Given this growth for Bing Shopping, it doesn't come as a surprise that most of Bing's competitors lost some market share during the last month. All of the top 3 shopping tools (Yahoo Shopping, Bizrate, and Shopzilla) lost between 2% and 5%.

When Kaboodle had only 20K active users, it managed to secure a partnership with eBay - and it became clear that this company was going to be a major player in the world of social commerce. Kaboodle offers a robust and simple set of features. Users can collect shopping items from many sites using the Kaboodle toolbar. The items can then be organized into collections, reviewed and shared with other users.

Each collection can be viewed as a list, grid, slideshow and collage. Of these, the first two are very useful - while slideshow and collage are more like eye candy. 

Kaboodle nails the usability for key social features: it is really easy to copy a single item or a whole list, and it is also easy to rate items or the entire list. Finally, the search on Kaboodle works very well - making the service simple, yet complete.

Fresher Search Results

Until now, if you wanted to see the freshest search results, you had to apply a little URL-hack, but now, this feature has become default in the Search Options panel.

Another interesting new feature is the ability to filter results by sites you have already visited and by sites you actually haven't visited yet. This feature only works when you are signed in to your Google account and have your Web History enabled.

Books, Blogs, and News

Google already introduced the ability to just search for books a few weeks ago, so this isn't really a new feature, but the company now also allows users to filter by blogs and news. While you could obviously always use Google News or Blog Search for this, you can now easily toggle back and forth between these sources and stay within the same search interface.

Shopping

Given how hard it has become to do product research on Google, as the search results are often cluttered with shopping sites, the ability to see more or fewer shopping sites is probably the most important new feature here. As Google points out, if you are doing research and aren't ready to buy just yet, being able to tone down the number of shopping sites will be extremely helpful.

"Yahoo is making a major push into search personalization and recommendations - the overall project is called "Shoposphere" and the major feature being released is called "Pick Lists". Their goal is to move ecommerce towards what they call "me commerce". Any registered Yahoo user can create a Pick List."

The Yahoo Shoposphere site has more details on Pick Lists:

"Pick Lists let you share the stuff you love and the stuff that matters to you with everyone or your friends... on the Shoposphere, throughout Yahoo! Shopping, by email, and even through RSS feeds.

Make a good one and it could even show up as one of the highest rated Pick Lists on the Shoposphere."

More analysis from me as I look further into it... I do like the "me commerce" bit :-).

IDG reports that price comparison sites also claimed a huge increase in traffic over the 2006 holiday shopping kick-off. PriceGrabber saw referral traffic up a reported 47%, while Shopping.com watched its referrals increase 61%.

Online retailers can only expect today to be even busier. What started as a marketing gimmick a few years ago, "Cyber Monday," in which online retailers give additional discounts to shoppers (many of whom are connecting to the Internet from work for the first time following a long weekend in the US), appears to have gained industry-wide acceptance. Shop.org, an electronic retail trade group, reports that 72.2% of online retailers will participate in Cyber Monday. That is a significant increase over the 42.7% who participated just two years ago. Some retailers, such as Wal-Mart, plan to offer online deals all week, skipping the Monday tradition altogether.

72 million consumers plan to shop online today, according to BIGresearch, and comScore predicts revenues of over $700 million, which could be the start of an online shopping season some see reaching $30 billion this year.

Will you shop online this year? Have you taken advantage of any online deals yet today? Did you shop online on Friday?

"During the early years of the Web, before content had semantic meaning, sites were developed as a collection of “pages.” Sites in the 1990s were usually either brochure-ware (static HTML pages with insipid content) or they were interactive in a flashy, animated, JavaScript kind of way. In that era, a common method of promoting sites was to market them as “places”—the Web as a virtual world complete with online shopping malls and portals."

So I have to admit it is surprising that the virtual shopping mall, as a concept, is alive and well in 2006. Lately we've heard that Boo.com, an infamous 3D shopping website of the late 90's, is making a comeback later this year. But one that has actually launched already is The Mall Plus, where users navigate a virtual shopping mall in a 3D environment. All of the shops are a part of the The Mall Plus, rather than being external sites. Geekzone quotes The Mall Plus CEO Nigel Kirkpatrick as saying it's "the next generation of retail, through a virtual environment".

Perhaps if you could interact with other shoppers in The Mall Plus, then that would be a killer feature - e.g. if it became like a social networking / shopping experience. But currently the 3D people inside the mall are "lifeless and static", as one NZ 2.0 commenter noted. Another point made on the NZ 2.0 list was that virtual 3D shopping actually slows down the user experience - whereas with Amazon and other e-commerce sites, the idea is to make online shopping as efficient as possible.

