Many people ask me how I knew about YC back in early 2007. It was Founders at Work for me. It took me a few years to get my hands on a copy of the book (Amazon didn't deliver in Romania back then), but the content was incredibly useful and completely original.
Reddit also had a play in it. At the time it was the competing Digg Upstart, or that's how everyone saw it. I distinctly remember a blog post after Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast, where the founders said they went out for ramen and for the first time ever it didn't matter who picked up the check at the end of the meal. That pushed me to apply to the program.
It might have been the early days looking back -- but YC seemed like a big thing even back then if you were into the startup scene. Between Reddit, Stripe and Auctomatic (Founded by Harj Taggar and Patrick Collison, which to me meant european founders are welcome in the program) you could sense that everyone involved with the group was continuing the stories I read about in Founders at Work.
Also founder of Two Tap here. Just to clarify on the above:
1. Pricing and inventory are realtime with Two Tap -- taken live from the merchant site when a shopping session is started. If only a size S is available on the merchant site then that's what we make available for shoppers in our carts. Merchants don't have to do any integration or manage this process.
2. Reliability has been a non problem for a while, we have a guarantee that we don't lose orders. And the process to confirm orders is async like Amazon -- step 1: we've received your order; step 2: your order is confirmed.
3. Two Tap supports over 1000 retailer integrations.
Pretty much what we're building at Two Tap, a gateway API that can be used to order any product from a supported retailer's inventory and benefitting from realtime product data (inventory, price etc).
A huge benefit to being an independent API is that new features become available for all of the supported stores in a matter of days (vs months-years-never if each retailer would have to update their API).
Oldnavy and a few other retailers are not active yet. We've pre-built these integrations despite not having requests to sell their inventory just yet.
I'd mention more on the BD side but can't at this point for competitive reasons. The fact that we currently support sending orders through to 450 retailers does not mean we have deals in place with all of them, but that the infrastructure is built to allow this to happen -- if affiliates or publishers get an approval from retailers or the affiliate networks that govern this. Perhaps we should make this clearer on the supported stores page.
All in due time. The industry as a whole is being pushed to decide which models they will embrace -- and as always some will be slower to adapt than others. The pressure comes from lost revenue on mobile which makes retailers a LOT more flexible now compared to even 6 months ago when talking about this.
Considering multiple format screens and devices fragmenting retailers distribution channels over the next years this is set to become an even bigger chapter down the line.
Good question. That's because this method doesn't scale and fails as a solution to the industry's challenges.
There's companies that are trying to get retailers to implement APIs but this leads to a fragmented ecosystem. Year's past payment processors that sold "pay/checkout with ..." buttons and wallets have failed to achieve significant merchant adoption despite being fuelled with marketing spend in the billions.
The solution everyone embraces seems to rely in building an independent and neutral piece of infrastructure (an API) that any publisher can integrate and that plugs into every checkout out there. It's the missing pipes in ecommerce, anyone can use it and nothing really changes (we don't process payments, it's all automated etc) -- and conversions go UP.
I'm repeating some ideas in the post but on the publisher side it's worth noting NONE would entertain the idea of integrating multiple APIs -- one for each merchant. Did I also bring up the required combined efforts of all merchants to keep those APIs up & running? :)
So pro-scraping because it's the only way to build adoption in ecommerce.
This is strongly correlated with brand values they push in certain marketing campaigns and both returns as well as excellent service are promoted.
Flipping it you could say they attract people that do returns more than avg.
