The deals culture is shifting from customer acquisition to customer loyalty by necessity. Why? Deals have begun losing high-income women. That’s the view of Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim, a featured speaker at ILM East in Boston March 26-28.
“Daily deals had an initial surge then quickly lost flavor on a key customer segment — …

John Donahoe, eBay CEO and interim PayPal CEO, projected soaring numbers for new mobile payment forecasts. During his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Association, Donahoe predicted that eBay would reach $8 billion in mobile gross merchandise volume (GMV) this year, almost double its $5 billion GMV we reported from last year. Reasons for the …

Dan Hess, CEO of deals aggregator and research company Local Offer Network, played mythbuster at ILM West, using data to set the record straight on where the market is moving…and where it isn’t.
Hess is convinced that there is still ample room for “specialization” across geography, demography and interests…rather than the doomsday consolidation/roll-up  scenarios forecast by …

Companies are beginning to focus on loyalty programs for existing customers, rather than simply using deal a day to acquire new customers. Closely and WildFire App are both pursuing loyalty programs.
A loyalty start-up we like is Punchcard, which launches today. The brainchild of MerchEngines founder Andy Steuer, Punchcard is a smartphone app that provides a …

One of our big complaints against hyperlocal sites is they haven’t really invested in the commercial lifeblood of their community. They’re more like the (almost totally irrelevant) equivalent of a public access cable TV channel.
That’s why we like the approach of ShopCity, which lets hyperlocal sites, chambers of commerce, local publishers and local governments use …

Black Friday and Cyber Monday for holiday shopping are bedrocks of the nation’s economy. Where do deals fit in?
As Bloomberg reports, Yipit Data forecasts that U.S. consumers will spend $80 million to $100 million on daily deals gifts between Thanksgiving and Christmas, up from $15 million to $20 million in 2010. A separate poll of …

Groupon announced this week that it will soon launch Groupon Goods, a division that will sell selective clearance items. The announcement, which comes a day after it announced a merchant rewards program, shows the company moving to really leverage its deals-oriented user list.
Can Groupon pull it off? To me, it depends on whether Groupon …

SaleLocator, a shopping and sales search engine and mobile app, has made public its API to share real-time, in-store sales information for national and regional retailers.
We spoke with SaleLocator cofounder Michael Falkson, who said the company is looking to partner with local content websites, including news and Yellow Pages sites. Earlier this month, SaleLocator launched …

Specialized verticals are a major part of the new marketplaces environment. One vertical we like is TeachStreet, a portal that helps consumers find teachers, and then helps sign them up and process payments.
Along the same lines is TakeLessons, a five-year-old teacher site that is exclusively focused on hooking vetted music teachers with students. The …

Online retail spending reached $37.5 billion, up 14 percent from a year ago, according to comScore’s latest quarterly study. Highlights from comScore’s study  include:

The 14-percent growth in the quarter was primarily a function of an increase in the number of buyers (up 16 percent), with 70 percent of all Internet users making at least one online …

The credit card-based, in-flight beverage, food, entertainment and Internet era has a new twist: “Froogll” deals that can be bought online and targeted to users based on destination (i.e., Las Vegas), gender and observable family status (i.e., single/married/family).
Froogll is the brainchild of Jetera, a targeted, in-flight ad provider based in Danbury, Connecticut. The site, which …

Can Groupon easily extend into the grocery coupon space? No, not at all easily. For starters, food producers used to “cents off” can’t really provide goods at 50 percent off, or more, and then provide a commission of 30 percent to 50 percent of sales.
But we can think of a number of reasons to greenlight …

Four-month-old, Cincinnati, Ohio-based SmartyTags has a decidedly different approach to the technology of QR codes. Rather than just focusing on the technology, its focus is on how best to use them as a marketing tool, track uses of each code and make them part of an integrated marketing campaign.
As QR codes have advanced with …

NextJump has launched a beta version of OO.com, a consumer-facing destination site that seeks to leverage its relationships with merchants, national marketers and local marketing entities including LivingSocial (deals), Restaurant.com (restaurant deals) and now Grubhub (restaurant order out). The site boasts 16,501 offers in 184 cities, and is divided into “national” offers, “limited time” offers …

Ease of transaction, rewards and “exclusives” will be key to the next generation of deals, and the credit card companies are determined to play a major role. MasterCard is working with NextJump for a special rewards programs, and has a number of other initiatives in the space (which key execs will discuss at our Deals …

The Deals space is so hot, yet there are many unanswered questions about it. We know it will be big, but who really knows what it is going to look like 18 months from now?
With that in mind, we have developed a brand-new addition to our regular conference schedule: Deals 3D, a day-and-a-half event taking …

Auctions have influenced a more dynamic shopping environment, but aren’t very important and have ended up as just a niche shopping format, argues James Surowiecki in the June Wired (article not posted). Even on eBay, they just make up 31 percent of all sales.
It’s a far cry from 10 years ago, when Priceline founder Jay …

Finally, we have the long awaited merger of a directory with a retail solution. Today, prior to its earnings call, Local.com announced it would integrate product and store availability into its growing suite of women-oriented services by acquiring Krillion.com. The sale price was $3.5 million.
When it was launched in 2006, Krillion was a real …

When hyperlocal zeroes in on local marketplaces, it makes a lot more sense to me. Witness ShopBuffalo, an attractive new marketplace from The Buffalo News launched as a companion to Buffalo.com. The site has partnered with ShopCity and Hero, a local design firm.
Launched March 31 as part of a broader redesign, ShopBuffalo provides free …

Retail inventory has been revving up as a new, highly mobile-oriented tool for retailers to highlight stock on hand and steer consumers to store locations. It is an important lead-generating feature on new shopping portals, such as FindnSave. Research by JiWire shows that 62 percent of consumers seek product availability when researching goods online. The …