What happens when shoppers flock to a store en masse? They wait in line—which is exactly what many are doing at Target today, except they’re waiting in line online.
Seriously, .@Target?? Your website is a joke. I get the same message every time I try to add something to my cart! pic.twitter.com/vVUUDEe1pN
— Meg Hambach WKYC (@MegHambach) November 30, 2015
For Cyber Monday, the megastore is offering 15 percent off of any items online to all shoppers. The only problem: Target’s site couldn’t quite handle the influx of traffic drawn by such a deal. Some shoppers vented their frustration on Twitter:
@Target – it was faster to go to the store and buy what I wanted than wait in a line online. #CyberMonday #targetfail
— Aut (@Sadsquash) November 30, 2015
@meganreichart @Target I couldn’t even get the home page to load because it was too busy and I had SO many things to get
— Elizabeth Baugh (@elizabeth_baugh) November 30, 2015
As #targetfail catches on, Target, of course, is trying to stay positive—and has been responding to some tweeters in kind.
@BekahQ There’s tremendous response to today’s offer. Apologies for delays. We appreciate your patience, continue to refresh your browser.
— Target (@Target) November 30, 2015
A representative for the company tells WIRED that the volume of traffic today is double the site’s previous record, set three days ago on Black Friday. The spokeswoman said that while the site hasn’t crashed per se, the company has been “metering” the site’s traffic since 9am CST, when the company saw its biggest spike. The company would not provide further details about its backend operations.
As Target stumbles, Jeff Bezos, the founder of digital-first retailer Amazon, must surely be smirking. Despite huge promotions on its site, Amazon hasn’t experienced this kind of mass outage in the past few days.
But even tech companies aren’t always safe as online shopping continues to grow in popularity, especially during the holiday push. PayPal went down briefly this morning as customers tried to check out on third-party sites. Maybe everyone should add some extra bandwidth to their holiday wish lists this year.
Every day is turning into Cyber Monday.
At least that’s the indication from National Retail Federation estimates that found the number of Americans shopping online creeped past those who went out into the world over the long Thanksgiving weekend. The industry group’s survey found that an estimated 151 million people shopped either in stores, online, or both over the weekend. Of those, nearly 102 million of them headed to stores, while more than 103 million said they shopped online.
“Just as many people want that unique, exclusive online deal as they do that in-store promotion,” NRF president and CEO Matthew Shay said.
The group’s report was released yesterday, which means today’s Cyber Monday bonanza isn’t even included in those numbers. According to an estimate from Forrester Research, online holiday sales in the US are expected to be a hefty more than $95 billion. Cyber Monday alone could bring in $2 billion in online sales, Forrester says. The NRF estimates that more than 121 million people plan to shop online today.
Compared to the past, what exactly does this mean? The NRF’s methodology for its survey has changed, so it says comparisons to its results last year aren’t valid. But a report from IBM noted that online Black Friday shopping saw an increase of 21.5 percent over last year. ComScore’s numbers were more conservative, estimating that online shopping from desktop computers increased by 10 percent. Meanwhile, analytics company ShopperTrak says that while it expects an increase in brick-and-mortar sales during the 2015 holiday season as a whole, preliminary estimates show that IRL stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday had “thinner crowds” compared to last year. All of which to say—ho, ho, ho, we love to shop. But we’d rather stay home to do it.
Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED
Pinterest is diving into wordless searches.
The site’s new visual search tool is Pinterest’s latest effort to help its 100 million users discover the things they didn’t even know they liked, leveraging the vast repository of 1 billion “boards” and 50 billion “pinned” images now on the social scrapbooking site. The new tool lets users zoom in on a specific object in an image that could contain multiple elements—say, if a user was looking at picture-perfect living room showing off a lamp, table and couch—to see more of a specific object that looks visually similar. A user could choose to see more lamps, for instance, with similar colors, shapes, and patterns.
The company says that it has indexed about a billion images on its social network for the new search engine with the help of the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center, known for its expertise in “deep learning” techniques. Basically, Pinterest engineers used special software to let its system “learn” which images looked similar after combing through large amounts of data. Over time, Pinterest says, it hopes to categorize all of its billions of Pins.
“Pinterest is about discovery, and visual search is another dimension of discovery,” Kevin Jing, an engineering manager for Pinterest, tells WIRED.
The move makes sense for Pinterest, a company investors have valued at $11 billion and which is seeking new ways to appeal to advertisers. The company introduced Promoted Pins earlier this year, a tool the company said expanded advertiser reach by as much as 30 percent. In June, Pinterest unveiled buyable Pins, transforming the site into an e-commerce platform. Just last week, it collected all of those buyable Pins in a newly launched “shop,” a destination for Pinners to find categories of buyable stuff curated by the company. All these recent announcements taken together show Pinterest seeking ways to make money from its Pins—and visual search appears to fit well into that same equation.
Jing says the tool won’t necessarily prioritize buyable Pins above other results, but they would still come up, which should please advertisers and investors alike. The market for US search advertising is expected to total $29.2 billion next year according to The Wall Street Journal, citing research from industry research firm eMarketer. If Pinterest can prove it’s nailing search with new and innovative tools, it could justify grabbing a bigger slice of that market.
Yes, Google still rules search. But Pinterest has its own an edge. Because the very act of pinning is supposed to signal a user’s preference, that makes it a potentially valuable record of consumer desire. If Pinterest can introduce better and more effective ways of searching that catalog, it could conceivably help advertisers more efficiently reach people signaling what they like—and what they might want to buy.
Etsy is struggling. The Brooklyn-based online marketplace for all things artisinal posted its third-quarter earnings report today—and the results aren’t pretty.
The company brought in $65.7 million in revenue, a 38 percent increase year-over-year, which sounds good. But that figure fell short of analyst estimates, which predicted sales of $66.4 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Etsy also reported a net loss of $6.89 million, or 6 cents per share, during the quarter. In after hours trading, shares dropped nearly 10 percent, hitting an all-time low. The company’s stock price dipped as low as $10.15 per share, which means it has lost close to two-thirds of its value since Etsy’s rather successful IPO in April.
During a call with investors, CEO Chad Dickerson reiterated the company’s goals, which included, among other things, “making Etsy an everyday experience.” To do just that, Etsy has been working hard to keep its platform top-of-mind for shoppers on the lookout for handmade and vintage goods. The company has spent liberally on email, mobile, and search advertising—spending on marketing initiatives rose 88 percent year over year, according to the company. And its efforts have worked, in some ways: this quarter, the company says the number of active buyers on the site increased 25 percent from 18.1 million to 22.6 million. Etsy also saw a 20 percent increase in active sellers, who rose from 1.3 million to 1.5 million.
But Etsy needs to do more, especially as it faces a looming threat from the world’s largest retailer. Amazon recently launched an artisanal marketplace of its own, Handmade. To fend off the competition, Etsy has embraced mass manufacturing to help its sellers crank goods out in volume.* And last month the company rolled out same-day delivery through Postmates in parts of New York City.
But Etsy’s artisanal nature means it’s hard for the company to truly turn itself into an “everyday experience,” unlike Amazon, where dipping into the online marketplace for truly everyday items like toilet paper is a common occurrence. Etsy is trying its best to be like Amazon by copying many of its larger rival’s methods. But without its own massive logistics infrastructure, Etsy has to resort to its own ways of innovating—a strategy that so far, at least, has not seemed to help the company make artisanal go mainstream.
*Update, November 4, 9:30 pm ET: Etsy disputes this characterization of its position toward manufactured goods, pointing to CEO Chad Dickerson’s claim on yesterday’s earnings call that Etsy is “reimagining manufacturing and its more human, its smaller scale.”
The Pinterest Shop Pinterest
When Pinterest unveiled “buyable Pins,” a way for Pinners to be able to immediately purchase the cozy blankets and stylish outfits they’ve bookmarked on the social network, the collective sentiment from users was clear. Finally! But even though the five-year-old social network now has 60 million products available from retailers, small businesses, and e-commerce platforms, not everything was automatically “buyable.” You still had to go looking for that telltale blue button on the top right corner of a Pin that signaled the item could be bought and shipped to your home.
Now, several months after the initial announcement, Pinterest wants to make it way easier for its 100 million users to find things to buy by putting shoppable Pins in one spot. As of today, the company has a Pinterest Shop, a destination where devoted Pinners can find “trend collections” of buyable Pins curated by Pinterest.
“As a catalogue of ideas, our mission isn’t to just show you those ideas, but to help you bring them to life,” Jamie Favazza, a Pinterest spokeswoman, says.
Among the top categories for buyable Pins, according to the company? Leather leggings, blanket scarves, and clever graphic tees. (In the same announcement, Pinterest said it would also begin rolling out buyable Pins on Android devices starting Tuesday—previously, the feature had only been available on iOS.)
The move is a logical one for Pinterest, a company now valued at a whopping $11 billion, which has been working hard to boost its advertising revenue for some time now. When the company launched buyable Pins in June, part of its pitch was that it would not charge third parties a fee to buy or sell items on the site. Instead, the company will make money by charging advertisers to promote buyable Pins; according to past data from Pinterest, such Pins could expand advertiser reach by as much as 30 percent on average.
So, yeah, creating a dedicated page for buyable Pins so users will end up spending more on Pinterest is exactly what Pinterest wants. The social network has for so long been the natural destination for users to come and declare what things they like. Why not just open up the catalog of what, exactly, people are liking, so even more users can turn liking into buying?
Facebook
As Facebook angles to become the one and only place you spend your digital life, its effort to transform your News Feed into a storefront is once again ramping up.
The tech giant said today that it will be testing a few new ways to shop in its app.
Facebook says that in coming weeks it will test a Shopping section that will act as a “single place for people to more easily discover, share, and purchase products.” You may also soon see ads that will allow you to browse products in a “fast-loading, full-screen experience” before going to the retailer’s website to buy. Facebook says that similar ads that require you to go straight to a retailer’s site are slow to load; so, much like Instant Articles for news, Facebook is hoping to keep you interested in ads for longer by having them load faster within the app.
These are just the latest steps Facebook has taken into the retail realm. The company has already tested “buy” buttons in its app that allow users to directly buy products without leaving. It’s also rolled out “Shop” sections on small businesses’ pages, er, Pages.
“On Facebook we’ve seen that people are coming to our platform not only to connect with friends and family but also with products and brands,” the company said in a blog post. Nearly half of people come to Facebook to actively look for products, the company said.
For Facebook, these efforts are part of its larger goal to become your world—and make advertisers pay to be there. You can read news, chat with friends, or browse shoes without ever leaving Facebook’s enclave. As users spend more and more of their time on mobile, Facebook is capitalizing on the fact that users spend most of their time in a few apps, including, for many, Facebook. Just as the company has convinced many news organizations to share stories directly on Facebook, retailers are being encouraged to market and sell right on the platform.
If Facebook has its way, you may never have to (or want to) leave, which is great for Facebook’s bottom line. After all, retailers will pay to reach you wherever you are.
Shopify
Facebook is making it easier for you to shop directly in Facebook. That way, you have one less reason to leave Facebook.
The company has partnered with e-commerce service Shopify to enable merchants who uses Shopify’s services to sell their products directly in a new Shop section on Facebook Pages, a feature Facebook is pushing as a better mobile alternative for businesses than the web.
“Our goal is to make it easy to sell products where the customers are,” says Shopify’s director of product, Satish Kanwar, “and increasingly that’s on mobile.”
At an event last week at its Silicon Valley headquarters, Facebook highlighted its success at helping 45 million businesses launch digital storefronts with Pages on Facebook’s app and site. With its 175,000 merchants, Shopify is helping Facebook make it a little easier for some of those businesses to make those Pages true online stores. If a user clicks on a product, stores can either push shoppers from Facebook to their websites, or let them check out directly on Facebook.
Payment processing and transaction tracking will be handled by Shopify, and Facebook will not be taking a cut for items sold on the site. While the companies have been testing this feature for a few thousand users, it will roll it out in the coming weeks for all of Shopify’s merchants on Facebook.
Buy, Buy, Buy
The Shopify announcement today is just one of the ways Facebook is making itself into a kind of digital mall. Shopify and Facebook have been testing “buy buttons” since last summer, and Facebook says it’s also testing other ways for shoppers to buy products on Pages from merchants directly and has plans to work with other e-commerce partners in the future.1
Of course, Shopify is not the only e-commerce site trying to make it easier for people to buy on their phones. Nor is Facebook the only social network hoping to make it easier for people to buy without bothering with the web. Digital transactions startup Stripe said earlier this week that anyone will now be able to sell stuff directly in Twitter using its new API. Pinterest, meanwhile has launched buy buttons to let users make purchases on the site.
Why such a push for shopping? Social media giants are ultimately jockeying to keep you in their worlds as long as they can—and to do that they’re partnering with services that resemble more parts of real life. For Facebook, shopping is just another thing you do in the real world, like chatting with friends or reading the news. Just like you do those other things in Facebook now, the company hopes you’ll start shopping there, too.
1UPDATE 4:45 PM ET 09/16/15: This story has been updated to accurately reflect that Facebook is not yet testing shopping functionality with other e-commerce platforms.
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Target Shoppers Wait in Line, Online, on Cyber Monday