LetsBuyIt Blog

For those of you who want to express your style and originality but don’t have time to spend 5 years in design school or 3 years studying couture, opt for the new solution…customization on the Web!

Now you can customize the look of your sneakers to your tastes online:
The renowned and already successful Nike ID recently revamped its site design with new and simpler functionality. Puma has done the same with their, Mymongolianshoebbq, making it much more practical in use. Converse provides similar features on their site at converse.com.

Interested in customizing your gift and candies? Try the site Mymms.fr that lets you personalize your chocolates: personalize with colors and messages!

It may cost a bit more to be original, but the prices at these sites are far from outrageous!

And if Nike starts specializing in sneakers for giant insects, check out the new shoes we have designed for Billy :

After having previously reported (blog post here) about Telebid we now read in the FAZ that apparently Telebid has not only expanded to the UK and Spain but is also planning to open up in the US, Korea, Japan and China and currently has a daily subscription rate of 3,000 new members per day! We had also discussed the business model previously in the blog and we know now that apparently Telebid is making a daily turnover of almost 30 000 to 35 000 Euros per day, according to FAZ!!! Judge for yourself.

Concerning the recent eBay sale of Yieeha, a Social Community Shopping Portal, the new owner has been made know now on their blog and is the Net-Line Onlinedienste GmbH from Heilbronn. After quickly checking out their website the company turns out to be a live-erotic-cam provider, which gives the Yieeha slogan “Social winning” quite a new twist! It is good to know the user info in safe hands.

We know that Social Shopping is the big thing in e-commerce now, which has brought up many interesting players such as Edelight, DaWanda, Smatch or Shoppero.

As I have found out through the interesting article on Exciting Commerce with the title “Social Shopping: Amazon Friends & Interesting People” I had to discover that Amazon and Ebay have now joined the ranks of competing for the social shoppers.

That will make things interesting!

The latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on Internet shopping habits has revealed that more than 85% of the world’s online population has used the Internet to make a purchase in the last two years.

Turkish top the tally with 91% of the online shoppers using credit cards followed by 86% of the Irish shoppers and on third place are the Indian online shoppers with 84%.

“ Among Internet users, the highest percentage shopping online is found in South Korea, where 99% of those with Internet access have used it to shop, followed by the UK, Germany and Japan with 97% each with the US eighth, at 94%.” (Source: Livemint)

These are the most popular categories purchased on the internet: Books (41% purchased in the past three months), Clothing/Accessories/Shoes (36%), Videos / DVDs / Games (24%), Airline Tickets (24%) and Electronic Equipment (23%). Clothing / Accessories / Shoes have increased by 20% to 30% in the last two years and books by seven per cent.

Kinset has developed a 3D Store technology that combines the virtual shopping with the real-time experience.

With Kinset, shops can be designed, tailored and created according to your needs in 3D and the shopper can stroll around, wander through the aisles and can use the power of the web to get information about a product that the shopper is interested in.

The retailer can decide on the look, feel and layout of the shop and analyze shopping behavior through tracking technology, on how the shopper has moved around in the virtual shop, etc. The retailer can change shop designs to optimise sales and can even use it as testing module for the real world.

This takes virtual worlds like Secondlife to the next commercial level and combines the best of the real and e-commerce world. We will see how users react and adopt this new way of shopping.

The e-commerce is currently growing rapidly. By 2011, it should triple and Sales Volume should reach 320 billion EUR. The main players in this market are United Kingdom, Germany and France respectively which represent approximately 70% of the European online sales. E-business is however the most dominant in the United Kingdom (60 billion generated this year). This can be explained by their different way of life. English people are said to be great spenders in comparison to Germans and French.

This growth should extend rather quickly and cover a big part of Europe. Have a look here at the entire article concerning figures of the market.

The craze of Internet users to purchase online continues to grow. The number of deals realized by e-commerce reached EUR 28.8 millions in 2007, which means a rise of 37% in one year.

Similarly 63% of the Internet users had already done a purchase in the second quarter 2007.

We notice a rise of 22% of the number of Internet buyers in 2007. This phenomenon can be explained by a bigger trust of the Internet users concerning the use of this sale’s channel (+20% in one year). Moreover, online buyers are mainly young people between 20 and 40 years old, whereas people older than 50 years are still reluctant to this way of shopping.

It is a sector which evolves very quickly because of the immediacy of the act. We are more easily facing to a logic of impulsive buying. Additionally the intent to purchase increased by 35% in 2007 in comparison to the previous year.
Find here all the information and all the statistics on this subject.

ON a Friday afternoon in Guangzhou, a city in southern China, 500 shoppers gather outside a Gome electrical superstore in the downtown district. They arrive en masse at the designated time that they had previously agreed online. Several hours later, they emerge clutching boxes, having secured 10-30% discounts on cameras, DVD players and flat-screen televisions …

Team buying, aims to drive unprecedented bargains by combining the reach of the internet with the power of the mob. It is spreading through China like wildfire. The practice originated in online chat-rooms but has quickly inspired several specialist websites, such as www.teambuy.com.cn, www.taobao.com or www.liba.com

Would that work in Europe?

We would like to highlight an article from the e-commerce Times.

“Because each customer has a different buying style, unique selection criteria, personal motivations and shopping approach, retailers must deliver a more dynamic experience to better accommodate customer preferences.”

“Most people spend 30 seconds, on average, on a product page, that time goes up when the product’s shown in 3-D. And sales rates are typically 18 to 20 percent higher just by providing an interactive experience.”

Read the complete article here.

What’s your opinion?

Researchers who track online customer satisfaction said recently that e-commerce companies made consumers happier than offline retailers.

Two or three years ago, companies didn’t really know what they were doing online. But nowadays they master the e-commerce process and at the same time, consumers became more mature and fluent with the concept of online shopping.

Customers know what they should expect from online shopping and they are feeling a lot more positive about their online experience. Even if few years ago they were desperate with some terrific experiences, most of them are giving a second chance to e-commerce.

Retailers tried since years and years to know their customers and to use data mining to generate value to their website. But researchers founded that consumers are still almost impossible to predict.
“Consumer behavior itself is amazingly static, and the Web hasn’t changed that,” specialist said. “Shoppers are going to do what they are going to do.” The bottom line is that “even on the Web, the old rules still apply.”

Profits! This is a key aspect of the e-commerce shops. The number of profitable e-commerce companies continues to grow and a recent survey that has been done on the e-commerce landscape found that 60 percent of the top 40 sites in terms of sales volume were profitable.

What’s your opinion concerning the e-commerce? How often do you buy online?
Are you ready to give a second chance to LetsBuyIt?