Retail eCommerce Spendi...

Do you sell things online? Yes? Great, cause I have some terrific news for you. Online retail spending is up 17% year-over-year. comScore says that in Q1 2012 alone, online retail spending hit $44.3 billion . It’s weird, everyday I hear people talking about the bad economy and how it’s killing businesses but here’s online retail showing double-digit growth for the sixth consecutive quarter. Scan this chart and feel good about yourself: Now, if I was a glass half empty person (hush, you), I could say that it’s a nice rise since 2007 but not phenomenal. But when you look at the slump in 2008 – 2009, then the rise after that, it’s very uplifting. Don’t you think? comScore’s Gian Fulgoni agrees with me; “While the economic recovery continues to be painfully slow, the channel shift to e-commerce appears to be accelerating. This presents opportunities but also challenges for brick-and-mortar retailers if they can’t hold onto their offline market share in the digital world. E-commerce has reached critical mass in several product categories, and it will be important to monitor these sales trends by category in order to correctly gauge the impact e-commerce is having on overall retailer performance.” Critical mass, huh? Winners this past quarter include Digital Content & Subscriptions, Computer Software, Consumer Electronics, Jewelry & Watches and Event Tickets. They all shot up at least 17% over last year. Honing in on the last two, we can see America returning to her old ways spending money on entertainment and luxury items. comScore says that 48.8% of the transactions in the first quarter of 2012 included free shipping. This is the largest they’ve seen for a non-holiday period. We know that shipping costs is one of the things that trips up online buyers so finding away to make shipping free is bound to swing more sales your way. Then we come to my favorite portion of the show – the tablet! 38% of tablet owners used it to buy online in the past month. You’ll never guess which category took the prize for top sales. Apparel! So here’s to all the folks that sell things online, from handmade iPod cozies to macaroni and cheese by the case, it’s time to rejoice. Treat yourself to a break and a treat, then get back to work. Those numbers won’t keep climbing without help from you and yours.

Study: 42% of Americans...

A new study from Leo Burnett found that 42% of Americans ages 18 to 49 used social media sites like Facebook and YouTube as part of their shopping experience within the past year.

I suspected, however, t...

I suspected, however, that I wasn't homesick for anything I would find at home when I returned. The longing was for what I wouldn't find: the past and all the people and places there were lost to me. Cheap Flights to mauritius

Mobile Payments Platfor...

Mobile payments processing platform Square has been used by a variety of individuals and businesses, from charities to taxis to food trucks to political campaigns . Next up—art fairs and farmers’ markets. The company says that at Etsy’s New York’s Spring Handmade Cavalcade last weekend in Brooklyn, over 90% of the vendors used Square to accept payments. And this weekend, Square says that many vendors at Unique LA, the largest independent fashion market in the country, will use Square to process card payments. Unique LA expects over one and a half million dollars to be spent in its market over the weekend. It’s not surprising that Square is being used by independent purveyors at fairs and markets. The company’s smartphone dongle and companion payments app makes taking credit cards easy. The payments app has been a favorite amongst independent workers, merchants and small businesses for the past few years. As reported a few weeks ago, Square is now processing $5 billion in annual payments (or around $416 million in payments per month), which is up from $4 billion in annual payments in March. And payment volume is up 25 percent over the past month. The company also just started making funds available in merchants’ bank accounts the next business morning (for any sales made before 5 pm), while other merchant processors can take 2 to 5 business days to get merchants their money.

Gumroad Gets $7 Million...

Gumroad , the startup that lets individuals receive e-payments through a simple URL link, has received $7 million in new funding led by Silicon Valley venture capital stalwart Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers . The round, which serves as Gumroad’s Series A, brings the startup’s total outside investment to just over $8 million — Gumroad closed on $1.1 million in seed funding back in February , and all those investors also pitched into this round. Kleiner Perkins partner and former Twitter VP of engineering Mike Abbott headed up the funding and will join Gumroad’s board of directors. Gumroad founder and CEO Sahil Lavingia tells me the new funding will be put toward hiring more people to bulk up its current staff of three. “I just really want to build a sustainable company that scales, and I think Kleiner Perkins and Mike [Abbott] just want to help me do that. He really believes in the larger vision.” Small Beginnings, Big Idea That vision is to let people sell anything online as easily as they can share a link to it — independently made music, crafts, writing, whatever — without having to set up an online store. It all began a year ago as a proof-of-concept hack by Lavingia, a 19-year-old college dropout who was a designer on the founding team of Pinterest and has also worked as a designer for Turntable.fm . He showed it off in a post on Hacker News , writing: “Over this past weekend I had the idea to build a sort of link shortener but with a payment system built-in. There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link – on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends – but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store. So I built Gumroad.” Today, Gumroad works worldwide with all major credit cards, and can be used for digital content as well as for physical content, since it lets users collect shipping information if needed. Gumroad takes a 5 percent fee for every payment processed, along with a 25 cent credit card fee. So if an item costs $1, Gumroad takes 30 cents; if an item costs $10, Gumroad takes 75 cents. Lavingia declined to provide specific user numbers, but said that so far, “people from nearly every creative industry has started using the platform. Music, film writing, photography, illustration; all of these industries have started using Gumroad significantly.” Disruption Brings Challenges The idea is that largely because of social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and online media platforms such as YouTube and Flickr , nowadays people can attract followers and fans on their own — they don’t necessarily need to get exposure through old distribution channels (or pay the big commissions those channels typically take.) Gumroad wants to make it just as easy for these people to sell things to their followers as it is to get their attention, and potentially make a living doing so. It’s potentially a hugely disruptive concept, so it’s not too surprising that a big-idea VC like Kleiner Perkins is getting on board. Lavingia tells me that a few copycat apps have emerged in the past year since Gumroad debuted, and he welcomes the competition as being “good for consumers” — but surely this new funding could help the company keep its edge for a while. Of course, anything dealing with payments is also hugely complicated from security and regulatory standpoints, so Gumroad certainly has its work cut out for it in making sure its platform is truly robust enough to go up against the powers-that-be. It’ll be interesting to watch how it puts its funding and new staff to use in the months ahead. Our own Alexia Tsotsis interviewed Lavingia a few months ago on TechCrunch TV, and you can watch that video below: