1. The Secret to Private Sales What you can learn from the top 5 players.

2. Table of Contents What is Private Sales, and why is it so hot right now?.pg. 3-9 Who are the leaders?..pg. 10-14 Key elements of top Private Sales sites ....pg. 15-21 A peek at whats next....pg. 22-27 Is Private Sales a fit for your business?....pg. 28-30 Contributor biographies...pg. 31-33 Thank you...pg. 34 3. What is Private Sales, and why is it so hot right now? Private Sales is an emerging retail concept through which luxury retailers and brands sell merchandise on an exclusive, online platform to an exclusive customer base. Though there are several variations to the model, Private Sales sites are generally defined by the following: Invite-Only access requires an invitation from the brand, or a member friend. Name-Brand Merchandise sale items are quality, not cheap or out-of-date. Discounts items are compellingly priced to drive impulse purchases and loyalty. Selling Event sales are timed events, during which the merchandise is offered either until it sells out or a set deadline is reached. 4. 4 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. What is Private Sales, and why is it so hot right now? Invite-Only A key element of successful retailers is successful marketing. Private Sales sites use mostly viral email marketing, where friends invite each other to join the site. These messages have a much higher open rate than standard email campaigns because they come from someone the recipient knows. And the conversion a registered user is also much higher than a standard email blast can achieve. Image credit: purpletwinkie 5. 5 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. What is Private Sales, and why is it so hot right now? Name-Brand Merchandise For brands and retailers that have the product assortment to support the model (products with a sense of exclusivity, that are premium and/or expensive), Private Sales sites offer a unique venue for distributing excess product when demand has been miscalculated. 6. 6 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. What is Private Sales, and why is it so hot right now? Overstock is unavoidable in manufactured goods, thanks to everything from fashion misses to production planning mistakes to unexpected weather... The way we are dealing with overstock is a revolution for branded products," [Xavier] Court [vente-privee co- founder] says. "It is extremely efficient, protects the image of the brand, and brings in new customers on- and off- line. Jennifer Schenker, BusinessWeek Vente-privee.com Refashions Closeouts 7. 7 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. What is Private Sales, and why is it so hot right now? Discounts and Timed Sales The holy grail of online retailing has been the impulse purchase. Impulse purchases are what drive profitability for brick-and-mortar stores. For example, a shopper may come in for one item, and walk out with three. The ecommerce world has had difficulty translating this experience online. Often, a shopper will come to an online store for one item and leave with that one item or even nothing, given an industry average cart abandonment rate of 60%. Online retailers needed to find a way to drive impulse purchases, and Private Sales is the first online retail concept that has proven its ability to do so, and on a massive scale. Shoppers are buying items not because they specifically intended to purchase them, but because they are offered deals that feel too good to pass up, and the time is running out. And, for this experience, they keep coming back. 8. 8 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. What is Private Sales, and why is it so hot right now? Private sales is a very attractive online retail concept, largely due to the following: Rapid revenue growth Vente-privee went from 0-$1 billion in revenue in 6 years; Gilt Groupe went from 0-$500 million in 3 years. Extremely attractive financials, such as low customer acquisition cost due to viral invitations. Larger players buying in GSI Commerce acquired Rue La La for $350 million in October 2009, and there are perpetual rumors of Amazon planning to buying vente-privee for up to $3 billion. Incumbents adding private sales to their sites, including Neiman Marcus, Saks and Comcast. VCs funding new entrants, such as BuyVIP, Secret Sales and Private Outlet. 9. 9 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. What is Private Sales, and why is it so hot right now? Saddled with overstock from the retail recession, makers of luxury apparel, home furnishings, and other high-end goods are selling their wares at reduced prices through private shopping sites. Many of these companies help fuel pent-up demand by limiting membership Luxury brands can use these members-only sites to hide markdown prices from retail shoppers willing to pay the full amount, while attracting scores of wannabe fashionistas willing to wait for haute couture at a low price. Douglas MacMillan, BusinessWeek Psst! Private-Sale Shopping Sites Are Hot 10. Who are the leaders? Though the market is dynamic, the following companies have emerged as early leaders in the Private Sales space; therefore, they represent the most likely sources of tested best practices. 11. 11 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Who are the leaders? vente-privee Founded in 2001, vente-privee is the originator of the Private Sales concept, offering daily sales events to members that feature international designer brand merchandise. The company has seen rapid growth, with nearly $1 billion in revenue in 2009 and projections to grow 22% each year. Vente- privee operates in France, Germany, UK, Italy and Spain. Gilt Groupe Founded in 2007, Gilt Groupe provides invitation-only access to fashion and luxury-brand sales events lasting 36 hours. Gilt is a major player, with $500 million in revenue last year. ideeli ideeli was the first members-only shopping community in the U.S., founded in 2006. Ideeli offers limited-time sales events to more than 1.3 million members, featuring top brands in fashion, home and beauty. The company recently received $20 million VC funding. 