I can actually see a long-term future for 3D virtual shopping, so I applaud The Mall Plus for tackling this. However I don't think it's a viable idea right now, as the likes of Amazon and eBay - along with new meta services like uGenie - are much more Web native in the year 2006. But in 2016? Who knows, maybe it will be a 3D virtual shopping world. What do you think?

According to AdAge, the advertising campaign, including radio and outdoor media, will launch tomorrow in 10 U.S. cities. Earlier this year that campaign was going to include a major car manufacturer and several well-known luxury brands, but due to the weakening economy, many of the early participants were forced to pull out as budgets were slashed. Tomorrow's launch will now just include McDonald's, Finish Line, and RedTag.

Mobile Tuesday's promotion will also have an online presence at a yet-to-be revealed URL. However, some 18,000 crafty shoppers have discovered the link thanks to sites posting Black Friday deals. Mobigosee already considers the campaign a success as they have surpassed their original goal of 5,000 and the campaign has not even officially begun.

Today Zlio announced an agreement for their US site to partner with Shopping.com, an online shopping comparison service that is owned by eBay. This will allow Zlio "shopkeepers" to generate revenue every time someone clicks on a product in their shop. In other words, Zlio users can now be paid per click as well as per sale on their ZlioShops.

This 'per click' revenue share system already exists on the French version of Zlio, via a partnership with Kelkoo/Yahoo.

Zlio was in the news in May, when US e-commerce giant Amazon clamped down on Zlio and told them they could no longer promote Amazon products in the United States. Amazon's own aStore product functions very similar to Zlio, except that it only promotes Amazon's products. But Zlio soon hit back, by partnering with US chain book store Barnes & Noble - giving Zlio 1.5 M more product items for their catalog and essentially replacing all the Amazon stock they were forced to remove.

This is very smart partnering by Zlio and certainly an effective way to hit back at Amazon.com, by joining forces with one of Amazon's biggest rivals (B&N) and another big Internet co (eBay).

Also see Read/WriteWeb's full review of Zlio.

You can tune into the show, and interact with us via the chat, by clicking here. You can also use the Calliflower Facebook app to tune in and participate.

• Jack Jia, founder and CEO, Baynote, a collective intelligence platform for online shopping, featuring recommendations and social search.
• Eric Koger, CEO, ModCloth, an online retailer of vintage, indie, retro and mod clothing.
• Andrew Eisner, Director of Community and Content, Retrevo, a "matchmaking service for people and electronics".
• Kurt Collins, VP of Business Development, Cartfly, a social commerce store network that enables online merchants to turn their storefronts into portable widgets and distribute them across major social networks.
  
• Mateo Gutierrez, Director of Social Marketing, ThisNext, a social shopping network "where people interact with community-validated taste makers and influencers to discover recommended products".

RWW Live is hosted as always by Sean Ammirati and ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus.

Before the show starts, we're interested in what questions you have for the panelists. Please leave a comment on this post and one of the RWW crew on the call will do our best to ask your question.

We will post the audio from the show at the end, but we hope you join us LIVE on Calliflower or Facebook.

Related: 10 Wish List Websites For The Holiday Shopping Season

UPDATE: the show is now finished, here is the audio:

Download MP3

During the public beta period, Kinset is operating two stores, BunchaBooks and 'LectricTown, both fed by Amazon. Browsing the virtual shelves was easy enough, if a bit clunky. Mousing over fuzzy product images brought up additional information in the sidebar, and pressing F7 adds a product to your shopping cart. I couldn't figure out how to actually purchase products, and Kinset froze up before I had a chance to try to figure it out. Needless to say, I wasn't very compelled to put much more effort into finding out.

The big question is why? Shopping on traditional 2D sites like Amazon offers users clearer and more numerous images of products, as well as the same information. Some sites even offer 3D animated views of products, and many ecommerce sites use products like Adobe's Scene7 to deliver high quality product photos that Kinset can't compete with. Further, shopping on traditional web sites is faster, generally makes it easier to find specific items, and anyone who wants to set up shop in a virtual world can choose from more established players in the market, such as Second Life.

And, to make matters worse, after all the hype surrounding ecommerce in virtual worlds, it hasn't panned out for many companies. But in spite of all that, Kinset has managed to rope in two high profile clients. Brookstone will open a Kinset store in November and Tweeter could have a store open on their platform by the end of January. The reason, according to the Boston Globe, appears to be all about control.

