The past week my mind has been focused on curation based commerce (Fab.com, onekingslane.com) and the emerging rocket ship called Pinterest. I love Fab and their emails and think that curation based commerce is a vertical that will expand. (The only problem is that they need to scale internationally, cough South Africa.) Let me be frank for a minute, after looking at Pinterest for close to a month, and writing a post on the company; I am still not sure whether Pinterest has a use case. Pinterest – A bubble waiting to burst opens this weeks’ look back with regards to ecommerce news.

The week in 10 ecommerce stories:

1. It is pretty clear for me that Amazon is the pied piper. The only difference is that they have multiple assets that are making money. Amazon Launches MYHABIT private shopping apps for Kindle Fire and Android for me is a clear sign that Fashion is an ever increasingly important vertical for Amazon. I am not even mentioning their big ace in the hole Zappos.

2. Wayfair is one company that has steadily gotten my attention. Who are they? Why does no one really know about them? They were CSN and they have flown under the radar for a while. That is changing as they are a big player raking in a cool $500 million in revenue. Read Wayfair: Your Online Mega-Pivot Megastore from Fast Company.

3. Electronics Retailers Scramble to Adapt to Changing Market from The New York Times highlights the issues retailers are facing. Best Buy with all over their troubles are a sign that in developed markets retail companies need to have a eCommerce strategy. If not Amazon, eBay and Walmart is getting the eyeballs and sales.

4. John Gruber recently mentioned that Google has made more money from iPhone apps than from Android. It is brutal but it highlights for me the importance that Apple has given the iPhone in regard to eCommerce. Case in point Google announced a stand alone app for its Offers (think Groupon) service.

5. Evolution of Online Shopping: Checkout – what is the single most important phase for eCommerce companies. The checkout is often overlooked but TiKR provides almost a best practices for what a checkout solution should contain.

6. Ron Johnson has a very difficult job.  The JC Penney CEO and now President has to turn a round a retailer who has big challenges. For those not aware, Johnson was the person in charge under Steve Jobs that created the retail winner for Apple. That didn’t last long: J.C. Penney’s president leaves after less than a year on the job, indicates the level of issues that JC Penney has. Pricing is the big one.

7. Meet BEV: The Twitter Activated Vending Machine. OK, this is a fun one but man alive, this is a vending machine (we all have used them) found in South Africa that uses Tweets to dispense BOS Ice Tea. Dick Costolo and Jack Dorsey, gentleman you need an ecommerce API to create transactional commerce a reality.

8.  Rakuten has announced that it will sell its own eReader in Japan. I think it is simply a branded Kobo reader that will help Rakuten get into the ebook space. This is a classic defensive move as Rakuten is market leader in Japan and Amazon is to launch the Kindle in Japan sometime this year.

9. World’s First Groupon Store Confirmed, Coming to Singapore This July – We all expected this right? Groupon is trying hard to diversify, but is retail the answer to their problems?

10. Is Square the next big acquisition target? I think so as they are an enabler for more people to be able to transact. It was a matter of time, but it seems that Rocket Internet is about to raise a double digit round of finance for their Square clone, Payleven.

Onwards.