After conquering online retail in diapers, soaps, beauty products, most recently pet supplies, Amazon-owned Quidsi is moving into its next vertical—toys. Quidsi is debuting YoYo.com, a toy e-commerce site that aims to provide handpicked recommendations and discovery tools to make kids toy shopping easy and fun.
For background, Quidsi launched with Diapers.com, which quickly became the biggest seller of diapers online. Last year, it expanded into drugstore items with Soap.com and this year (post an Amazon acquisition); Quidsi expanded to pet supplies with Wag.com. Quidsi is looking to take a stake in the $22 billion toy retail market.
The online toy store claims to feature the broadest selection of toys online (even more than parent company Amazon), with everything from classics and best sellers to hard-to-find and specialty brands. At launch, the site will carry 20,000 toys, books, video games and collectibles. For basis of comparison, the average ToysRUs has about 10,000 toys in stock.
What separates YoYo from other toy sites on the web, explains Marc Lore, CEO of Quidsi, is that the site features an easy way to distill toy choice by age, type of toy and more. Plus YoYo provides ‘picks,’ a hand-selected assortment of stand-out toys chosen by the YoYo.com team to help shoppers identify the most “wow-worthy” toys for each age group and product category. The team looks for toys with exceptional qualities, and rank them by their best quality (i.e. great for travel, small spaces etc.)
Other discovery features include top 10 toys by age lists; a toy finder based on age, gender and price point; search filters like Award-Winning, Eco-Friendly, No Assembly Required and No Batteries Required; and wish lists that can be used for registering for gifts for parties or the holiday shopping season.
Similar to Quidsi’s other verticals, YoYo.com will offer free one to two-day shipping on all orders of $49 or more. The site will also share an online shopping cart with Diapers.com, Soap.com, BeautyBar.com and Wag.com, so shoppers can get everything they need for their families, homes, pets and themselves, with one easy checkout. Purchases from all sites count towards the free shipping minimum, which is lowered to $39 for orders that contain products from more than one site.
As for the next vertical, Lore tells me that Quidsi is going to continue to focus on catering to its core demographic—moms. There are a number of possible verticals left to tackle for this audience-food and clothes. Perhaps Quidsi will enter one of these areas next.
