Santa Monica based shopping 2.0 site, ThisNext, recently received another 5M in a series B round from their previous investors Clearstone Venture Partners and Anthem Venture Partners (according to Techcrunch) .  This backs up their Series A round of 3.5M.  They also may raise another 2-3M in debt financing (according to socalTECH).

eCost is an El Segundo based whole seller of new, refurbished, and discontinued merchandise. They are a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: PFSW), and have been around since the early 2000's, this review has come in the wake of my holiday season and not being sure where to get the best deal on all sorts of electronics. So here is a brief overview:

You get on the site and there a too much going on from blazing fires in the corner to 10 large ads trying to sell me on the newest gizmos. In reality this is not all bad, I did come here looking to purchase stuff so I was ready for the visual barrage. Next I ran a few searches and noticed that they seem to carry just about every electronic gadget on the market and best of all their prices were usually cheaper than the vast majority of the stores on Google Shopping (I still miss the catchy name of Froogle).

Upon checkout you come to realize you must have an account, this annoys me but I do realize the utility in storing user information. Right before attempting to complete the transaction I get an offer for "Platinum Premium" membership where they assure me that I will get better deals for only $39.95/year! If this doesn't irritate me enough it says that if I am upgrading from their old Platinum membership I only have to pay $8.95 to become a Platinum Premium member. This leaves me wondering how excited will eCost be when a new element more valuable than Platinum is invented so they can charge even more for "member benefits." And how long will it take eCost to change form "New Element Membership" to "New Element Premium Membership?"

I am never a fan of buying something (ie membership) before buying something (ie digital camera). Overall I could have see eCost being a solid site and a major competitor for the new meta-search technology of sites like Google Shopping but with memberships alienating their users I have doubt eCost will ever have a major impact on how we buy our electronics...

I wonder what Woot.com is selling today?

Today 10 year old Cooking.com (based in Santa Monica) announced that they received a $7M venture backed loan from ORIX Venture Finance. 

As a follow up to last week breakdown of shopping 2.0 sites, Ben from SocalTech, was kind enough to point out a Santa Monica based shopping site we missed. ThisNext is a "shopcasting network where you can recommend, share and discover products." They've been around since August of 2006 and are well funded (they've been backed by Western Technology Inc and Clearstone Venture Partners).

Upon first glance, you'll find ThisNext has a real clean design, something we've come to expect from web 2.0 companies. Their site is an interesting mix of traditional shopping recommendations, social networking, and the buzzwordtastic "shopcasting". What is shopcasting? Well its basically a way for bloggers to integrate via a badge their recommendations from their own blog into the greater ThisNext network. So basically its mashing up shopping and broadcasting. Personally I think the buzzword, is dumb, just an attention play on podcasting, but none the less, the concept itself is both cool and useful. ThisNext's network of recommendations actually works pretty well, and is probably a product of good engineering and a solid algorithm, as I'm sure sorting through crap blogs and recommendations, to find the good stuff to recommend for people is not trivial.

Despite my general like for ThisNext, when I actually tried to use it for real holiday shopping, it came up rather short. I was looking for a new webcam to get my mother and law for Christmas, so I figured I'd give ThisNext a spin. Searching for "webcam" yielded about 20 results, none of which were very good recommendations. Searching for other products also produced results that weren't exactly spectacular. I did however find that browsing for products works well. So I suppose it depends on your intentions, if you are looking for something specific ThisNext possibly needs more traction before it will really can be super useful, on the other hand if you are more generally looking for just some cool product in an overall category ThisNext works pretty well.

At the end of the day, ThisNext is funded well, and has a great look, so it could become a leader in the land of social shoppping. It is a category that is rather crowded, and ThisNext isn't a total homerun (yet), so whether they can earn their valuation still remains to be seen. But at this stage in the game, ThisNext is off to a pretty decent start.

Website: http://www.thisnext.com

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Marina Del Ray based Guidance, recently released a survey saying that nearly half (41%) of all holiday shoppers consider price the single most important factor in choosing where to buy online.  Obviously.  So while we chalk the PR they sent us up as sad link bait, I'll give in and make note of it because its a good season to brush up on shopping 2.0.