Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.

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Some weeks ago it was announced that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos personally has acquired the Washington Post. Now, another e-commerce billionaire is getting serious about journalism: Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, plans to launch a new online media outlet, focusing on independent, investigative journalism. One of the first members of his team is Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who is widely known for having helped the Whistleblower Edward Snowden to leak his stories.

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Speaking about Jeff Bezos and Amazon: Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone is about to publish a book titled “The everything store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon”, describing in detail how the e-commerce giant became one of the most powerful companies in the world, and how Bezos made all this happen. Businessweek has published a (lengthy) excerpt from the book describing how Bezos forced diapers.com to sell to Amazon.

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The US startup Square, run by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has become known for its smartphone credit card dongles and payment processing tools available for small and medium retailers. Now users in the U.S. can use the newly launched Square Cash service to send money to each other in the most simple way: by email.

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WordPress is a great blogging system. But it also can be used to set up a neat online store. Practical Ecommerce shows 4 popular e-commerce plugins for WordPress: WooCommerce, WP e-Commerce, Jigoshop and Cart66 Lite.

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To make a living with blogging – that’s a dream of many. Swedish blogger Emma Sundh has managed to do that. For the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter she explains what’s needed to turn a blog into a part- or even full-time business. Here is the Swedish version and here one automatically translated into English.

Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.

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Having to enter credit card details into online forms on e-commerce sites involves always security risks. Now the three big card giants Visa, MasterCard and American Express plan to get rid of those numbers all together, at least for online customers. Instead of the numbers digital tokens would be processed, making payments more secure. Currently a framework and standard is being developed.

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Meanwhile, mobile payments are finding increasing acceptance among online shoppers. According to global payments solution specialist Adyen, mobile-payment transactions have increased by 27 percent worldwide from May to August. And iOS devices accounted for nearly 3 out of 4 mobile transactions.

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Amazon is trying to compete with PayPal in getting online retailers to implement a button that allows their customers to pay for goods with Amazon. The “Login and Pay” button works similar to the ubiquitous PayPal buttons, making use of previously stored customer and payment details at Amazon. For retailers, the transaction fees are 2.9 percent + $0.30 per transaction or less, based on volume.

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The Seattle-based discount e-commerce site Zulily is the first deal site to go public since Groupon. It aims to generate about $100 million with the IPO.

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The famous US blog and journalism portal The Huffington Post, one of the first blog sites that became a big media entity, has launched a German version. As in its mother land, huffingtonpost.de will offer a mix of news written by professional journalists and of opinion pieces and blog posts by independent and community authors.

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Some people don’t want to blog. Other would like to but don’t really know how to start. And especially, where to start. Digital Trends has compiled a nice overview about the best free, freemium and premium blog services, describing who they are optimized for and what to expect.

Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.

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Showrooming is one of the side-effects of the rise of e-commerce. The terms refers to a scenario during which customers walk into local stores to choose products to buy, but then go online with their smartphone to get the items at lower prices from an e-commerce site. The local store becomes a “showroom”, losing out on revenue and risking its own existence.

A study released by Columbia Business School and the loyalty management company Aimia might be able to calm down concerned store managers a bit: According to the research, only 6 percent of people try to purchase products with their smartphones after having seen them in a store. Many use their smartphone instead to find reviews and customers feedback to make a qualified buying decision.

A possible conclusion could be that stores actually should encourage customers to find reviews about the products sold, or even enable them, by providing in-store web access. If they realize that other customers like the specific item, the likelihood for an in-store purchases increases.

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Ever visited a Chinese online shop and got a shock about the amount of clutter, colours, banners and massive link lists? It has to be that way: “Our consumers like a page that is very crowded, busy with a lot of links so they can open lots of windows at the same time”. That’s a quote from a Chinese e-commerce entrepreneur published in a CNN piece about the “mad, mad world of China e-commerce”. It’s a world where the rules of the West simply don’t apply – an important fact that every online shop that plans to expand to China has to keep in mind.

And the differences don’t stop with the customers’ expectations on the “shopping experience”. Logistics and the integration of social media into the buying process are following different patterns than in Europe and the U.S as well. And there is one more point to consider: Competition is extremely fierce. Or how CNN describes it: “In China, e-commerce is a bloodsport.

