NYC-based Adore Me, yet another player in the subscription-based e-commerce business, has raised a second round of funding totaling $2.5 million. Investors in the new round included Redhills Ventures, U.S. angels, plus Jaina Capital and Ventech Capital, two funds that specialize in Internet, information technology, communications technology, and green startups.

Since its start in November 2011, Adore Me has generated monthly sales increases approaching 50% with its personalized “showrooms” of lingerie. According to co-founder and CEO Morgan Hermand-Waiche, the site is now on track to generate between $1 million and $2 million in revenue this year, with 20% of total sales projected to be swimwear, a newly added category.

In addition to Hermand-Waiche, Fabrice Grinda and Jose Marin are Adore Me’s other co-founders. All are serial entrepreneurs – Grinda previously founded Olx.com, an online classified site, and Marin is CEO of Latin America-focused DeRemate.com, for example.

Hermand-Waiche says that the company was initially angel funded while he was in Harvard Business School studying. Adore Me is now actively looking for partnerships with publishers or other ecommerce sites addressing U.S. women, he adds.

With Adore Me, the idea is to create a personalized online lingerie club, which offers designer lingerie, and now swimwear, at affordable prices. After a user signs up, they’re given a complimentary consultation and one-on-one attention from experts, who then create monthly customized showrooms tailored to each site member. Each set, manufactured by Hermand-Waiche’s family owned business, is sold for $39.95, and includes free shipping and returns.

Included in user showrooms are bras, briefs, babydolls, slips, underwear, corsets, bustiers, shapewear,  legwear and swimwear. (Hey guys, betcha didn’t know girls buy all that stuff, huh?) Members can also choose to skip a month if they don’t like the current collection. For commitment-phobes, there’s a free level of service where users can just buy at will from their showrooms. However, paying members get their 6th set free.

Adore Me now has 50,000 members and around 100,000 visits per month. In terms of sales growth, “it is too early to talk about absolute figures of sales per month,” says Hermand-Waiche, “but what we can say is that month on month revenues growth has been 40% since January.”

Believe it or not, Adore Me isn’t the first startup we’ve seen this year aimed at helping women find better underthings. True&Co and Brayola have also received funding to do the same, but with more emphasis on fit than on discount pricing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ecommerce sites should consider how they can personalize their sites using Facebook data, as a new study shows 50% of visitors to ecommerce sites are currently logged in to Facebook. Using Facebook social plugins and Connect integrations, sites can leverage Facebook data to show visitors what friends bought or shared, what products relate to their Likes, and which friends they might want to invite. The study was conducted by Sociable Labs, which helps websites implement social functionality, and looked at 456 million visits to over a dozen ecommerce sites catering to different demographics.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that ecommerce sites are increasingly adding social features. She shared with us a new statistic: 88% of Internet Retailer Top 200 retail sites are integrated with Facebook.

Sociable Labs’ founder and CEO Nisan Gabbay explained that the target age market for an ecommerce site has surprisingly little influence on the percentage of visitors that were logged in to Facebook. Those aimed at college students were closer to 60%, but even those with middle aged saw at least 40% of visitors logged in.

The data was collected using the FB.getLoginStatus() API call from sites of Sociable Labs’ analytics and ecommerce integration customers. Gabbay tells me that while some of the studied sites attract early adopters, he has discussed the data with Facebook and the company validated it. Also, despite the fact that his company could benefit from more sites adopting social, the sample size is large enough to decrease the likelihood of bias.

“People look at Facebook’s active user count but don’t quite get how pervasive the service is in people’s lives. It’s there all the time in any activity they do online”, Gabbay says. The stats indicate that there may be less risk of sites offending non-Facebook users by adding social functionality than one might expect, because there just aren’t that many hold-outs any more. There’s also technical ways to detect if a user is logged in, and hide those big blue social plugins if they’re not.

As we enter the holiday season, there will be a critical mass of shoppers taking actions on ecommerce sites. Those willing to develop or license Facebook integrations can use social data to point visitors to the products most relevant to them. This can produce a lot more sales than leaving visitors them to browse aimlessly.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new product search engine dubbed Hidentify has launched with the ambition to help consumers make educated buying decisions sans the hassle of conducting complicated research on the Web.

In essence, Hidentify lets people express their needs in natural language rather than by composing queries filled with technical details, and still find out what the right product is and where they can purchase it right away.

Hidentify (correctly) posits that finding the right product online can sometimes feel like a chore, with choices including rather basic Web or mobile search engines, ecommerce sites with filter sidebars, price comparison sites, product wikis, product review aggregators and whatnot.

The company thinks there must be a better way to search for stuff to buy online: using your own words. Instead of searching for ‘an affordable notebook with a 19″ screen and a 2.53 GHz processor’, you would enter something like ‘cheap powerful laptop with large screen’ in Hidentify and get a list of matching products.

Once users get a list of products that Hidentify has guessed matches their needs best, they can tweak some of the search filters and/or head straight over to a seller’s website as soon as they’ve determined which product to purchase.

I think it’s an interesting idea to be able to use common language for product research on the Web, especially for people who only buy products that require some serious online researching once or twice a year – but then I think Hidentify faces an uphill battle since it needs to attract many such users to be viable as a business. The underlying semantic technology may prove to be appealing to a host of ecommerce giants (Amazon? eBay? Google?) though.