12. 12 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Who are the leaders? Rue La La Founded in 2008, Rue La La is a division of Retail Convergence, Inc., a portfolio of ecommerce companies that use a common technology platform, customer database and management team to create a luxury Private Sales experience. Rue La La was acquired by GSI Commerce for $350 million in October 2009. Hautelook HauteLook, founded in 2007, operates a marketplace through which premium fashion and lifestyle brands host 24-48 hour private sales events. The company achieved $90 million in revenue last year. 13. 13 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Who are the leaders? The chart below shows the dramatic gains in unique visitor traffic for these companies* over the last year roughly a 300% increase total, with each seeing at least +100% yearly change. *Vente-privee not included due to insufficient data availability. 14. 14 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Who are the leaders? For those looking to develop Private Sales businesses, there is a great opportunity to learn from the leaders. Therefore, we reviewed these sites for key business model design elements that drive their success, as well as some unique elements to watch as trends going forward. Specifically, we wanted to find: What are the best practices that can be learned from the leaders? What are predictions for future capabilities that the leaders will offer? 15. Key elements of top Private Sales sites A successful Private Sales model requires the creation of an exclusive club, a viral invitation-only machine, a highly loyal repeat customer base and a powerful demand for impulse purchases. Several key design elements have become best practices to achieve these objectives: 16. 16 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Key elements of top Private Sales sites Viral Invitations New customer acquisition is driven primarily through people inviting their friends. This dramatically reduces the traditional customer acquisition costs of advertising, direct mail marketing, SEO, paid search and affiliates. The average incentive is $10 to the friend of each invitee that makes a purchase. Each site makes it easy to invite friends to, often either through Facebook Connect or adding contacts through Plaxo. Image credit: Olive Oil Lady 17. 17 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Key elements of top Private Sales sites Cart Reservation One of the biggest complaints from Private Sales shoppers is that an item will sell out in the time it takes them to move an item placed in a cart to checkout. The most common approach to address this issue is to provide a reservation time buffer once an item is placed in the cart, thus allowing enough time to checkout. Some of the sites extend this time when another item is placed in the cart. A notable difference between key players is whether or not the reservation time is shown a consideration between notifying the customer that they may continue shopping to drive up average order volume, versus the risk that they will horde merchandise in their cart. 18. 18 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Key elements of top Private Sales sites Absence of Site-Search Functionality Most ecommerce sites offer search or guided-search functionality to help visitors find products of interest. Conversely, most Private Sales sites do not. The goal with this tactic is to create a window-shopping experience, where a shopper spends time looking at each event, thus creating an impulse to buy. (Shoppers are not coming to the site with an intent to purchase a specific item.) However, most of the sites do offer a variant filter for items of interest, such as size and color. 19. 19 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Key elements of top Private Sales sites One-Page Event List A traditional ecommerce retailer may have thousands of SKUs in a hierarchical product catalog, broken down by category, sub-category, and product page. Large Private Sales sites may have dozens or even a hundred simultaneous events, but they are listed on a single page. The emphasis is on encouraging browsing to create the urge for an impulse purchase. 20. 20 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Key elements of top Private Sales sites Sales Events Always Start at the Same Time It is important to encourage customers to come to your site at the same time, by having a standard start time for each sales event. This maximizes impulse purchases, the rate of product sellout and conversion rates for return visitors. However, this tactic can also create a huge challenge for IT in supporting extreme spikes in traffic. Though your IT team would much prefer to spread the start time of sales events throughout the day to ease the operations, the business benefits of having customers that know what time to come to the site every day greatly outweighs the additional IT costs and performance challenges. Note: Cloud-based auto-scaling platforms are ideally suited to address this spiky demand. 21. 21 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Key elements of top Private Sales sites Order Stays Open for a Few Hours Compared to traditional shopping, a Private Sales shopper is motivated to checkout before the inventory depletes or her reservation runs out on her cart. This creates a situation where a shopper is forced to checkout soon after adding an item to the cart. For this reason, buying many items may require several checkouts, inevitably leading to call-center complaints about multiple shipping charges for same- day purchases. Advertising that free shipping is available for additional items purchased within a given number of hours builds goodwill, increases order volume, and most importantly does not create disgruntled shoppers. 