Wayfair and Rocket Internet to IPO the coming week – eCommerce news of the week

We are a few days away from the beginning of October, which is the start of the festive season for ecommerce businesses. All the planning should have been done as systems will be tested as customers make their early festive purchases. The coming week also contains the annual Shop.org conference which will be in Seattle in which global ecommerce executives come together to learn about new trends etc.

We are also most probably going to see potential rivals in home goods going public this week. Wayfair, the Boston based powerhouse will be going public. Greg Bettinelli whom did a great job looking at the Zulily IPO documents had some interesting insights this past weekend:

Across the Atlantic, Rocket Internet will also most probably be going public this week. The company has claimed that it will be taking a more hands-on approach with the various businesses it has in its portfolio. I tend to believe that Kinnevik the major funder behind Rocket Internet will be happy that institutional investors and other investors takes some risk in the platform venture based company. However not everyone is seeing the upside of the Rocket Internet IPO:

 

The ecommerce stories that caught my attention this past week:

  1. 4 ways Amazon’s ruthless practices are crushing local economies (Salon.com)- “Even by the anything-goes ethical code of the corporate jungle, Amazon.com’s alpha male, Jeff Bezos, is considered a ruthless predator by businesses that deal with him. As overlord of Amazon, by far the largest online marketer in the world (with more sales than the next nine US online retailers combined), Bezos has the monopoly power to stalk, weaken, and even kill off retail competitors—going after such giants as Barnes & Noble and Walmart and draining the lifeblood from hundreds of smaller Main Street shops.”
  2. SK Telecom Agrees to Acquire Shopkick (WSJ) -“SK Planet Inc., a fully owned subsidiary of SK Telecom that is operated independently, paid about $200 million for the company, according to a person familiar with the matter. SK Telecom told The Wall Street Journal last year that it would spend between $500 million and $1 billion through its SK Planet Internet services arm to buy, invest in and build U.S. companies over three to five years.”
  3. A Latin American Unicorn From Argentina (Huffington Post) – “There is a market of 500 million people – nearly 8.6% of the world’s population – that the business media all too often neglects, serving up story after story on China and India. Forgotten is all of Latin America. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of Internet users in Latin America grew from 18.1 million to 122.4 million, a compounded annual growth rate of 32% compared with only 12% in North America during the same period.”
  4. Amazon Wish Lists disappear for hours (Geekwire) – “If your idea of a fun fall Friday evening is to curl up in front of a computer with a warm drink and go Internet window-shopping on Amazon, bad news: Amazon wish lists have been experiencing technical difficulties since around 7:00 PM Pacific.Rest easy, Amazon (probably) didn’t delete your wish lists. At least, not just your wish lists, anyway.”
  5. Superbalist swings past the million member mark (Ventureburn) – “Hot on the heels of its acquisition by South African ecommerce giant Takealot, the curated design shop has announced that it now has more than one-million members prepared to spend their hard-earned cash on it.According to Superbalist co-founder Claude Hanan, a large part of this growth has come from South Africa, with people looking to buy international products, but through a local channel with proven reliability.”
  6. Update on Amazon’s Fulfillment Center (FC) Network (Amazon Strategies) – “Every year as we head into the fourth quarter holiday selling season, we roll up our sleeves and update our database of Amazon Fulfillment Centers (FCs).  The job has gotten easier over the years as Amazon now announces most of the new FCs with local press, or talks about them on earnings calls.”  A great insightful post on Amazon’s logistics infrastructure.
  7. Peapod celebrates its 25th birthday remembering its pre-Internet days (Internet Retailer) – “In an exclusive interview with Internet Retailer, one of Peapod’s co-founders remembers the early days of VHS tapes and disks, jokes about the first-ever mobile shopping app (for Palm Pilots!), and shares a video of him explaining to customers decades ago how to shop online.”
  8. An analysis of the ecommerce market in the Nordic region (EcommerceNews.eu) – “Bring, a Norwegian postal and logistics company that’s owned by Posten Norge, has taken a look at the ecommerce industry in the Nordic region. This year’s report shows that the consumers’ total experience is important when shopping online. And it also shows that there are some big differences between consumers from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland.”
  9. Examining the Amazon Way (New York Times) – “John Rossman, an executive at Amazon in the early 2000s, has written “The Amazon Way,” about the 14 leadership principles that drive the retailer, including obsessing over the customer, hiring and developing the best, and practicing frugality. The relatively brief book, which was published through Amazon’s self-publishing platform, discusses how these rules can benefit any company — should it be brave enough to put them into effect. “None of the 14 principles mentions the need for a healthy work-life balance,” the author notes.”
  10. MySmartPrice now allows users to compare prices on WhatsApp (MediaNama) – “Price comparison service MySmartPrice has launched a new price comparison service on WhatsApp. The feature is based on a non-official WhatsApp API available on GitHub developed by Max Kovaljov. Users simply need to add +91 9332222222 to their WhatsApp contact list. Then they can message the product name and MySmartPrice will reply back with a list of prices for the requested product and other similar products. Currently, this feature only supports price search for the electronics category. MySmartPrice co-founder Sitakanta Ray told Medianama that other categories will be added by the end of October this year.”
  11. Konga And GTBank Launch Cardless Payments Feature For Online Shoppers (TechCabal) – “Konga and GTBANK have just turned on a very interesting payments feature. At checkout, Konga shoppers who use GTBank Internet banking can elect to not use their cards. Instead, they can now use the new “GTPay” option.”
