After acquiring Vendio just a couple months back, Alibaba just purchased Auctiva. Vendio and Auctiva run in the same circles, but according to the FT, “Auctiva is larger, processing about $5bn in goods annually versus $2bn at Vendio, said Alibaba chief executive David Wei.”

This is part of Alibaba’s $100M plan to invest in AliExpress, encouraging sellers to source products from China.

Who will Alibaba buy next? Will this force eBay to make a move?

Ina Steiner of AuctionBytes:

It will be interesting to see how Alibaba will consolidate Vendio and Auctiva’s tools. I especially wonder what eBay thinks of its Chinese rival now owning two important third-party vendors and having access to rich data about its sales and its sellers.

I haven’t even used it yet, but I’m already completely put off by Visa’s Rightcliq.

1. I couldn’t create an account through Firefox, even after I upgraded to 3.6.8. I had to use IE.
2. They had me setup 4 security questions.
3. I find out it’s a downloadable browser application/plugin…which is now attached to IE, a browser that I rarely use.
4. Now that it’s installed, it’s causing IE to crash.

This is too hard. I still really have no idea what Rightcliq is and now I don’t really want to know. Maybe it turns out to be the most amazing shopping app ever, but if my experience is any indication, no one will ever know.

Bing Shopping officially launched yesterday, putting an end to the Bing Cashback experiment. While Bing Shopping doesn’t have Google-esque unique user numbers, it doesn’t matter. Bing Shopping is now a free shopping engine just like Google Shopping, so merchants will flock to the service. SingleFeed pre-registered our merchants for Bing Shopping and the response was impressive.

In the end, though, results are what matter. After the initial excitement of another free shopping engine, Bing Shopping needs to provide significant value for merchants in order for them to take this new venture seriously. You might say that because it’s free, they don’t have to do much to succeed. I disagree. I think that even though it’s free, Bing Shopping still has to provide solid traffic and sales in order to be taken seriously and capture mind share.

Why is mind share important?

Merchants are stretched thin with all their online marketing activities. SEO, PPC, Affiliate Programs, Shopping Engines, Email, Display, etc. When I was running PPC campaigns for clients back in the late 90s and early 00s, I remember testing FindWhat, Ah-ha, Kanoodle, Looksmart, and others, but in the end, my mind share was captured by the leaders. Same with SEO. Eventually, it was really about getting to the top of Google.

The same can be said with the shopping engines. Google Product Search, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, NexTag, and PriceGrabber and to a lesser extent Pronto, Amazon Product Ads, Become, and Smarter drive a lot of high quality traffic to merchants. Then there are a lot of others that just don’t get the same mind share because merchants know that optimizing for an engine which doesn’t have significant traffic or that doesn’t drive sales is not worthwhile when there are so many other shopping engines and marketing channels to consider.

Now that Bing Shopping is free, the depth and breadth of listings should dramatically improve. Then it’s up to Bing to provide a great shopping experience that makes consumers want to come back. On day 1, Bing Shopping is highlighting a Back to School section. Even though the associated landing page makes no sense (why Art Supplies?), I’ve always liked this type of merchandising. Other features of Bing Shopping include shopping slideshows, easy sharing functionality (for Twitter, Facebook and Email), a mix of expert and user Reviews, a free shipping filter, search history, and product page seller details (see below). Expect a lot more improvements on the consumer front in order to drive adoption.

Bing can always push more Instant Answers (the shopping results highlighted in Bing searches – think Google OneBox results) for shopping related queries, and they already highlight shopping results in a second tab (see below), but without a Cashback offer, they are going to have to build a great shopping search experience. The nice thing is that now that Bing Shopping is free, Bing Shopping doesn’t have to worry about getting consumers to click out as quickly as possible in order to monetize. Many of the paid shopping engines just try to get consumers to click out on multiple listings as they are still playing an (ever increasingly difficult) arbitrage game on Google AdWords. Bing Shopping can actually concentrate on helping consumers make the right buying decision. It’s up to AdCenter to provide high quality ads in the periphery to help monetize the searches.

Bing Search Result:
-note the instant answers, second tab for shopping results

Bing Shopping Product Page:
-note the plus box for more in depth merchant information

SingleFeed is running a webinar tomorrow with The Rimm-Kaufman Group.

In this webinar we will cover:

-Google Merchant Center Best Practices
-Connecting your Merchant Center & AdWords accounts
-Creating AdWords Extension/Plus Box ads
-Optimizing & tracking your Extension/Plus Box ads

Title: Connecting Google Merchant Center with Google AdWords
Date: Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PDT

Register Now!

