Alice.com
(“Everyone needs an Alice”) is an interesting new concept which has gone online
in June 2009. It is an open, online shopping platform for manufacturers of consumer packaged goods (CPG) who want to make a direct connection with end customers. Consumers
need to provide a profile on Alice.com to shop there.

TechCrunch
wrote a review on the site last June:

“Although
young, the site, which has over 6,000 products, has a great deal of variety
when it comes to different types of products. There are 86 choices under
bathroom paper, which includes kleenex, toilet paper, cotton balls and more.
And there are 804 offerings for hair products.(…)

On
the manufacturer side, Alice.com makes no retail margin allowing each
manufacturer to control product assortment and pricing in its own direct sale
to the end consumer. Alice collects the goods from the manufacturers in a
warehouse and manages all of the e-commerce and shipping. So how does the site
make money? Advertising.”

Since
the beginning of October, Alice.com has introduced an interesting strategy for
free trial samples:

The
manufacturers who sell products over Alice.com can directly target consumer
groups of their liking with their free product samples. The samples are sent with
the regular purchase orders. The profiles and other user data (such as purchase
behaviour) allow for a more direct selection of sample recipients as opposed to
when samples are made available to individual retailers.

In September this year Alice.com
has raised a four million dollar financing round. In
November 2008, Alice.com (back then still in stealth mode) was able to raise
$4.3 million.

The founders of Jellyfish, the reverse auction shopping site, are behind
Alice.com. Bought
by Microsoft, Jellyfish.com leads in the meantime the shopping site for
Microsoft’s search engine Bing, Cashback.

Parts of the technology from Jellyfish is used by Cashback.

Originally posted in German by Marcel Weiss, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.