Will we ever shop full price again?

--  with a few other luxury items sprinkled in.

Totsy.com for kidswear

Zuilily.com for babies and kids

OneKingsLane.com for housewares

SnappyTuna.com for kitchenware 

Bulx.com for furniture and high-end home improvement items (!)

beautystory.com for beauty products

Reebonz.com for European fashion and furnishings (it's an overseas company yet they ship to US free but includes VAT in the checkout)

LuxuryHut.com (Canadian but has US distribution center so it's no matter)

Jetsetter.com for travel deals (a division of Gilt.com)

JackThreads.com for street/skate fashions (mostly male)

Biva.com  offers mostly fragrances and accessories

BBOSPrivateSale.com  which is the flash site for new and previously owned luxe items from Bag, Borrow or Steal (now called Avelle.com) which still offers "luxury goods for rent" -- a concept that has come and gone.

and the list goes on..........

Gilt.com has since branched out and now offers men's, home, chlidren and travel deals along with the womens' fashion and accessories. It's undoubted that more innovation will be coming; Jason Binn, publisher of Niche Media LLC which publishes Hamptons, Vegas, Apsen, Wynn and Gotham magazines to name a few announced in early September that he is joining Gilt as Chief Advisor. Hmmmmmm.

All of these sites require [free] membership and often it's only by referral -- although I've seen ads for many of them. They alert members to new sales via email only keeping brand names out of the search engines. The top sites have between 1.5 and 2.5 million members. That's a powerful customer base for limited quantity designer closeouts.

 

"Discovery-based shopping is what excites the customer,'' says Adam Bernhard, chief executive of Hautelook.com, which is based in L.A, in a recent article in the herald-review.com.

 "We remerchandize our (online) store every night, and every morning you have an e-mail with eight or 10 new brands. Shoppers come for no other reason than to look and all of a sudden they've made a purchase.''

This new way of shopping was born of the recession, when entrepreneurs recognized that manufacturers would need a place to discreetly sell excess inventory.

Rather than ditching high-end handbags and runway apparel at bargain-basement, bricks-and-mortar retailers - where they might stay on the floor for months and tarnish a brand's image - manufacturers and designers can turn to the private flash sale sites. Here, discounted merchandise is hidden from search engines, sells out quickly and is seen only by "members'' who have signed up to participate, or buyers who've been referred by a member.

"The perfect storm of the recession put wind in the sails of these entrepreneurs because they had access to an excess of merchandise they never would have had, and manufacturers who never would have considered a sale online were left with their pants down,'' says Sucharita Mulpuru, e-commerce analyst for Forrester Research in this article.  

[read the full article, Online flash sales attract bargain hunters to Web By BOOTH MOORE - McClatchy Tribune Writer.]

 

The flash sale trend dovetails with -- and came after, I believe -- the one-deal-a-day sites like our ultimate favorite Woot.com with the best copywriting of any site. We visit just to get a laugh from the product descriptions since I'm not often in the market for a good tech deal. And Woot.com begat kids.woot, shirt.woot, sellout.woot and perhaps the most useful of all .... wine.woot!

The list of Deal-a-Day sites is too long for here... check out DODtracker.com to see nearly 100 sites of this type. Seems like every industry and market segment has at least one or two to call it's own.

Several focus just on jewelry like DiamondShark.com, SparkleCartel.com, ohLoot.com, blingDaily.com and the upcoming JewelryClique.com.

 

AFTER FLASH SALES:

Another spin on these designer deals is the bidding sites that let you "win" designer bags, jewels and department store gift cards with bids you purchase from the site. It definitely took me a moment or five to catch on here. At first I thought the site was about the bags. But then I realized they were all about the bids.

The business model of these sites is based on the purchasing of the bids. Like raffle tickets in a "Chinese Auction." That's where their profit is -- at first I thought it was the sale of the products. Silly me. But for the customer, you can get a $500 purse for say, $100-$200 in bid "tickets" so it's still a good deal.

But the action is way different than an ebay auction and you can get caught up in the adrenaline of the last 10 seconds of bidding. In fact, the sites call it bidding entertainment (code word for gambling) and you have to be over 18 to join some (and not from Florida who's residents are prohibited from such sites!). Frankly, it was too nerve-wracking for me and I'm a good ebayer!

I was a bid-virgin when an invitation to the newly launched LuxeWin.com came in my inbox -- it was so new that the competition was low and I easily won a $500 Michael Kors purse for .24¢ with just one of my five free bids. The next auction is when I understood the game about buying more bids since my starter pack had run out. And I quickly learned how fast the bidding can go in the last minute when it resets every 10 seconds with each new bid.

Next I came across OohiLove.com, FashionBay.com and bidcactus.com (which isn't fashion or luxury specific). And then I remembered that I've seen Bidz.com before but it never attracted me since it seemed so unfashionable.

A little research and I learned there is a whole world of "penny auction sites" as they're called.  High fashion & luxury is just the latest industry to jump in where electronics, mass market jewels and gift cards seem to reign. I found the site PennyAuctionScam.com which is very educational; it's important to know the good from the bad, and to see the very long list of sites they list. Wow.

NOW BRING YOUR FRIENDS ALONG:

This year came the boom of group coupon-ing sites. First I saw Groupon.com (launched late 2008 in Chicago and went national last year) and thought it was so clever. And before I even got to the "-ver" in "clever" I received invitations to ShopWithMe.com, Bloomspot.com and Livingsocial.com.

These give you deals from local businesses in major cities/markets and are mostly local services like restaurants, salons, spas and the like. A few times I've seen a deal on an e-tailer like shutterfly.

Along with the daily deal email format, most feature witty copy, bright design, integration with Twitter and Facebook, ample quotes from Yelp or Zagat reviews, a big click-to-buy button and a countdown clock. It's a cross between deal-a-days like Woot.com and witty, informative city e-newsletters like DailyCandy and Thrillist.

The business model for these kinds of sites is that they count on enough folks coming in on the deal -- typically, X amount of dollars for a product or an experience like dinner at a restaurant --to make it still profitable for them because of volume sales. Once critical mass is reached they award the coupons to those who ordered them. I wasn't able to determine if they ever miss the number and don't deliver the deal.

Is it a good deal for retailers?