The two food ordering startups didn’t reveal any financial details, but the merger will create the biggest take out and delivery portal on the web and mobile with more than 20,000 restaurants in 500 cities. Read more »
Faisal Masud, who was hired away from eBay to help Groupon become a broader e-commerce company, is moving on. Read more »
Belly originally built its loyalty and marketing platform for local businesses, but it’s now gravitating toward big enterprise chains. McDonalds, Chic-fil-A, 7-Eleven and Domino’s are all running pilot programs of Belly’s service in Chicago. Read more »
What’s the trick to getting consumers talking about your products and shopping on mobile? Fashion retailer Modcloth isn’t afraid to try out a lot of tactics. Read more »
Online food delivery and takeout portal Foodler is now accepting Bitcoin alongside credit cards and cash-on-delivery for orders from more than 17,000 restaurants. Read more »
Content owners, whether they are publishers, retailers, or marketers, are always looking for new ways to deliver a unique experience to their customers. We call this content personalization. Key trends in this area are led by a collection of technologies that we call post-programming curation. These technologies use the best of behavioral tracking, collaborative filtering, audience targeting, and dynamic content presentation. Read more »
PayPal is offering two new extensions that will let Magento’s merchants set up shop in PayPal’s mobile app and support mobile payments anywhere in their stores. Read more »
The Week surprised the publishing industry by carving out a profitable place in the competitive world of magazine news. Now, it is building up its operations for the digital long term. Read more at paidContent »
Braintree is ramping up its mobile presence thanks to its recent purchase of Venmo. Using the peer-to-peer payment technology, Braintree is creating an in-app customer identity network that can be used to buy goods across iOS apps. Read more »
Six months after launching in Europe and Canada, one quarter of all of Braintree’s e-commerce transactions are initiated on a foreign shore. CEO Bill Ready explains why its international expansion is a key driver of its business. Read more »
Amazon forbids third-party merchants that use its marketplace from offering the same goods cheaper elsewhere, and the German Federal Cartel Office is gearing up to do something about it. Read more »
Looking to buy a new Kindle Fire or Xbox product? How about making your purchase through a hashtag? Twitter has teamed up with American Express to allow purchases on the site, raising questions about the company’s future in e-commerce. Read more »
500 Startups put its own unique spin on the accelerator demo day on Wednesday, debuting 30 companies in its fifth batch of startups. Here were the five that caught my eye. Read more »
Facebook announced Thursday that it’s launching a Facebook Gift Card, a plastic re-loadable card that will allow users to send credits to friends for stores like Target, Sephora, or Olive Garden. The move comes as Facebook look to build out its e-commerce on the site. Read more »
Last week SpotHero announced a $2.5 million round. This week competitor and fellow Chicago parking outfit ParkWhiz announced its Series A. ParkWhiz started out selling parking spaces online for special events like the Super Bowl, but it’s expanded into day-to-day spot reservations. Read more »
The streaming video industry continues to undergo radical transformation. Kun Gao, of Crunchyroll, points to four things to look for in the coming year. Read more »
Y Combinator-backed Crowdtilt on Wednesday announced the beta launch of its API that will enable third parties, from vacation sites, online retailers and startups looking for capital, to use the startup’s group payments capabilities. Read more »
One Kings Lane, the San Francisco-based home decor site, on Tuesday announced that it had raised a $50 million Series D round, bringing its total amount raised to $117 million. The new funding will go technology, marketing and merchandising, the company said. Read more »
Style and social commerce platform Polyvore on Tuesday announced that it had launched a free mobile app for the iPhone that enables users to assemble and share personal style collections, as well as browse and purchase items. Read more »
New Deepfield analysis out just after Black Friday and in time for Cyber Monday shows (spoiler alert!) Amazon is by far the most popular online retail site. But there are some surprises as well. Read more »
Fab, the NY-based design-centric shopping site, on Wednesday announced that it had partnered with deals site LivingSocial for the holidays. As part of the partnership, Fab products will be featured in LIvingSocial’s gift guide, which reaches 24 million people. Read more »
New York-based data analytics startup SumAll announced that it has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Battery Ventures and including Wellington Partners. Launched last year, SumAll helps smaller businesses analyze and visualize a comprehensive set of their data. Read more »
New York-based discovery commerce startup Birchbox on Thursday launched a special edition home-themed box, featuring home accessories, gourmet foods and other lifestyle and entertainment products. Last year around the holidays, it similarly launched a one-time box targeting men and later made it a monthly product. Read more »
Walmart Labs, the retail giant’s innovation arm, on Wednesday launched a subscription food service called Goodies. Similar to beauty startup Birchbox, the service charges subscribers a monthly fee to receive a curated box of sample-sized items, which they can then purchase in greater amounts online. Read more »
At GigaOM’s Roadmap conference Monday, Birchbox co-founder Katia Beauchamp and Warby Parker co-founder Dave Gilboa each talked about why their companies hadn’t yet released mobile apps and what they have in store. Read more »
Dave Gilboa, Warby Parker’s co-founder and co-CEO, said the future of its business and all retail will involve the blending of online and offline commerce. He said Warby Parker does more sales per square foot at its headquarters showroom than all retailers except for Apple. Read more »
Dollar Shave Club, the seemingly too-good-to-be-true promise of razors every month for only $1, has raised almost $10 million in a Series A funding round for international expansion (with Canada to start), and growth into other men’s product verticals, although they wouldn’t say which ones. Read more »
Pickie, a recent graduate of TechStars New York, announced Monday that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from a range of investors, including DFJ Gotham, Betaworks and Liberty City Ventures. The startup uses social data regarding products to generate personalized iPad-based magazines for shopping. Read more »
Tradesy, a new fashion “recommerce” site from the creator of the highly popular site, Recycled Bride, is launching Wednesday with $1.5 million in funding to disrupt the resale business, which has plenty of competitors but no clear winners yet. Tradesy hopes to upset this balance. Read more »
Etsy, the marketplace for handmade goods, is rolling out a new mobile app in time for the holiday season. One in four visits to the site comes from a mobile app and mobile visits are twice as likely to convert to purchases, Etsy said. Read more »
Frank & Oak, a Montreal-based digital-only men’s fashion brand, has raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding led by Lightbank. Since launching in February, the company said it has attracted 200,000 members and is growing at a rapid clip. Read more »
Fab says it has “reimagined” its mobile apps, updating its app for the iPad and optimizing it for the iPhone 5. One-third of Fab’s sales come from mobile but it’s looking to when mobile shopping contributes half of its revenue. Read more »
The co-founders of two companies changing the face of connected retail, Warby Parker and Birchbox, will join us at our upcoming RoadMap conference next month. They’ll talk about the forces changing the retail landscape and how they expect to connect with the consumer of the future. Read more »
Ebook pricing and device trends that hold in North American countries don’t necessarily work for less developed market. Executives from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google, France’s FNAC and India’s Indiaplaza discussed similarities and differences between digital reading cultures Wednesday afternoon at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Read more at paidContent »
New York-based fashion community Stylecaster has purchased beauty and virtual makeover site Daily Makeover and raised $2 million in new funding. With the acquisition, the company said it would double revenue and the size of its team, as well as triple its traffic. Read more »
As New York’s Birchbox looks to build a global presence with the recent purchase of Paris-based JolieBox, it is announcing a limited partnership with goop, the London-based lifestyle site launched by actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Read more »
Social gifting startup Treater is moving to mobile with the Thursday launch of iPhone and Android apps. While it competes with Facebook Gifts and other startups, the company says it wants to encourage informal, impromptu giving, not necessarily gifts for formal occasions. Read more »
San Francisco-based thredUP, an online retailer of secondhand children’s clothing, has raised $14.5 million in Series C financing. The company plans to use the new funds to invest in infrastructure and expand into new verticals, including teens, maternity and adults. Read more »
Social networking giant Facebook is rolling out a new gift-giving service that enables users to exchange physical gifts entirely through its platform. The new feature is based on technology Facebook acquired when it purchased the startup Karma in May. Read more »
Sumall, a New York data analytics startup targeting small and medium sized online stores, mined its data to determine how time on site translates into revenue, which it says can be a helpful indicator in e-commerce. Read more »