22. A peek at whats next Private Sales is still a young retail concept, and rapid innovation in the user experience is to be expected. Following are some of the advances we expect to see on leading sites over the next year. Image credit: alicia rae 23. 23 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. A peek at whats next Fashion content Private Sales sites have the opportunity to influence shoppers through richer content around the available products. Many of the sites provide little-to-no content around the items. Why are they compelling? Why is the price such a deal? Which items could be combined with others for an outfit? This type of content could increase the number of shoppers interested in a specific sales event, and drive greater return traffic. For example, Rue La La has partnered with Bravo to sponsor the show, Launch My Line. We predict tighter content integration into Private Sales sites as they already drive tremendous daily traffic from loyal customers. Providing exclusive daily content such as fashion articles is a logical next step. Image credit: John Carleton 24. 24 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. A peek at whats next Club for Top Invitee Networks The most valuable shoppers are not the ones that buy the most, but the ones that have invited groups of people that buy the most. These networked influencers should be addressed separately to keep them loyal to the brand. (If they switched to a competitor, they could take a lot of people with them). Private Sales sites could market to these consumers directly with special offers, increased incentives to extend invitations or competitive leader boards to see who is the biggest influencer. 25. 25 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. A peek at whats next Customer Idea Community Which brands are the shoppers most interested in seeing? What site improvements are most desired? Private Sales sites have many loyal customers that are deeply engaged, but none that weve seen are fully leveraging the potential value of this community. Poll questions or blogs with comments would be a good start to tap into the open innovation potential of the clientele. This also allows for effective use of social networks to extend reach. Image credit: BWorthey 26. 26 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. A peek at whats next Crowd Visualization Part of the power of Private Sales sites is the rush of the crowd at the start of an event, which generates impulse purchases. Currently, none of the top sites provide a visual representation of this crowd to shoppers. This feature, especially if turned on during the high-traffic first hour of an event, could help to build a community feel and drive impulse purchases due to the visual competition for products. Image credit: edwebproject.org 27. 27 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. A peek at whats next Social Analytics This is a nascent area, but as Private Event sites learn how to mine and analyze social graph information, a new level of personalization can be explored where customers like you can truly be identified. With this data, marketing efforts can not only be focused on conversion, but also on influencers. 28. Is Private Sales a fit for your business? Private Sales has become one of the fastest growing new retail concepts. Many companies are looking to offer Private Sales to tap into this trend, but how do you know if it makes sense for your business? 29. 29 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Is Private Sales a fit for your business? For an existing retailer to make a Private Sales model work there are a few key elements to consider: Consumers must feel a sense of exclusive access to convince them that the pricing is really compelling and worth inviting their friends. To achieve this usually requires a separate brand or at least a brand extension (e.g. Saks Private Sales). An existing customers database can be leveraged to jumpstart a Private Sales site, but only the top 10% of the customer base should be invited to start (based on purchases over the last 12 months). The functional and technical requirements for a Private Sales site are very different from a traditional ecommerce store, and generally require a specialized platform. 30. 30 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Is Private Sales a fit for your business? Overall my point of view is the private sale experience is fantastic and should be part of most eCommerce or multi- channel companies. It is another way to shop and to bring excitement to your customereCommerce is moving into a new phase (and it makes money). Bob Schwartz, Schwartz Group Analysis of the Private Sale Market Note Very Private Sale 31. Contributor biographies This e-book was developed using the intelligence and insight of Marc Osofsky and Adam Michelson. 32. 32 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Contributor biographies Marc Osofsky Marc Osofsky is the vice president of marketing for Optaros and leads the companys go-to-market efforts and solution development. Marc has more than 15 years of experience in helping businesses leverage new technologies to achieve their business objectives. 33. 33 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved. Contributor biographies Adam Michelson Adam Michelson serves as the director of ecommerce at Optaros. He works with clients to leverage next generation internet technologies for ecommerce re-platforming, new online retail concepts and multi-channel efforts. 34. Thank you for your time! We hope you enjoyed The Secret to Private Sales. Please connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or our Ecommerce Blog to let us know your thoughts. Or, to discuss launching a Private Sales site for your business, contact Optaros today: Phone: (617) 227-1855 Email: Info@Optaros.com