Monday, March 14, 2011

Making Fast Money




The second wave of e-commerce is coming, buoyed by a flood of fresh cash. European flash-sales site operator Privalia, which offers short-term, steeply discounted fashion deals in Spain, Italy, Brazil, and Mexico, is expanding to Germany with a $280 million acquisition of rival Dress-For-Less.


The deal is funded in part by $123 million in fresh cash from General Atlantic, Highland Capital Partners, Index Ventures, and Insight Venture Partners, as well as debt and newly issued shares.


Those are big numbers, and they come on top of a $95 million round just last October from General Atlantic and Index.


Privalia is a private-sales site that offers members deep discounts on apparel and other items for a short period of time. Others in the flash-sales category include Rue La La, now owned by GSI Commerce; Gilt Groupe, which offers deals in apparel and travel; and One Kings Lane, a home-décor site. The limited time horizon for offers, combined with a curated array of merchandise and new social tools, serves to drive demand from consumers looking to buy something new.


That customer base — those who view shopping as entertainment and largely made up of women — is potentially much larger than the hardcore online shoppers who became loyal online shoppers a decade ago.


The first wave of e-commerce, transactional and efficient, did catalogs one better by offering a nearly limitless array of merchandise and selling it cheaply and quickly. It satisfied demand, rather than creating it.


Private-sales sites, daily deals purveyors like Groupon, and other new forms of e-commerce promise to do something much bigger and more difficult: create demand. Successful traditional retailers excel at this, turning their stores into showcases of consumer delight and convincing people to reach for their pocketbooks for something they had no intention of buying when they walked into the store.


Privalia seems to have an edge in fast-growing overseas markets. Gilt currently operates in the U.S. and Japan. GSI, which is publicly traded, spent $350 million acquiring Rue La La and could expand quickly. A lot of capital is flowing into the sector. But unlike earlier waves of e-commerce, which required building and stocking warehouses to guarantee the availability of those vast virtual shelves of merchandise, the new e-commerce tends to move products quickly, making it an appealing investment to venture capitalists who might shy away from plowing their capital into inventory.


Instead, the money in this second wave of e-commerce is going into customer acquisition, technology, and some financial maneuvers — like Privalia’s rollup of Dress-for-Less.


Next Story: On the GreenBeat: PlugShare app finds car chargers, Suntech beats First Solar in panel production Previous Story: Global LED market surges, doubling last year








This was supposed to be an article about monetizing your life as an amateur musician. It’s become an opinion piece on my experience of Google AdSense.


Google Adsense allows you receive revenue through placing content-specific adverts on your website. The system makes Google around $8 Billion a year.


I signed up for Adsense several years ago. I had a travel blog which was general only for family and friends. If I remember correctly, my travel blog made me about £0.05 across 2 years or so.


Fast forward to 2011 and I am trying to investigate means of being a little more business-like about my hobbies (mostly music). By the end of January I had manned up and started to promote my blogs. I had created several different blogs, which were contributed to by friends and colleagues. I promoted these activities through Facebook and Twitter.




After a few weeks, I was looking at around 2,000 hits a month across all my content sources. I was feeling pretty proud of myself. My Google Adsense balance was approaching £10, and I hoped I could make around £50-100 a year. Google then disabled my account.


When your Adsense account is disabled you receive a standard email which tells you there has been "invalid activity". It directs you to a help URL. The only response you can take is to make an appeal.


Taking the matter particularly seriously, I spent some time writing the appeal which outlined my thoughts on the invalid activity. My guess is that I have violated their "don’t click on your own ads" policy when I’ve been proudly showing off my sites to friends and family. Since my IP address is logged on Blogger etc. and my clicks are less than 1% of the total hits received from countries far and wide, I assumed that they would realise my site was genuine.

Continued on the next page



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