**This webinar will be recorded. If you cannot attend live, please register and a link to the recording will be emailed to you.**

Alibaba Acquires Vendio – Here’s the press release. Congrats, guys!

eBay Acquires RedLaser – Here’s the WSJ take.

Activity picking up in the ecommerce space.
-GSI acquired FetchBack at the beginning of June.
-Alibris acquired Monsoon Software at the end of February

Internet Retailer kicks off today. I’m sitting on the show room floor at SingleFeed’s booth as we speak. The A/C just came on and workers and exhibitors will be flooding the floors in the next couples hours getting set up. SingleFeed exhibited 2 years ago. It was a great event for us for lots of reasons, but as a metrics oriented marketing company, I will say that the ROI was great. Just as importantly, though, we got to talk to merchants (customers and prospects) face to face, which is so important.

This can be an expensive event. All in, SingleFeed will spend about $20K for just over 2 days on an exhibit show floor with hundreds of other vendors. We could spend a bit less, but it’s worth it to go the extra mile with some nice meals or events for the team and our friends. Many companies spend a lot more.

After a dip in attendance last year, numbers are back to record breaking levels with over 6000 people registered. And the shopping engines are well represented. CA, CI, and Mercent are here. Shopzilla, Become, Shop.com, Smarter, and TheFind are here. TheFind is also a big sponsor. Google has a small booth (the normal 10×10), but curiously they only list Google Commerce Search, Google Affiliate Network, and Google TV Ads. And it had to have been a last minute decision as it’s at the end of a row. Then there’s WinBuyer with a big booth. Much different than last year when lots of the shopping engines, and others, stuck to the sidelines.

I’ll post some pictures later.

Just wanted to pull together some posts on Microsoft’s ecommerce efforts over the years…

Bing Double Cashback Ends Promotion – August 28, 2009
Bing Cashback – Why Merchants Should Submit their Feed Today – June 5, 2009
Cashback is not the Answer – May 21, 2008
Jellyfish’s Day in the Sun – May 21, 2008
Microsoft Acquires Jellyfish – October 2, 2007
Windows Live Shopping Beta Shut Down – Feb 21, 2007
Jim Barr, GM of Microsoft Marketplaces – May 23, 2006
Ecommerce, Microsoft Style – May 19, 2006
MSN Marketplaces – May 9, 2006
Microsoft Officially Enters the Comparison Shopping Space – July 15, 2005

Official post from Bing.

ZDNet article
CNET post
TechCruch post

More to come…

Updated to include Shoptab. See below.

It’s been just about 3 weeks since SingleFeed started testing its Facebook application. I’ve fielded a lot of questions about the potential for selling on Facebook and the different options out there for merchants. Now that I’ve delved into the opportunity a bit more, and we have plenty of stores in Alpha, I wanted to give everyone a quick update.

The Potential
With so many consumers on Facebook, merchants have to have a presence on Facebook. It starts with a fan page, but no one really knows where it ends. I view Facebook as an online marketing channel that should be viewed just as one views an affiliate program, seo, ppc, blogging, tweeting, email or shopping engines. Facebook allows merchants to develop a deeper relationship with customers than most of these marketing channels, though, so there’s a little more to it than just thinking like a metrics oriented marketer. Facebook presents an opportunity to interact with Fans of your brand or products. We’ve all been talking about interacting with our customers for years, but with a big ‘ol Wall of posts up front and in your face, more than ever, merchants have an opportunity to listen more and provide shoppers/customers what they want; be it access to designers, special/exclusive offers, meetups, contests, or even a Facebook shopping experience. Facebook also allows for a more viral marketing opportunity.

We’re starting to read about a big splashy Facebook marketing success story every day. Yesterday the NYTimes had a piece about Disney Tickets Together and WSJ had a piece about Merchants Pushing Sales through Social Media. But that said, merchants still have to test, track, and iterate before jumping into the deep end of the social commerce pool. Note that in the WSJ article, Guitar Syndicate doesn’t know if Facebook is actually driving sales and Ski & Sun Sports says that Facebook sales “account for barely 1% of the company’s overall online sales.”

Merchant Options for “Selling” on Facebook
In this post, I’m not talking about adding the Like button to your website or setting up a fanpage. I’m assuming that both of those have happened or will happen (at least as long as the merchant gets to ‘own’ their presence on Facebook). What I’m going to run through are the options I know of for adding some type of shopping experience to a merchant’s Facebook page. There seem to be two schools of thought right now: programs that allow for transacting on Facebook and programs that list products and drive the consumer to transact off of Facebook.

