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 and similar deal sites have experienced a rapid rise, which is now followed by an equally rapid fall. The Washington Post sheds a light on the issues that daily deal sites are being faced with and that eventually lead to the decline of their deals business.
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Some people find it annoying if a writer or a company on Twitter posts the same link to a blog post over and over again. But our friends at that the Buffer Blog have come up with three reasons why that kind of behaviour is pretty effective to gain maximum traffic from social media shares.
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At least in the U.S., consumers increasingly expect free shipping when buying stuff online, fueled by Amazon’s popular Prime service that with a one-time fee entitles to free shipping for 12 month. Interestingly, now even the big credit card companies like MasterCard and Visa want to help people reduce shipping costs by launching specific campaigns and web portals.
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Do you know Boxed.com? It is a fairly new U.S online retailer that focuses on one thing: Selling bulk-sized products at pint-sized prices over mobile devices. Quartz portrays the company that was launched three month ago after only three month of development, and it’s already expanding rapidly in the U.S.
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A very interesting news comes from Chinese WhatsApp competitor WeChat: Its platform was used by the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi for the sale of its latest flagship device, and that worked out pretty well: Xiaomi sold 150.000 units in under 10 minutes through the chat app. Looks like there is a new effective sales channel evolving!
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Speaking about the Asian e-commerce market: According to a new forecast, the volume of products sold online in the five leading Asian markets will double within five years.