sure to use coupon code CK10 until 9/30 for 10% off your purchase. Check out some other great ideas:
Sexy Snow White
Harajuku Girl
Marilyn Monroe
Morticia Addams
Padme Amidala
Costume Discounters matches any lower price you might find on another site, and takes another 20% off in addition. That’s reason enough not to miss browsing through their extensive selection, with entire sections for unique ideas like drinking-related costumes and steampunk. But use coupon codes 35SPRING to get 10% off your order of $35 or more, FREE60 for free shipping on your purchase of $60 or more, or 15MORE for 15% off a total of $150 or more. Fill your shopping cart with these:
Glee Cheerleader
Steam Punk Renegade
Duffman Women’s Costume (The Simpsons)
Sexy Baywatch Lifeguard
Tinker Bell (Peter Pan)
Amazon.com has books, electronics, and home grocery delivery. We all know this. But what about Amazon for Halloween? Yeah, they do that too. You can buy your new tablet or get a really ridiculously early start on your holiday gift buying while throwing your Halloween costume in the same shopping cart. It doesn’t really get easier than that. If you need more incentive, spending more than $25 may get you free Super Saver shipping.
Back in 1988, Star Wars creator George Lucas took a stand in front of Congress. It was well known that Lucas was a proponent of special effects and technological advances in filmmaking. You hadn’t even had to see his movies; it was obvious from the buzz about them. But the sanctity of originality prompted him to challenge the colorization of black-and-white films.
“Tomorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with ‘fresher faces,’ or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor’s lips to match,” he’d said, casting such alterations in a negative light.
This Friday marks the release of all six Star Wars films on Blu-ray, which not only enhances the original picture quality but includes quite a few alterations to the original scripts and scenes. These range from the fairly nominal (an Ewok blinking in “Return of the Jedi,” R2-D2 hiding behind digital rocks) to the downright blasphemous (Obi Wan’s Krayt Dragon roar has been altered, Darth Vader now cries “Noooo!” as he throws the Emperor into the Death Star’s core). Also, CGI, Yoda is. Critics and fans are fairly furious at more major changes like these, arguing they alter character profiles and cast original scenes in different lights. Quite obviously the movies were a resounding success before Lucas implemented these special Blu-ray exclusives, and it seems fans do not want to see the movies they know and love (and have possibly memorized verbatim) changed noticeably. What happened to preserving the original intent of the artist, George?
Clark Schaeffer, a special effects supervisor, feels “Lucas almost turned to the dark side to go to computer graphics. So much of it does not have the heart that it had before. [...] When that film was done it was 30 years ago. Let it be what it was. [...] I mean, why not pull out ‘Wizard of Oz’ or ‘Gone with the Wind’ and change those?”
As for adding in lines: of all the things a director could feel his movie is missing, how on Earth (or the Death Star, rather) does an overdramatic cry of “Noooo!” fit the bill? It wouldn’t even be quite so bad if it didn’t echo artificially. (It echoes, folks.) If the Terminator got cool lines like “Hasta la vista, baby” and “I’ll be back,” and the Joker got “Why so serious?”, doesn’t Vader deserve something a little more… brutal?
Some fans feel strongly enough about the changes that they are canceling their pre-orders, which have been available since January. The box sets are also getting pretty negative reviews across different ecommerce solutions already. The movies will be available in three sets: The Original Trilogy (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi), The Prequel Trilogy (The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith), and The Complete Saga (all six episodes). This means you can’t select your favorite episodes individually, all have Blu-ray enhancements, and if you don’t like the “Noooo!” you’re just going to have to sit through it anyway. Most of the other changes would only be noticed by those scanning the original movies next to the Blu-ray versions. If that doesn’t bother you, go ahead and pick your favorite combo, throw it in your shopping cart, and hope the postal worker doesn’t say “These are not the Wars you’re looking for” when he drops it off at your door.
If for some reason you are not enough of a diehard Star Wars fan to remember which episodes are which, may the ‘Cart be with you, complete with vintage January 2011-style optimism for the groundbreaking release.
Attention ecommerce solutions, startups, public figures, cities, and other things with names: if you don’t want to see yourself associated with a .xxx domain, now is the time to act. The sun rose Wednesday on ICM Registry’s sunrise period (see what we did there?), giving trademark owners through October 28 to reserve the new porn-specific domains. Sunrise B applicants with reputations to protect can reserve their domains to protect from misuse. (We here at ZippyCart don’t want to imagine what sort of content a “zippycart.xxx” would hold.) Sunrise A applicants in adult entertainment–owners of an active trademark or adult website on another TLD–can protect their brands as well, by reserving the domains for their own use.