The startup plans to make money from affiliate advertising (by sending ready-to-buy consumers to seller’s websites) and running advertising on their own website.

Hidentify is starting off with a consumer electronics shopping engine and will expand from there – it will be competing with startups like Retrevo, SmartRatings, utoopia and Pluribo.

Also read: Decide Launches An Electronics Shopping Service That Tells You When To Buy

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Web of Trust, a crowd-sourced website reputation rating service, has partnered with Facebook to protect user from clicking malicious outbound links on the social network. When users click a link to a site with a poor reputation rating, Facebook will show a warning message.

The Web of Trust partnership should help reduce the risk of phishing, spam and scams on Facebook, improving security, which has been a public relations problem through the years for the social network.

With a 20 million user community and 31 million sites rated, Web of Trust will protect users in real-time, rather than focusing on preventive education like some other risk-abatement programs.

In addition to phishing and scams, Web of Trust will increase protection from unscrupulous ecommerce sites and reduce the likelihood that younger users will click through links on Facebook to adult content.

When users click a URL on Facebook, the social network will scan the site to see if it has been flagged by Web of Trust. If so, users will see a message indicating that the site “has been classified as potentially abusive.” A large button encourages users to “Return to previous page” or they can click a small link to ignore the warning and continue to the site.

Users can download the Web of Trust browser add-on to rate sites and help protect fellow web citizens. If more Facebook users immediately used Facebook’s own flagging system or that of Web of Trust, spammy sites that spread through the news feed via phished accounts could be blocked more quickly.

To date, Facebook has worked to protect users by offering educational resources such as the Safety Center, asking users to provide information to assist with account retrieval in case they are hacked, and added security features such as account owner and login verification. It also recently extended its partnership with McAfee to eradicate worms such as Koobface through the Roadblock feature and provide a free subscription to anti-virus software.

Web of Trust’s reputation model may work well for long-existing risks, but new malicious sites that pop up might not be rated before they threaten Facebook users. Facebook’s security team and internal automated systems for alerting users to malicious links will continue protect users from suspicious outbound links, but now they’ll be augmented with the power of Web of Trust’s crowd.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

White label daily deals platform and TC Disrupt finalist Chompon today launches what it is calling an “Adsense platform for daily deals.” Rolling out today is a new Chompon affiliate functionality that makes it easy for publishers to drop in a deals widget where they’d normally show an ad unit, enabling them to sell targeted deals instead of ads.

Niche websites can now get the monetization of ecommerce sites like Groupon applied to the scale of a display ad with ChompOn’s embeds. The ChompOn platform also allows deal providers to bid on getting their ads sold and automatically tracks sales and other analytics for both merchants and publishers. Deals like this one can now be distributed across any affiliate site whether it’s part of the Chompon network or not.

Thus far Chompon is working with 50 partners including Blackbook Magazine, JDeal and as of today Beyondtherack, a wine deals site and their largest partner thus far. While CEO Samuel Yam wouldn’t get into specifics, the service currently has a few hundred thousand dollars in monthly gross revenue and will be announcing additional partnerships in the coming months.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Amazon.com this morning announced fresh visual search capability in its men’s and women’s shoe stores. Basically, the feature allows Amazon customers to search and browse for shoes based on how they look (example).

The styles are presented graphically as silhouettes within the existing navigation of search refinement, allowing customers to easily handpick shoe shapes from a pre-defined palette without the need to know what the styles are called.

Amazon says the capability is driven by its proprietary visual search technology, which is able to analyze product images for shape, color and appearance information and classifies similar looking products together. The algorithms were developed at Amazon subsidiary A9.com.

It’s the same technology that powers the “Items That Look Like This” feature that you can find on Amazon.com product detail pages (example).

Visual search technology is increasingly finding its way to ecommerce sites in innovative ways. Google acquired visual search engine company Like.com and earlier this week debuted Boutiques.com, a fashion-focused shopping site that relies heavily on the company’s core visual search technology.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Recommendation engine Hunch is rolling out partnerships with seven large sites to provide personalized recommendations for their products, services, or content. Interactive Corp’s Gifts.com, Bluefly, Buzzfeed, Heyzap, ShopStyle, Milo and FanBridge are the initial partners, and Hunch says more will be announced shortly.

“These companies will either build applications that reside on Hunch.com, embed Hunch functionality within their own sites, or both,” says Hunch.

The partners will us a rebuilt-from-the-ground-up API to show personalized recommendations to users, says Hunch CEO Chris Dixon. The Hunch website itself is built using the same API that is being made for partners.

This also gives Hunch a potentially lucrative revenue model. There will be a free version of the recommendation engine that most partners will use, But ecommerce sites will share revenue generated from purchases recommended by Hunch.

“Our whole business is centered around the API,” says Dixon.

Dixon says that the company spent the first year or so after launching in learning mode, building out the data and finding connections. Now they have enough data, and 20 billion “connections” to be confident in making recommendations to people on just about anything at all. Cofounder Caterina Fake made similar statements when I interviewed her earlier this year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch