We like the idea of using corporations as a distribution base for media and services. In the 1990s, The Family Education Network built a great newsletter business distributed in corporate lobbies. The concept’s been widely extended with the addition of email and the ability to more effectively target employees based on different criteria.
NextJump, for …

Building ecommerce, promotions, search, social and same day delivery services around store inventory is one of those high concept “local” concepts that always make so much sense but have been tough to build around.
Intuit and eBay have both purchased inventory services (StepUp and Milo) and have integrated their capabilities into their other local services. …

Throw out the pyramid and the funnel. The pretzel is the new paradigm for mobile-driven retail, according to panelists at the OMMA Mobile M Commerce event Oct. 22 in Los Angeles.
The age-old pyramid and funnel concepts have been driven by initial awareness, browsing and then transactions. But such linear thinking doesn’t make as much sense …

A big milestone was reached last week when Bank of America launched its BankAmericaDeals loyalty and rewards product to many of its 59 million customers. The launch of the product, a partnership with Cardlytics, suggests a coming of age for the new card-linked loyalty space. Indeed, more than 20 card-linked companies are vying …

Zillow’s consumer-first approach, which took housing listings out of the hands of the brokerage by posting them on the Web, has since been applied in several local segments: mortgage, home and trade, insurance, recruitment, etc.
Now along comes CarWoo, which has raised $12 million from Comcast Ventures, InterWest Partners, Ventures, Blumberg Capital and Raymond Tonsing to …

Amazon doesn’t usually speak at industry gatherings. But that was before it needed to reach out to the advertising community to sell display ads on its sites, ads on Kindle, national and local offers on Kindle, and extend its promotional reach on third party sites. Hence a luncheon keynote today from Seth Dallaire, VP of …

Business listings provider Localeze announced today that it will provide online business listings to Savvi, a savings network. Localeze business listings are standardized across its list of approximately 150 local search platform partners, including search engines, online directories, social networks, mobile apps and personal navigation devices. Savvi offers member-sourced and shared local deals in addition …

Long before daily deals surged, and now after they’ve peaked and pivoted, loyalty and rewards programs stand as beachheads in the evolving online promotions/commerce ecosystem. At ILM East 2012, three leaders in loyalty discussed how advertising and commerce are quickly colliding, and how “big data” is shaping the new merchant/consumer relationship.
Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim …

Inventory hasn’t yet emerged as a “must have” for merchants, but the strategic importance of tracking store inventory remains undiminished. Merchants will potentially use inventory levels to drive users to specific locations, build promotions to get rid of overage (or remove promotions when supplies are running low).
While far from universal, many national retailers are beginning …

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 …