If a Sunrise A and Sunrise B applicant vie for the same domain, both parties will be notified of the overlap and given a chance to rescind their application. Further conflict will be mediated until an agreement is reached. However, if two Sunrise A applicants try to register for the same brand, the domain will be auctioned off with no consideration as to who applied first.
From November 8 to November 25, those in the adult Sponsored Community who didn’t qualify for Sunrise A will have an opportunity to apply for their desired adult domain names before the general application period. After December 6, whoever applies for a .xxx domain first can purchase the rights to it, within reason.
The ICM Registry releases domain names to third parties like GoDaddy.com, which will be charging a $209.99 non-refundable fee for all sunrise applicants, with $99.99 a year to renew after that. The fees vary from registrar to registrar. The brand will be protected for at least the length of ICM Registry’s contract with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)–about 10 years.
Brand owners purchasing their .xxx domains in order to opt out from associations with the adult industry are assured no website or e-mail under their registered brand. Anyone typing in a protected brand, like amazon.xxx, would be redirected to a page stating that the character string is blocked via ICM’s Rights Protection program.
ICM Registry CEO Stuart Lawley weighs in on the likelihood of brand misuse.
“The truth is, no one is going to be going to coca-cola.xxx, but some may not want their brands associated [with .xxx domains] in any way.”
It could certainly be detrimental to your ecommerce solution to be confused with an adult entertainment website. The question is, are you willing to pay upwards of $200 so that someone else doesn’t claim your trademark as their own? Will it really be damaging to your company if there is a .xxx domain registered with your brand? The risk is probably best assessed on a case-by-case basis. If your brand is extremely unique, like perhaps your full name, unwanted associations might certainly be made.
Do you remember those old InventHelp commercials with the Gary Larson-esque caveman chiseling away at a stone wheel? They had an “anyone can invent” vibe, the way The Joy of Painting (with the beloved afro-wearing, tree-loving Bob Ross) promised anyone can paint. (Don’t believe either of them; the ZippyCart offices are filled with wrecked canvasses of botched mountainscapes and sad little trees, and the InventHelp people couldn’t invent a better name than “Cavey” for their caveman.) But enough of the 90s. In the 21st century, Manhattan-based ecommerce solution Quirky is rooting for consumer inventors, and the Sundance Channel is taking notice.
CEO Ben Kaufman, a child of the 90s himself at just 24 years old, launched Quirky in 2009 after testing out his love for invention. By his high school graduation, he had invented and produced his own design of iPod headphones, financed by a second mortgage on his parents’ home. Kaufman’s first company, mophie, won Best of Show at Macworld 2006 for its iPod accessories. He sold mophie in 2007, spearheaded a second company, and later pursued a larger goal: assisting others in the approval, design, and production of their own inventions. Thus, Quirky was born.
Last week, the company made its TV debut in a new Sundance Channel show cleverly titled “Quirky.” (Did they get InventHelp’s assistance on the name?) “Quirky” is a six-show miniseries documenting the start-to-finish process of product invention. The show comes complete with cheesy commentary sections like you might see in The Real World, and the requisite amount of disagreements and tension to make any reality show watchable. Luckily: “I love manufactured drama,” says Kaufman. “It shows the world that we’re going to make something happen here.”
Some believe that Kaufman’s optimism interferes with realism, as with a physics-defying can opener that Quirky continued to rework. Hovering over the prototype of the CanDo, several staff members remark that it barely resembles the idea Jon Corral, a copywriter by trade, proposed. This extensive revision process doesn’t phase Kaufman. “The world’s negative,” he says. “I like it, because it just allows us to be the positive ones.” It remains to be seen whether ceaseless positivity can result in successful inventions or not, but with revenue expected between $6 million and $10 million in 2011, he may be on to something.
Regardless of structural flaws and design tweaks, the original inventor walks away with about twelve cents on every dollar of revenue through online shopping cart systems, and four cents of every dollar in physical sales, according to Quirky. People who contributed critical ideas to the development of each product also get a cut, as do indirect retailers like the Home Shopping Network.
Quirky releases two new products into pre-sale each week; when enough consumers buy into the pre-sale, the company outsources the production to a 15-person manufacturing center in China, where the completed invention is shipped back to the States and finally sold on Quirky’s website. Quirky charges a $10 fee for all inventors to submit their ideas electronically, unless the idea fits into a category the website currently features (for example, pool/beach accessories), in which case the submission is free.
Looking for that perfect holiday gift but can’t afford the full retail price? Want to know what top designers, tech giants and celebrities are dreaming of this year? Or maybe you need to reward yourself–since about 60 percent of shoppers admit they will buy themselves a gift this holiday season. If you’re in the NYC area, head over to 404 Park Avenue South between now and November 10 to check out eBay’s and designer Jonathan Adler’s new “Inspiration Shop.”
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