Rise of Social Shopping
Blink an eye and big stuff happens. With valuations in the billions for sites such as +OpenSky and in the hundreds of millions for relative newcomer WaNeLo.com Don't get lost in the trap such valuations create.

Remember Arthur C. Clarke's quote:
Any sufficiently NEW technology is indistinguishable from MAGIC.

There are several forms of new ecommerce magic happening now including:

+Wanelo = gamified, social & mobile shopping.
MassDrop = social affiliate program.
+OpenSky = Social Shopping with a #crowdfunding or +quirkydotcom  feel.
+fab.com = social shopping.
+Etsy = +eBay for crafters.
+Woot = Daily Deal

We added a new section to our Ecommerce Questions Haiku Deck to reflect the rise of social shopping. We also noted how and why Amazon should be worried. New "social shopping" plays are hitting Amazon right where they are vulnerable - community, social and mobile.

Amazon is  "Search and Stab" and they are about to compete with savvy mobile game creators. Shopping as a social game will beat low prices created by scale. Didn't Amazon just prove that point by vanquishing Walmart from the king's ecommerce throne?

Amazon understands the ARBITRAGE of online commerce better than anyone, but what if arbitrage wasn't the driving force anymore? Going to be an interesting fight between SCALE and its many benefits and a new generation of "kids" who don't know any better than to question everything, assume nothing and have FUN.

Fun is contagious. Will follow with video notes soon.

2 Great Meetings Today
Ecom Revolution made progress with two meetings today. Visited my former Employer Atlantic BT, I was Marketing Director for two years before starting Curgami, and enrolled 4 dookies in the revolution.

Today's Ecom Daily Diary discusses enterprise crowdfunding, Jon Jordan, Matt Lemke from Atlantic BT, Phil Buckley's 100 People To Watch in the Triangle and introduces four Duke University undergrads who will help define enterprise crowdfunding.

Also built a form so YOU can easily JOIN the Ecom Revolution.
http://bit.ly/ecom_revolution_google  

Crowdfunding is a new powerful marketing channel similar to what email marketing used to be - high profit, low cost with big social and UGC benefits.

Designing Tomorrow's Ecommerce Today
Added artist Sara Havey's magical knitting gnome to the fastest "views" Haiku Deck I've ever created (300+ in 24 hours) because it is a perfect example of the New Ecommerce's crowdsourcing and DIY future.

The deck is divided into three sections:
* Current Ecommerce Best Practices.
* Rise of the Social / Mobile Web & Social Shopping.
* Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing and DIY.

Is it possible to create tomorrow's ecommerce website TODAY? Is Sara's gnome knitting? You bet!

Mark Schaefer's "content shock" says what all content marketers know. Content marketing sustainable. Crowdfunding is sustainable & perfect for New SEO.

Why Etsy.com Is Crowdfunded Gamification
When I saw the staggering difference between Etsy.com's pagespread (pages in Google) vs. Red Envelope, one of my favorite gift sites from back in the day, something very DIFFERENT was going on. 

Etsy.com 19,000,000 pages in Google. 
RedEnvelope 31,000 pages in Google. 

At first I thought the power of Etsty.com was in its User Generated Platform approach. Some of the power is in the framework, but another key driver is the soft gamification they employ to focus spotlights on some artists and product categories. 

Etsy.com requires email marketing since 19,000,000 pages means finding anything without curation is nearly impossible. Instead of straight curation based on a known competitive rule set Etsy.com gamifies much like a Vegas slot machine. 

Vegas slot machines use serendipitous condition. We pattern creating humans believe we create a pattern when we pull the single arm of these "bandits", but there is not Stimulus-Reward response. 

Randomizing "winning" means addiction is easy, quick and complete. Etsy.com randomizes their curation so each artist is sure their moment in the sun is around the next corner. One more pull of the single arm will surely produce a winning response. 

The risk of this gamification is the algorithm doesn't find content fast enough to put off an artist's desire to stop game play. The good news is Etsy.com's engine is the ONLY reinforcement. 

When an artist creates an Etsy.com site they drive social traffic to it and some of that traffic, since it is highly segmented and qualified, will convert creating the first round of reinforcement with no cost to Etsy.com other than the quickly depreciating community code. 

The gap between initial acceptance, use of an artist's social net to create their first conversions and the point when an artist stops game play is when Etsy.com's algorithm must rescue the content. With so much game play (19M pages), Etsy.com knows an artist's lifecycle probably within minutes of the change from phase to phase. 

So YES Etsy is gamified crowdfunding since the platform makes a tremendous return on the first conversions, those that come from the artist's push to their social net, and cost of new artist acquisition is reduced by scale and existing artist advocacy (something that is also mathematically predictable). 

  

CrowdFunde knows ecommerce is expensive and a highwire act if there ever was one. Quirky.com and Threadless.com show the power of tapping crowd wisdom for product development but why stop there.

CrowdFunde is a new tool, a tool that helps ecommerce merchants tap crowd wisdom to lower costs and increae profits.

In 5 New Ecommerce Lessons on ScentTrail Marketing I explained why everyone should have a store. This post goes further insisting everyone should have a store AND a vialble crowdfunding platform.

Haiku Deck for this post
http://www.haikudeck.com/p/XdSgR5zOax/crowdfunding-and-ecommerce

Post + Haiku Deck
http://martinmartysmith.com/5-reasons-crowdfunding-and-e-commerce-are-stronger-together/

If my advice about adding a store was confusing and now this post feels like a bridge too far Don't Worry. AtlanticBT.com and I are creating a crowdfunding platform Software As A Service tool that can easily adapt to any business vertical or cause marketing.

We happen to be creating the platform for CureCancerStarter.org, but our intent is to build a flexible framework that can be easily adpated to other applications.