I’m enthused about a recent article from MarketTools; Aug./Sept. 2008 Insight Report Reveals Impact of Web Activity on Consumers’ Purchasing Decisions. It highlighted the fact that consumers visit online blogs, communities, or social networks and engage in product research online to help make purchase decisions. This research and these statistics support our vision on the direction e-commerce is heading in this marketplace. Enter Shopit; the platform for social commerce. Great knowing that we are right where we should be.

Your actions have spoken and were listening! Based on what our community has been requesting, we’re adding a ton of new features and a brand new look for Shopit! Also, in an effort to simplify the site, we’ll be doing away with some features that are not frequently used by our community. So we have removed the option to list items for ‘trade’ on Shopit. You can simply list them for sale or accept offers on them.

We thank you again for your continued feedback to help us improve Shopit. We’re working hard to ensure we give attention to all of your requests. Keep em’ coming!

We were so inspired by Rhett’s new attention grabbing look this week, we all decided to try it on for size. Worked for some… not so much for others. But the surprise of mustaches peaking over cubicles, hanging around the break room, and parading around the office was priceless.

Shopit was originally supposed to go up to San Francisco solely for the PorC conference (see post below), but then, we were invited to attend Yahoo’s Openhack08 conference!  Sweet!

We hopped on a train and headed to Yahoo’s main campus in Sunnyvale, CA.  We got there, registered, and attended the crash courses.  Some of the topics covered in the courses were: Yahoo’s mobile platform Blueprint which let’s you easily build apps for the iPhone and other basic phones. OpenSocial, OAuth, and Y!AP.

After attending the Yahoo Application Platform (Y!AP) course, I got the urge to start up a Shopit hack for a possible entry into the openhack08 contest. I left my mouse at home but luckily Kent Brewster from Yahoo was kind of enough to lend me one so that I can move much faster.

I ended up successfully porting the Shopit application to the Yahoo Platform in about 4 hours.  Yahoo has put together a really nice platform and made it really easy to port.

After deciding that we were not going to stay an extra day (which required us to sleep in tents or on the floor of classrooms), we did not enter our “hack” into the competition.  Congratulations to cafe.com for winning openhack08.

Toward the end of the day, I sat in on a course taught by the one and only Rasmus Lerdorf (the creator of PHP).  I felt like I should write him a check!

We were then allowed to socialize a bit with some Pizza & Beer.  Geek to Pizza is like Cop to Donut.

We headed home and caught a flight out of San Jose to LA.  Surprisingly I ran into my cousin on the flight home and had a good time catching up.

All in all, it was a nice experience to mingle with some of the industry’s finest… and bitter sweet because although I was tired and wanted to head home, I would’ve liked to see where we would have stood in the contest…  oh and I missed an awesome performance from Girl Talk!

You can see all pictures via flickr from the event here.

–Troy

Wednesday I had the pleasure of flying up to San Francisco, CA along with Rhett McNulty, Shopit COO, for a PorC (Portable Contacts) hackathon hosted by Six Apart.  The plane ride was sick!  We flew Virgin America.  I watched TV, I played DOOM, and I even tried to chat with strangers via the Chat feature. Sadly nobody wanted to accept my chat invitation :(.

Once we got off the plane, we hopped on the BART and headed to the city.  We walked several blocks to the Six Apart office — thanks to David Recordon for hosting — and started munchin’ on some of the best pizza I’ve ever had.  Once we were plenty full, we got right to work hackin’ away on Portable Contacts.

At first we were having a few issues with the implementation but thanks to Joseph Smarr from Plaxo, we were able to get those all squared away.

I’m excited to fully implement all that PorC brings to the table.  It makes my job as a developer really easy and provides a lot for the Shopit users to easily transfer their data from their existing profiles.  For example, a user can come to Shopit and specify a social network like Plaxo and pull all of their data down with just a few clicks.  This data can be used to present users with products that they would be interested in purchasing by cross-checking our database of products with a users interest that are stored on the Plaxo side!

After a long night of fun, hangin’ out in a very informal setting, we called it a night.  We woke up and had coffee with some of Rhett’s buddies that happened to be driving through town.  His Buddies Jared and Mike are traveling across the country: surfing, mountain biking, and kayaking for a few months.  Living the dream.  They were kind enough to drop us off at MySpace for the Portable Contacts summit.

The Portable Contacts summit was very informative.  Joseph Smarr did a great job hosting the event and John McCrea did a great job managing it.  Diving in together felt like we were all playing a key part in setting the tone for the future of the web.  Because everything was so Open, we could do mashups of data without ever writing any code.  For example, Kevin Marks from Google and Joseph took the hCard data from Kevin’s twitter page and converted it to a vCard using technorati’s hCard to vCard converter.  They then used that vCard as a data endpoint for Portable Contacts.  This is super important because the architecture of the PorC standard was to follow existing Open standards like the vCard which maps one-to one.  Very cool. 

We finished up the night with some good beer (Pacifico) and a lot of help from Paul Lindner from hi5 for a little hack session the two of us had to hammer out a few OAuth issues we were having with our soon to be release Shopit hi5 app.  All is good.  Thanks Paul!

Stay tuned, more to come.  Tomorrow, we’re heading to Open Hack Day at Yahoo!

–Troy Payne (Social Apps guy)

That’s right…Shopit ranks as the #2 Application with the Most Active Users in the Classified category on Facebook. Shopit also ranks #4 in the Business category. With over 100,000 active users per month, Shopit is helping users get their products right in front of buyers and make money right from their profiles!

Shopit has proven to be the best solution for people looking to make money by uploading their products and installing the application within their social network sites. Here is a quote from one of our users:

“I love Shopit because I did not have to pay for a web designer and they make it easy for you to upload products. It’s also the best way to market to several hundred people within my Facebook profile!” ~MonaeCouture Store

The next time you are logged into Facebook, MySpace, or Bebo…search for our app!

~Brooke

We’ve completed the scheduled maintenance on our Our MySpace application. And don’t fret, your Shopit store will appear exactly on your MySpace page as it did before.

In an effort to comply with all of our partners’ Terms of Service, we will be closely monitoring all the products and services that are added to Shopit. If you have any questions about this or the MySpace application, please let us know. Thanks for your patience.

I’m an avid reader of Get Elastic, The Ecommerce Blog. About a month ago, Get Elastic announced their first ever Big Ecommerce Conference Contest where entrants could win full conference passes to three different internet expos! (a valued prize for us internet geeks ) So I entered, although I’ve never won anything in my life. And as luck would have it, I won!!


Shopit will be attending Online Market World 2008 at the Moscone Center, San Francisco, October 1st- 3rd. The event is a comprehensive three-day conference to address the entire e-commerce life cycle from business, technology, marketing, and operational perspectives. Some of the KeyNote speakers include: Kathy Ireland CEO & Chief Designer, Kathy Ireland World Wide, Tony Hsieh CEO, Zappos, Marsha Collier Author, eBay For Dummies Series, Holly Eve Suttman Founder, Black and Light Co.

We’re stoked. Thanks Get Elastic. We’ll see you in October.

-Stephanie