Commerce

Nick Hughes, the CEO of Seconds, has the best VC pickup line I've ever heard: "Last year, 2 trillion SMS messages were sent in the U.S., and not one reached a local business."

That's a lot of cheddar.

He continues: "Texting is becoming the predominant mode of communication, but we cannot send or receive short messages with local merchants." Hence his business, Seconds, which opens up the SMS channel between merchants and consumers.

Running on the Twilio communications platform, Seconds gives merchants SMS numbers and a console that lets them manage communication with … Read more

Fab.com, a design-focused e-commerce site that's growing by leaps and bounds, acquired online independent fashion marketplace FashionStake for an undisclosed sum.

FashionStake carved out a niche for itself in the e-commerce world by allowing independent fashion designers to sell their goods on the site, rather than gambling on getting products into name-brand stores can be difficult to crack. According to FashionStake's Web site, it offers products from 240 designers in 16 countries around the world.

Fab.com was one of the more surprising Web standouts last year. Since launching its site in June 2011, the company has … Read more

Apple and Amazon took home the best grades in customer satisfaction among people who did their holiday shopping via a mobile device.

ForeSee Results' "E-Retail Satisfaction Index" looked at the top 16 retail sites out of a possible 40 to gauge which offered the best mobile experience for holiday buyers. Apple's score of 85 out of 100 and Amazon's score of 84 handily surpassed third-place Dell with only 78.

Foresee Usability Team Lead Matthew Dull said both companies place huge value on the customer experience and carry that into their mobile environments.

While Amazon has both … Read more

Buyers looking for the latest hot tablet should be careful where and how they do their shopping.

As almost 100 new brand-name tablets wend their way through CES this week, OpSec Security is cautioning that a lot of phony tablets are popping up on certain e-commerce sites and business-to-business marketplaces.

In a study released yesterday, the security and brand protection vendor said that such Web sites as Alibaba, DHgate, EC21, Made-in-China, and TradeKey can be home to counterfeiters who sell fake items in bulk or at unrealistically low prices.

Citing specific examples, OpSec Security discovered that listings for Motorola's … Read more

Apple iPad users shopping for Kindle books now have their own dedicated Web site that lets you touch and swipe through the online store.

A tour of the new Kindle iPad-optimized site reveals the same experience you'll find on the full Web site but with a few bonuses.

The Kindle Store page opens to display a list of recommended books based on your past purchases and searches. You can swipe through the list to see all of the books that Amazon thinks you'd like to buy. For me, Amazon's suggestions are typically on the money and offered … Read more

Can't decide which TV, camera, or car to buy? Advice from friends too unreliable? Advice from expert reviewers (hello!) too soft? If you're the kind of person who likes to make purchase decisions based only on rigorous research, you might love Sortable.

Sortable is a product selection service that enables you to filter and sort a list of products based on criteria it extracts from published data. If you're looking for a camera, you can specify your price range, and then drill in by camera type, by brand, by video capability, and so on, down to some … Read more

If you used an iPhone or iPad to buy something online on Christmas, you had plenty of company.

Among all online purchases made on Christmas Day, 7 percent were done through an iPad and 6.4 percent through an iPhone, giving iOS devices 13.4 percent of all online purchases that day.

Eyeing online sales across 500 retailers on December 25 and 26, IBM's latest holiday benchmark report found a surge in cybershopping from mobile devices.

Android devices accounted for 5 percent of all online purchases on Christmas Day. And moving to the next day, the iPad again led … Read more

U.S. consumers spent a total of $35.3 billion online this holiday season, hitting a record for holiday sales, ComScore said today.

The 56-day holiday shopping period from November 1 to December 26 marked a 15 percent jump in spending over last year's season. The week ending December 25 alone saw $2.8 billion in online sales, a rise of 16 percent compared with the same week last year.

And the spending spree continued on into Christmas Day.

On December 25 there was a surge in sales of digital content and subscriptions, an area that includes downloads of … Read more

Even though the economy is still having trouble kicking in to high gear, consumers are spending boatloads of cash on gifts this holiday season.

Between November 1 and December 18, U.S. online shoppers have spent a whopping $32 billion, jumping 15 percent compared with the same period last year, when sales hit $27.8 billion, research firm ComScore reported today. Last week's sales performance was most impressive, hitting $6.3 billion during the seven-day period ended December 18 and setting a new all-time spending record for a single week. Last year, online shoppers in the U.S. spent $… Read more