Your friendly, er, asleep 'LectroTown sales rep...

"Brookstone vice president Greg Sweeney says he'd considered building a store in Second Life, where such retailers as Sears have set up shop, but he was concerned that it wouldn't give him 'enough control in being able to shape the experience,'" writes the Globe's Scott Kirsner. Tweeter also considered Second Life or There.com, but decided the experience was "too clunky," reports the paper.

Kinset is founded by serial entrepreneur John Butler whose first startup, publicly-traded Applix Inc., sold for $339 million this month, and by Scott Evernden. It is self-funded.

For casual Internet users who are all over the social web but don't have the knowledge, resources, or desire to set up and market full online storefronts, there's PutACart, which democratizes the long tail of e-commerce, allowing users to peddle their wares from a plethora of the most popular social destinations online.

Here's what the carts look like on Facebook, MySpace, and WordPress, respectively:

Since this is for casual social-web users, Paypal is the only payment method for both buyers and sellers. And if a user makes changes to certain parts of his product list or account, he'll also need to update the embed codes on his social sites.

Mostly, though, it's a great idea with a kind of bad interface. Here's a look at my web-based store. Unfortunately, I can't customize the look and feel of this page, and I have no options for customizing my social web shopping cards other than toggling between thumbnail and extended product views. I have no control over how it looks, and social web users are very big on customizable GUIs. Especially for something that will be the commercial side of their personal brand, users need to be able to choose images, colors, typefaces, and layouts. They should probably also have some level of access to style the page/widget as they like. On this site, I didn't even have the option to crop my thumbnail, which came out distorted because the creators didn't give me any dimensions, either.

Also, the message sent out after a Paypal purchase is confirmed should without question be customizable. I, Jolie O'Dell, would never write something like, "We can't tell how much cooler you are for having bought something from us. Your friends will be jealous. Thank you!" And I'm sure a great many other vendors wouldn't, either. If you're sending out a message on my behalf to people in my social graph, it's imperative that I have control of what the message says.

Customization issues aside, it's a fantastic service for social web peeps who want to throw a few marketable products into the digital universe without committing to an online store, and we look forward to seeing what the PutACart team does in the future.

Also, this is a test store, so please don't try to buy anything I've posted! Do you really think I'd sell out all my tech scene bros for $0.99? That's my retirement plan.

Yahoo's new Application Gallery

I remember speaking with ex-YPN chief Toni Schneider about this last year and I was impressed by his vision for a commercial platform for APIs. I'm expecting Yahoo to really the ante with Google and Microsoft in terms of mashup ecosystems. Don't count out AOL and eBay either. [...]

[Full Story on ZDNet...]]]>Sponsor

What is TheFind?

TheFind comprehensively indexes all of the products available for sale from all online retail sites, then - using derived knowledge of the shopping domain - serves up just the right matching products, ranked in order of best selling brands, styles and stores. In this piece, I will review their offering against my Web 3.0 framework.

The results display is very visual, with large pictures of the products. It resembles a customized shopping catalog that has been constructed for a specific consumer search query. Additional search tools provide a way for consumers to search for items similar to the one that interests them, and also to find all of the stores that carry a particular product - in order to decide the best place to buy the desired product.

See for yourself - this is a very different internet shopping experience than the largely text based results offered by Google, Shopping.com, etc.

It's one of the best visual merchandising oriented search engines I have seen on the web, which is a key differentiator for the Lifestyle segment. Its competitors include Like.com, the reinvented version of the photo search engine company Riya; and ShopStyle, a fashion search engine.

Examples

Below is an example search for "Baby cribs", Baby cribs "like this one", and Baby cribs like this one "in other stores". I don't know of any other shopping search engine that offers this kind of a visual search experience with such comprehensive coverage. However note that to complete the transaction, I would need to go to the store, so Commerce is not included in the user experience value proposition.

As Siva calls it, this looks like a cross between Google and Bloomingdale's catalogue!

search for "Baby cribs"

Baby cribs "like this one"

Baby cribs like this one "in other stores"

TheFind in Fashion Vertical

Now, let me switch the Context to Fashion, which is a somewhat more complex category. What I would like to see added onto TheFind experience are:

• Personalization: If I am looking for an Armani jacket instead of a baby crib, then I have issues around Mens or Womens, Size, Color. I could not only be shopping for myself, I could also be shopping for my husband, or my kids. Color is addressed nicely, but the rest of the complexities are not yet fine-tuned.
• Content: I might want to read product reviews from Vogue or Harpers on the products I am viewing. As it stands, this kind of granular matching is not possible.
• Community: I might want to leverage the knowledge of the community into my shopping experience, pointing to technologies such as Collaborative Filtering, which Amazon has so successfully built into their shopping experience - offering "those who looked at X also looked at Y".