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There is a new blogging tool in town called Ghost. At least almost, because it gives limited access for now. Humbly billed “Just a Blogging Platform”, Ghost follows a minimalistic approach, removing many of the elements found at increasingly bloated content-management systems and blog services.

The founder, John O’Nolan, targets slightly more tech-savvy people with his free open source service, since users have to take care of hosting for themselves – at least for now.

Wired has a write-up about Ghost, its features and main differentiation points to competitors.

Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.

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Apple has presented two new iPhones – the 5S and a little bit cheaper model made out of plastic, the 5C. The main feature-addition is a fingerprint scanner that is able to recognize the user with a quick scan of his or her fingerprint. For now, the fingerprints are stored on the phone and can’t be used by 3rd parties, thus won’t be available for websites or apps as an authentication tool. For now. That will likely change in the future and open up possibilities for online retailers to implement frictionless payment methods, as described by Businessweek. Another improvement relevant for the retail industry is a new iOS 7 feature called iBeacon, which lets the phone communicate with sensors nearby. One obvious use case would be to let stores enable coupons or mobile payments when customers with an iPhone walk in.

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Groupon has news again: The coupon giant has acquired the last-minute hotel-booking app Blink, making clear it does want to keep diversifying its business.

In other, a bit more entertaining Groupon news, the company’s Indian website recently offered a discount on onions – which apparently is a very popular vegetable in the country: The demand was so high that the Website went offline for a while. Within 44 minutes, 3,000 kilograms of onions were purchased.

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At the end of last week, a rumour appeared saying that Amazon would launch its own smartphone and providing it to people for free! Even if nothing seems to be impossible in the world of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, that story turned out to be incorrect – at least according to a statement issued by the company explaining that if it would offer its own smartphone, it would not give it away for free.

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Meanwhile, PayPal continues its foray into the retail sector, testing a hardware gadget for retailers that would auto-recognize when customers walk into the store, letting them pay via their PayPal accounts without having to pull out their phones or wallets.

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A little more than a year ago, the Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone launched the blogging platform Medium, focusing on longform writing. While the site that gives publishing rights only to selected users has caught the attention of many bloggers and tech pundits, questions about monetization and the status of the site (platform or publication) still wait for answers.

Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.

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PayPal is not finished trying to change the way commerce and payments are done: The company, known for its tools to process payments between people and online merchants or eBay sellers, has launched a new mobile app including features to see nearby stores that accept PayPal payments as well as to pay in restaurants. PayPal, owned by eBay, seems to be serious about “offline” payments.

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Here is a completely new approach for delivery of goods bought online: Drones! At least that’s what a Chinese delivery company experiments with, making use of Drones that can carry as much as 6.6 pounds and fly 330 feet in the air (via).

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The online electronics shop Pixmania has been sold by its previous owner, the British retail chain Dixons, to the German company Mutares. The latter paid about 69 million Euro for the online retailer that has making losses for a while.

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BuzzFeed, the growing blog/media outlet known for its compilations of cute animal pictures, is growing strongly, forcing lots of media observers to change their assumption that online publishing and successful business models don’t go well together. Then again, some might not see the often rather short-lived, rather cheaply produced content as the saviour of journalisms in the digital age.

Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.

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Groupon, the famous (or infamous) coupon giant, is eyeing at a more traditional e-commerce business. The company has started to directly sell products a while ago, unlike what it has become known for, only providing discounts to goods and services provided by other retailers. Because this new approach is working pretty well with a revenue of $186 million in the most recent quarter, Groupon is now planning to open its own warehouses to reduce shipping times. Currently, most products are shipped through third-party companies, which can lead to up to 7 days until items arrive at the customers’ houses. With own warehouses Groupon would become somewhat of a Amazon competitor, although the main difference remains: Groupon only sells a selection of products and doesn’t plan to change that.

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Last year Facebook launched an e-commerce initiative, allowing users to send physical gifts – real products to their contacts. Turns out, demand was rather weak, which is why the social network has decided to ramp down its physical gifting service. Going forward, available gifts will only comprise of digital goods and gift cards. According to the company, 80 percent of gifts sent on Facebook were digital, so the move makes sense. What works for Groupon doesn’t seem to work for Facebook.

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Same day delivery is en vogue, even though some observers claim that customers do not care enough about getting something they bought online at the same day to pay extra for it. But startup executive and former Amazon employee Michael Hart argues that the potential of same day delivery is not only huge, it also could help brick and mortar retailers regain some market share due to the physical proximity to the customers.

Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.

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There is an interesting news floating around about an upcoming payment feature to be launched by Facebook. AllThingsD first wrote that the social network is testing something like a “PayPal competitor” for mobile purchases. Later, TechCrunch published a piece confirming that it had heard similar rumours, but that the feature in fact would play well with PayPal and all other payment solutions currently being used by online retailers.

According to TechCrunch, what Facebook is testing is a solution which would enable users to fill out credit card and billing address information on e-commerce websites based on what they have stored on Facebook. So instead of having to enter all this data manually every time they buy something from an online retailer through their smartphone, they would be able to use a function saying something like “Let Facebook Input My Billing Info” to skip that effort. The payment would then be processed as usually through PayPal or whatever other payment provider is being used. The goal would be to improve the efficiency of ads on Facebook and to be able to tell retailers what advertising investments led to which revenues.

Interesting stuff for sure.

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It’s unlikely that you haven’t heard yet, but Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has bought the renowned Washington Post for $250 million. Not through Amazon but as a private person. There is a lot of speculation out there what his goals are, and whether Bezos will try to use the Post to sell more stuff on Amazon, or whether he’ll use Amazon to sell more newspapers (or if maybe the Post stops to print news). To get a better understand about Bezos possible motives, read MG Siegler’s great analysis.

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The global media agency Mindshare has released the results of a study looking at the motivations for the use of digital media by 33 nations across the globe. 14 nations were above “normal” in their use of digital communications across the four motivation areas self –expression / entertainment / information gathering and transacting. Self-expression of course is what drives many bloggers, whereas information gathering could be what drives readers to blogs. Twingly motherland Sweden turned out to be second most advanced in Europe in regards to those motivation areas. Globally, Singapore, Portugal and China are leading the motivations table.

As we have shown last week, Pinterest is growing rapidly and having an increasing impact on e-commerce sales. Even the world biggest e-commerce retailer, Amazon, can’t ignore that. And it doesn’t. This week, the Seattle-based company has launched what seems to be its very own Pinterest competitor: On “Amazon Collections”, users can see what other customers like, want or recommend – presented in the typical Pinterest layout with lots of rectangle-boxed showing photos of products which users can add to their own collections. Of course, all items presented can be purchased directly on Amazon. That can be both an advantage or a disadvantage for the service, since users will already be logged in to Amazon while browsing through collections, but will be limited to what’s available on Amazon.

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In the past years, a host of startups and companies has followed Square in offering mobile card readers for smartphones, making it easier and cheaper for local retailers to accept card payments. Now an astonishing report from BIA/Kelsey finds that 40 % of small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. already accept payments with mobile credit card readers. Another 16% of the businesses plan to add capability within the next year. If true, that means that smartphone card readers have reached mass market appeal and cannot be considered a niche business anymore.

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Austrian newspaper derStandard.at has published some facts about the local blogosphere, based on a survey among 236 persons. The results are being presented in an infographic. If you understand German you might want to read them.

Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.

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Pinterest, the popular and steadily growing visual bookmarking site, has an increasing impact on e-commerce sales. ReadWrite published a nice piece explaining in detail why it is worth to have an eye on Pinterest and its future development. Already 70 million users strong, the site now sends more people to e-commerce sites than Facebook. Also, an average shopper visiting an online shop coming from Pinterest spends on average twice the amount of money than a user referred to a shop via Facebook. Have a look at the original article to learn more about the startup’s rapid growth.

This week, Pinterest also announced a new approach to improve personal recommendations for existing and new users coming to the site: The company now tracks visits of people to websites that have embedded the Pinterest button to understand their fields of interests and personal preferences. This data is then analyzed and will lead to improved recommendations within Pinterest. It remains to be seen whether this potentially sensitive feature that is set to be launched within the next weeks will lead to any protests among users.

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A survey showed: At least in the U.S., shoppers like to receive coupons on their mobile phones from stores near their current location. But most merchants seem to ignore this potentially effective instrument to attract new customers and increase sales. That is a bit odd considering that the technology needed exists. But terms like geo-fencing, geo-targeting, and indoor positioning are likely to confuse the average merchant. Streetfight.com has compiled a handy list of 8 tools that local retailers can use to satisfy consumer demand and drum up additional sales with mobile coupons.