Transacting on Facebook:
Alvenda – made a splash by launching 1800Flowers’ in-Facebook store. Alvenda basically has taken 1800Flowers.com and put it in a Facebook page. Alvenda’s CEO puts it well: “The majority of future online sales will happen offsite. Customers will be able to shop with brands wherever they happen to be on the Web, whether they’re on YouTube, a favorite blogger Web site or in Facebook.” While I don’t completely agree with that comment, the idea is sound. More and more conversations about brands and products are taking place away from a merchant’s site and a merchant need to look at that as an opportunity. Besides 1800Flowers, look at this Brooks Brothers Facebook shopping site. I’ve heard that a Alvenda Facebook Shop can cost $20K.

Fluid Social – made a splash launching a 3-day store for Jones Apparel. Fluid can create Lookbooks and other creative avenues like My Jansport Favorites to help insert the merchant into the conversation. Like Alvenda, Fluid can also cost $20K.

Payvment – Payvment is definitely for the very little guy compared to the market for expensive and flashy solutions from Alvenda and Fluid. The App allows a consumer to quickly and easily view products and add to a cart. The company is getting some good buzz, but looking through the comments for the App, I’m definitely not getting a sense that they are powering anyone of significance and it was strange to go through the comments and find dead end after dead end (comments from merchants who didn’t have the App up and running). The solution can work for a larger retailer, but for now, it looks like they are attracting small Etsy-like stores. Here are some examples: New Hope Beads and Orglamix. Payvment just announced they closed $1.5M in funding, and in the announcement say that “over 20,000 businesses and individuals have started to sell goods on Facebook and over 500,000 Facebook users have shopped for products in stores using the Payvment app.” Please note that it doesn’t say there have been 500,000 sales!

Transacting off of Facebook:
Sortprice: Sortprice was very early out of the gate with their Facebook application and with over 1000 stores up and running, they have to be #1 in terms of real (not tiny little merchants) Facebook stores up and running. Sortprice enables a Facebook presence for any merchant that works with them for their shopping engine program for FREE. Here are some examples: TigerDirect and Evogear.

Wishpot: Wishpot is a bit of a mystery to me. They offer social commerce solutions for merchants, but they seem to be concentrating more on basic wishlists for consumers. The look and feel of a Wishpot Facebook stores is great, definitely better than Sortprice and Payvment Facebook Shops, but you’re going to have to pay. Looking like Teavana or C&C California is going to cost you a couple thousand dollars. Wishpot is also sending merchant offers to Twitter.

Shoptab: I don’t know anything about these guys and haven’t hear much about them, but I like the idea that the founders are store owners, or so the website says. According to their LinkedIn profiles, Jay Feitlinger and Bret Giles both seems to have good internet marketing and ecommerce experience. They set up a support portal through Zendesk, but it hasn’t been updated since late last year. Not sure if this is a side business. The Shoptab blog is a bit more active and the App page is full of comments. Shoptab costs $10, $15, or $20/mo depending on SKU count. Example stores: The Reptile King, Wholesome Productions, and the Coca-Cola Store. Paul Cheney from Practical eCommerce wrote about Shoptab last week.

SingleFeed: We’re Alpha testing our solution. It’s free and takes 5 mins to set up, which seems to be much different than most of the other solutions available. It’s based on the Google Merchant Center data feed, which almost all serious merchants have at this point, and runs off of Google App Engine. The feedback we’ve gotten so far is all about customization. Merchants want to be able to feature Sale products, Special offers, one-day Sales, etc. We’ll have our Beta out in a week or 2.

There are other solutions for setting up a Facebook shop, but these are the players I think are serious. There are many shopping carts and ecommerce platforms (Big Commerce, Cartfly, etc.) that allow merchants to sell their products directly on Facebook, but if you’re a merchant, please don’t make a decision on an ecommerce platform based on this one feature.

I’m not the first to report on this. Make sure to read Inc.’s coverage from April.

@ 10am PDT this morning, SingleFeed, with special guest Sarah Beritzhoff from Google, will be running a Webinar about all the ways your Google Merchant Center data feed can be used.

Here’s the Agenda:
Brief intro from SingleFeed and Google
Google Merchant Center Basics
Google Merchant Center & Google Product Search – quick look at new page format, review of different Onebox formats
Google Merchant Center & Google Affiliate Network – examples, explanation
Google Merchant Center & Google AdWords – examples, data, explanation, proper set-up
Q&A with SingleFeed & Google

Register now. It’ll be a packed (virtual) house.