Conclusion

Against my Web 3.0 framework, TheFind does a very nice job - especially in the Vertical Search front (A+) and a reasonable job with Context (A-). It would win a lot of points by working in Personalization, and Content and Community - even if Commerce is left to the stores. To do that, however, the technology challenge is significant. They have to add a complete new vector: the notion of capturing and characterizing the Customer Profile, along with and track and store customer behavior, in a fairly comprehensive way.

Given all the Stanford Computer Scientists in the company, this shouldn't be impossible!

This post was written by Silicon Valley Entrepreneur and Strategy Consultant Sramana Mitra. On her blog Sramana Mitra on Strategy, she writes about entrepreneurship, venture capital, emerging markets, strategy, policy, leadership and sundry other business topics. Sramana Mitra has been the founder CEO of 3 startups, Interim VP of Marketing of 7 startups, and has consulted for over 70 companies including public companies such as SAP, Cadence, Webex, and others.

• Amazon aStore is a new product from Amazon that enables you "to build a dedicated shopping area that can be embedded within, or linked to from, your website." Mitch Ratcliffe and Nick Carr have examples and good thoughts on this. As Nick said, this is essentially a retail store widget. Hat-tip Emre Sokullu for sending me a copy of Amazon's email announcement.
• Never mind Amazon elastic computing, GData/Base is where it's at - so says Nick Lothian, who notes: "...the possibility of integration of data feeds from Base with Google Spreadsheets is an application feature that intrigues me." I agree and it's where Google could be at it's most dangerous in the 'Web Office' game - by mixing in APIs with online office apps.
• Garett Rogers wonders if a Personalized start page is coming to Google's new hosting service.
• Shopcasting - Fred Wilson has a knack for coining terms (or at least popularizing little known ones) and this is another beauty. The idea of 'social shopping' has been knocking around for a while, but with the increasing popularity of widgets - its time may be here.
• Speaking of widgets, check out Hooman Radfar's new blog Widgify. In his latest post he says that Widgets are the New Web Pages.

So the theme of this little mashup post (with a misleading title) is that online shopping, widgets, Web Office and structured data are beginning to churn out some interesting developments in the Web world. Watch these spaces...

How does it work? Unfortunately I couldn't test it out myself (as it's a US service), but on the Text2store blog they describe the process: firstly sign up on the home page with your cell phone number and valid e-mail address, then within 2-30 seconds you will get a text message with a confirmation code on your cell phone. Then you follow the 3-step process outlined on the homepage, beginning with inputting data about products and services you're interested in:

The service is free for consumers. There is no upfront cost for merchants, who pay only for customers. Text2store is calling this "cost per text (CPT)" and it means that merchants "only pay for on-the-go consumers who we send (sms) text message or e-mail coupon/promotions to." They also have a cost-per-click model for website referrals.

The concern for consumers when receiving shopping deals by phone has to be spamming. Text2store however claims that it employs ‘User Controlled Technology’, meaning the user can control all aspects of receiving promotions/coupons. Users can set how often they get a sales deal, which day(s) of the week and even at what time. The company also has an editorial process, whereby they check all coupons/promotions (within 24 hours) before they are released to subscribers.

Conclusion

As of now, the Text2store website is still a little clunky and I wasn't able to test out the mobile side of it (any Chicago natives care to test it out and comment?). But the service itself is promising. Of course, shopping promotions being delivered via mobile phone is kind of the holy grail of personalized shopping - for both shoppers and vendors. Because ideally users will receive only relevant messages, that are localized to where they live and personalized to their tastes.

According to a Yankee Group study, 42% of mobile customers are open to mobile advertising if it is relevant, if they asked for it or if they will get coupons or free services; and the U.S Mobile advertising revenue is projected to jump to $150 Million in 2006 from $45 Million in 2005. Yankee Group also predicts that Mobile ad sales could total $2 billion, or nearly 1% of U.S ad sales, by 2010 and 5% by 2015.

So it's a potentially huge market and Text2store is wanting to grab a decent slice of it. They're not alone of course - Slifter and Cellfire are two similar startups, and it's safe to assume that the mobile carriers and Internet bigcos are also gunning for the mobile shopping market.

To finish, here are a couple of screenshots from the merchant's perspective: