eBiz News: Free Online Shopping Trend Data
This week e-commerce news, a Web site offering free weekly online shopping trend data is introduced, a widget for posting product reviews at social networking sites debuts and a contest for start-ups offers winners $50,000 to get their online store up and running.
Hitwise recently announced the launch of its new “Retail Data Center.” The Web site provides weekly online shopping trend data, based on how U.S. Internet users interact with more than 20,000 online shopping sites, across 21 shopping categories such as video games, electronics and apparel. The company says the data will illustrate which Web sites consumers are visiting and terms they are searching for online heading into the holiday retail season.
The Hitwise Retail Data Center updates weekly and will feature key data on a market-by-market basis including:
- Top 20 most visited Web sites from custom category of top 100 retail web sites (U.S. only).
- Top 10 shopping search terms among rotating categories.
- Top 10 visited shopping Web sites among rotating categories.
- Top four “fast moving” shopping Web sites.
- Links to latest online shopping related blog posts by Hitwise research analysts.
The U.S. Hitwise Retail Data Center is located here on the Hitwise Web site, updating every Tuesday with RSS feeds available. The data is based on the online usage and search behavior of how more than 10 million US Internet users interact with more than 1 million Web sites, according to the company.
The retail data is also available from the following markets: United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Social Commerce Widget
Bazaarvoice, the company that creates user-generated review software, is now offering a widget called ShareThis that lets consumers publish product reviews on Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us.
With ShareThis, e-tailers can extend their brand and products onto social networking sites to attract new customers and generate sales, while allowing shoppers to share opinions about products with friends and peers. The ShareThis widget integrates onto an e-tailer’s product page within the review summary, as well as with each specific review, the company says.
Consumers can click on a ShareThis icon to publish a review, their own or someone else’s, to Facebook, Digg or del.icio.us. The published review includes the e-tailer’s logo and the review itself, as well as a direct link back to the e-tailer’s Web site. The ShareThis service is free for Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews customers.
You Could Be A Winner
E-commerce suite providers Art Technology Group, Inc., just announced the launch of its first e-Commerce Ingenuity Business Plan Competition, which will award the winner a prize of $50,000 in cash. A second “People’s Choice” winner will receive $10,000 in cash as a result of a public vote on the company’s blog, e-Commerce Insights.
Submissions, which must include an e-commerce element as a business-critical component of the success of the plan, will be judged on the inventiveness and creativity of their proposals, as well as on long-term business viability and likelihood of execution. The winner will be chosen by a panel of software and technology experts, influential industry leaders and business executives to be announced at a later date. All entries must be received by Jan. 30, 2008.
The ATG e-Commerce Ingenuity Business Plan Competition is open to individuals or teams of e-commerce entrepreneurs, as well as seed or early-stage companies. To qualify as seed or early-stage, annual revenues or monies raised to date must be less than $100,000. Examples of encouraged submission concepts could include:
- New technology offerings to attract and retain specific customer segments.
- New solutions for creating loyal communities of e-commerce consumers.
- Visionary user-interface developments or approaches to personalized e-commerce experiences.
- Vehicles to deliver cutting-edge e-commerce experiences to new industries.
To enter the competition, each individual or team must submit a completed “Competition Submission ” form as found here.
[Source: Michelle Megna ECommerce-Guide.com - October 2007]
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