Each year we have seen big increases in traffic on Black Friday, but as we have grown it has been harder and harder to keep up the pace of growth. You can only grow 100% for so long. We thought we hit that wall in 2010 when our Black Friday scan growth was only 317% compared to 415% in 2009. Somehow we broke through not only our 2010 number, but also our 2009 record – scan volume on Black Friday this year was 535% higher than our baseline (the baseline is our average scan volume during the day). Here is a nice graph:
We wondered what product categories would increase the most on Black Friday so we compared data from the week before Black Friday, Thanksgiving and Black Friday itself:
Consumer electronics and toys did very well, but we were surprised by this year’s HUGE increase in video game scans – 2000% increase in scans compared to normal traffic times. Wow.
We also looked at how users compared between Android and iPhone. Normally Android users scan a lot more (almost double) than iPhone users. But on Thanksgiving iPhone users reached parity with Android users and by Black Friday the iPhone users put Android users to shame – doing a LOT more scanning. Here is a relative graph:
More to come…
This holiday season EVERY scan you make gives you an additional chance to win an iPad 2 or Kindle Fire (your choice). Each week until December 25th we will randomly select one winner – the more scans you make the more chances you have to win. The user with the most scans between now and December 25th will receive BOTH an iPad 2 and a Kindle Fire. To win you must setup a user account on ShopSavvy.
Contest Start: Today
Contest End: December 25th
Award(s): Apple iPad 2, Kindle Fire or Both
Rules: Open to any registered user (you must set up a user account in the app for your scans to count). One entry per unique scan for each weekly drawing. Each weekly winner will be notified by email and select either an iPad 2 or a Kindle Fire. The Grand Prize will be awarded to the user with the most unique scans by midnight CST on December 25th. Winners will be contacted by email and must respond within 72 hours and provide their birth date, mailing address and a headshot to claim their prize.
The press release hasn’t hit the wire yet, but you may have read that we raised $7M from Eduardo Saverin (and other investors) in TechCrunch, CNET, AllThingsD or VentureBeat. Interestingly it was actually our Series A – i.e. we had managed to avoid taking outside capital for three years after launching the company back in 2008. Until now we survived on our original Google award money, revenue from early clients like Visa and funds from our co-founders.
Many of you know that we almost sold the business this summer. However, just before we did we met James Bailey and Eduardo Saverin and began talking about what the future of mobile shopping would look like. It was uncanny how similarly we saw the current landscape and the shape it would take in the future. Those conversations helped us realized that we wanted to be in business together. At the end of the day we decided that it would be a LOT cooler to build a billion dollar company with Eduardo.
The investment will be used to double the size of our engineering staff (half should be located in our San Francisco office and the other half in our Dallas office). Additionally, for the first time we will also be hiring a sales organization to help advertisers build amazing campaigns that leverage our unique ad framework.
Looking to change the face of retail? Want to join a fast growing startup with a future? We would love to talk to you. We are hiring developers and designers based in San Francisco (near South Park) and in Dallas. Skill set? iOS, Android, .NET and Photoshop to name a few. Email me at amuse -at- shopsavvy.com and I will pass your resume along to the right person. We would love to hear from you!
ShopSavvy is hiring a ‘Startup Manager’. The position is pretty typical for a startup (i.e. your responsibilities will be very varied). The position pays $50K+stock options and will be based either in Dallas or San Francisco (salary is really focused on DFW area candidate). Duties will include:
Social Media Duties
- Craft social media strategy
- craft stories for corporate blog
- craft stories for shopping blogs
- tweet interesting stuff about ShopSavvy and Shopping
- update Facebook presence with interesting stuff about ShopSavvy and Shopping
- build a shopping community
Managerial Duties
- direct and manage PR activity with PR firm
- direct and manage off shore resources (Randy)
- direct and manage freelance writers for shopping stories
Personal Assistant to CEO Duties
- schedule all calls and appointments for CEO
- organize travel schedule for employees (mainly CEO)
- coordinate with controller and CPA for all HR and expense issues
Interested? Email amuse@shopsavvy.com
My entry in the pumpkin carving contest here at the office – a barcode on a pumpkin. I should have added more lines, but I was too busy cheering for the Rangers.
This week I noticed a few posts describing how much time users spend in various mobile apps. I pulled our data from Flurry (only counts iOS and Android, excludes Symbian and WP7) and was surprised by the numbers. During the average month our users spend more than 30 years scanning barcodes – thats a LOT of scanning.
The app market has exploded. Apple has the world’s largest market with over 571,745 apps in the iTunes App Store. Android is a close number two with 300,000 apps. Nokia is in third place with 50,000 apps in the Ovi store with Microsoft trailing in fourth place with 30,000 Windows Phone 7 apps. Across each of these app stores ShopSavvy is easily in the Top 1% (often showing up in the top ten in most of the app stores). IDC predicts that by 2015 183 billion apps will be downloaded from these app stores (last year 11 billion were downloaded). The market is growing like crazy. According to loyalalytics 26% of users are very loyal – active users who use a new app more than 10 times.
