I’m curious as to what’s happening to certain of our online form entries.  Most of them comprise of address, email, or other information that is plugging directly into a back-end database and either serve as query against or populate preset tables. These are permission-based entries which we, as consumers, thoughtfully offer and generally [...]

E-commerce providers have a problem: they lose a significant percentage (some cite 75%) of customers that have made it to checkout. It’s shocking. A huge, stare-me-in-the-face, gaping opportunity that’s been acknowledged for a long time. Plenty of ancillary businesses recognize it and offer solutions, which beget another [...]

At the beginning of the year I noted that media (i.e. content) would play a role in 2007 e-commerce growth.  Here was prediction #2 in my e-commerce prognostications: 
Content shifts traffic patterns. Especially within niches, the more sophisticated e-tailers will look to media to drive visit frequency. Just as groceries changed Wal-Mart’s customer base from [...]

I missed a coming attraction in my January e-commerce prognostications: webinars as direct-to-consumer marketing tool.  Traditionally the webinar (or “web seminar”) has been utilized by research houses as another distribution point.  More recently they’ve seen traction in the B2B (business to business) space as a way to conduct an informational sales pitch to numerous enterprise leads [...]

Despite what has been a marked uptick in consumer facing startups over the past couple years, it’s not altogether often that e-tailers make it into VentureWire.  If memory serves, 1-800Diapers.com was the last that graced its e-letter.  So I was interested to read the scoop yesterday that a shopping site called MyShape received $2 [...]

YOUR NAME HERE … ?, originally uploaded by tejana
At DrJays, I used to champion the merits of personalization.  Whatever we could do to dynamically adjust a page to fit a visitor’s stated, or probablistic, preferences, I’d recommend we pursue.  Why show winter coats to a visitor whose IP address placed her in [...]

shopping carts, originally uploaded by anyone_anywhere
I’ve been enjoying Jeremy Liew’s posts on Lightspeed Venture Partners’ new blog. On Jan. 1 he posted six 2007 consumer internet predictions and at the top of the list was “Ecommerce 2.0 arrives“:
Google’s search revenues continue to grow at 70-80% growth rates. Yet the public [...]