Social Shopping and Social Buying

Understanding the Purposes – and Weaknesses – of Online-to-Offline Discounting 
Ben Edelman has watched as scores of online marketers have promised to transform local commerce, in particular, Groupon. The natural question: When and how are large discounts sustainable?

Groupon and LivingSocial May Inflate Merchants’ Prices: Case Study Author Explains
A recent case study by community marketplatce Thumbtack.com found that the “regular prices” quoted by Groupon and LivingSocial often were higher than the prices quoted by the same merchants.

Groupon Gone Wrong! Harvard Business Fellow’s Warning to Investors and Entrepreneurs
We reached out to Robert Wheeler, a Fellow at the Harvard Business School, to get his view of the major risks associated with Groupon’s business model. His view: aspire NOT to be Groupon.

Can Groupon and LivingSocial Create Customers? One Merchant Tells All
Say a merchant was to run a promotion with both Groupon AND LivingSocial within relatively the same timeframe. Which of the two daily deals sites would perform better as far as helping to grow the store’s customer base and bottom line?

Why Facebook is Ripe for Commerce
To whet your payments innovation palate, we asked MPD CEO Karen Webster to share her thoughts on Facebook as the social commerce frontier.

Groupon’s Business Model: Bubble or the Real Deal?
Market Platform Dynamics CEO Karen Webster gives kudos to Groupon for its invention of the daily deal but conjectures that their valuation is extraordinary for a company that is essentially a huge email list with no network effects.

LivingSocial CEO on Groupon IPO and Company’s Greatest Mistake
Groupon opened a new chapter for the daily deals space with the announcement of its plans to raise $750 million in an initial public offering on June 2. The head of Groupon’s chief rival, LivingSocial CEO and Co-Founder Tim O’Shaughnessy, addressed this week how the IPO would impact his company.

A New Chapter in Payments for Barnes & Noble College
The company’s Director of Consumer Marketing and Interactive, Shanin Molinaro, spoke with PYMNTS.com in this exclusive NEXTcast interview about how social commerce will help to drive payments, brand loyalty and customer engagement.

PC vs. Mobile -Which Device Do Shoppers Prefer to Use?
This study was conducted among mobile Web users via a survey taken on their mobile devices. The entire survey consisted of 13 questions, with over 13,000 completed questionnaires globally and over 2,300 in the United States alone.

How the Rise of Facebook Commerce Will Impact Payments
PYMNTS.com talks with Adgregate Markets COO John Underwood, one of the authors of the new report, “The Effect of Social Networks and the Mobile Web on Website Traffic and the Inevitable Rise of Facebook Commerce.”

Teens and Tech Make Shopping Social
The boom in technology and growing spend among teenage girls has retailers drooling and seeing dollar signs. Tobi Elkin, writer and analyst at eMarketer, joins Karen Webster to talk teens and technology and the impact of social shopping.

Search, Social and Swag
Lots of people have been talking about the notion of social sites cannibalizing search. A friend mentioned this to me just today in the context of this article about Facebook’s dominance over the competition and the fact that Facebook last week topped Google as the most visited site in the US.

Deriving Value from Social Commerce Networks
Social commerce is an emerging trend in which sellers are connected in online social networks, and where sellers are individuals instead of firms. This paper examines the economic value implications of a social network between sellers in a large online social commerce marketplace.

MasterCard Marketplace
A merchant-funded rewards program that helps you and your cardholders save

Why you need Social Products…Like Now!
On-line social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace and more recently Twitter, have recently burst on to the internet scene attracting hundreds of millions of internet users every month

Facebook Hits the “Payvment”
The wars for being the payments vehicle of choice online is heating up with Facebook’s enormous community being the latest battleground. Should Facebook care? Should Amazon sweat? And where’s Google Checkout?

Five Burning Questions on Social Commerce: Seergate CEO Eldad Aharoni
Seergate’s co-founder and CEO Eldad Aharoni sits in the Briefing Room Hot Seat to answer five burning questions on social commerce. Read his responses below and weigh in with your answers too!

Video: Juliette Powell on Future of Social Networking
Juliette Powell, author of 33 Million People in the Room: How to Create, Influence, and Run a Successful Business with Social Networking, looks into her crystal ball and reveals where she believes social networking is heading.

Using Social Network to Drive Engagement and Ring the Register
An exploration of social network strategy and how social commerce can build brand strength

Viral Marketing: A Large-Scale FIeld Experiment
Viral marketing has become an increasingly popular promotional tool (Kirsner 2005; Walker 2004). According to a 2009 study by the media research firm PQ Media, spending on word-of-mouth

LivingSocial Reveals Plans for Future Growth
LivingSocial is one of the pioneers of group buying on the Web, enticing consumers to unlock their daily deals by offering deep discounts on fashion to food and even vacation destinations.

Making Friends and Making Money: Building Loyalty Through Social Networking
For SourceMedia’s Reinventing Loyalty Conference, Cheryl Guerin (VP Promotions and Interactive Marketing, Mastercard) and Karen Webster (President, Market Platform Dynamics), gave a joint presentation on how to build loyalty through social networking.  Below is the presentation in PowerPoint form.