  12. What one of the most mobile retailers (RueLaLa) ) is doing with iOS 8 (Internet Retailer) – “RueLaLa.com, where mobile sales make up 50% of total sales, is using new features like the notifications widget and handoff to enhance mobile commerce for shoppers on Apple devices. And there are desktop implications.”
  13. U.S. Postal Service wants to deliver more groceries, expanding Amazon test (Geekwire) – “The U.S. Postal Service is asking federal regulators to approve a two-year test of USPS delivery of “groceries and other prepackaged goods” in the early morning hours in big cities across the country, expanding beyond an initial test the Postal Service has been conducting with Amazon Fresh in San Francisco.”
  14. Amazon asks judge to throw out lawsuit alleging price inflation on Amazon Prime items (Geekwire) – “Amazon is opting to fight a lawsuit filed earlier this year that alleges some prices on Amazon Prime-eligible products are inflated to help cover the cost of shipping, even when delivery is supposed to be free. One motion filed by Amazon asks the judge to throw out the lawsuit, and another asks the judge to force the plaintiffs into arbitration.”
  15. Apple, Twitter bet on twenty-somethings’ billion dollar company (CNN Money) – “John Collison thinks it should be as easy to move money around the Internet as it is to move information. The 24-year-old Irish entrepreneur and his brother Patrick, 26, had already built and sold one startup. As they tinkered with ideas for their next project, they were struck by the antiquated mobile payment systems that existed.
  16. DHL drone will make deliveries to German island starting Friday (The Verge) – “Starting Friday, DHL will use drones to deliver medical supplies to a small German island. The company’s quad-rotor “parcelcopter” will transport packages to the island of Juist, home to between 1,500 and 1,700 people, and DHL claims this marks the first unmanned drone delivery service to launch in Europe. Flights will occur daily through October; Reuters says the drone will make trips when ferries and flights — the typical methods of traveling to Juist — aren’t running.”
  17. Amazon workers in Germany are expanding a strike to a fifth logistics center (Bloomberg) – “Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) workers in Germany expanded a strike to a fifth logistics center as the country’s largest union pushes the U.S. online retailer to join collective bargaining agreements and pay higher wages. “The people here are fed up,” Karsten Rupprecht, a Ver.di union representative attending the strike in the city of Werne, said in a phone interview today. “We have to show Amazon that they can’t just do with us what they want.””
  18. Where Profit Margins Are Hefty, Online Upstarts Muscle In (New York Times) – “The young companies are all angling for a piece of the $6.1 billion men’s grooming market. But they are also part of a bigger push among e-commerce companies that see opportunities in selling products as varied as mattresses and eyeglasses, where the established companies are accustomed to plump profit margins.“There’s kind of a game going on, where there’s way too much margin,” said David Pakman, a partner at Venrock, a venture capital firm that is an investor in Dollar Shave Club.”
  19. How Alibaba Makes Money from Ads (WSJ) – ” Alibaba Group not only dominates China’s e-commerce but also runs one of the biggest online advertising businesses in the country. Advertising accounts for more than half of Alibaba’s revenue, according to estimates by iResearch. For Alibaba, which listed on the New York Stock Exchange last week in the largest initial public offering in history that raised $25 billion, one big challenge is how to shift its lucrative ad platform to mobile apps from personal-computer websites. In the second quarter, the company’s revenue totaled $2.54 billion.”
  20. First look: Launch, new Boston incubator for e-commerce ventures (BetaBoston) – “What better place to cook up new e-commerce companies than the tower of an old Sears & Roebuck distribution center? That’s where Ben Fischman, the founder of Lids and Rue La La, has found space for his new e-commerce incubator, dubbed Launch. There’s no website yet, and the team is still small, but I dropped in last week for a visit.” Very clever idea and will capitalise on being in Boston, which is an ecommerce city.
  21. ‘Amazon wants to launch in the Netherlands as soon as possible’ (EcommerceNews.eu) – “Amazon is getting very serious about entering the Dutch market with its online store. More and more publishers state the American ecommerce giant has contacted them to negotiate about selling e-books. But it won’t be easy for Jeff Bezos’s brainchild as Dutch publishers aren’t so eager to join forces with Amazon.”
  22. Rocket Internet CEO stands to lift stake via options: report (Reuters) – “Oliver Samwer, chief executive and co-founder of Rocket Internet is in a position to increase his stake in the German venture capital firm under a stock options program that will be part of its planned stock market listing, a German magazine report said on Saturday. Samwer stands to receive options that entitle him to buy 4.5 million shares, or about 4 percent of the current share capital, at an unspecified discount over the next five years, based on certain business performance targets, weekly WirtschaftsWoche said, citing a document it obtained.”
  23. Accounting probe provides new twist in Tesco’s horror show (Fortune) – “The world’s second-largest retailer had already issued two profit warnings this year, slashing its dividend and ditching its CEO in the process. But on Monday it was forced to put out a third, saying it had uncovered accounting irregularities that led it to overstate its profit in the first half of the year by 250 million pounds ($408 million), nearly a quarter of the total expected profit for the period of 1.1 billion pounds.”
  24. Nordstrom to text product messages, photos to customers (FierceRetail) – “Employees at Nordstrom (NYSE:JWN) can now text photos of merchandise to interested customers. Nordstrom has partnered with cloud communications company Twilio to create a texting service that will allow the retailer to get shoppers interested in new merchandise and drive traffic to brick-and-mortar stores.”

Till next week. Onwards.