Buying stocks Online

After rushing an unfinished v1.0 product onto the market to cash-in on the holiday shopping season, and then failing to meet the demand of of online orders, Barnes & Noble has finally caught up enough to offer the Nook e-book reader in its physical stores.

The cynical cash-in this time is Valentine’s Day, and Nooks will be in stores by mid-week this week so you can show your love in the traditional American manner: spending money. To help you in this romantic endeavor, B&N will tomorrow switch on an online store locator to let you check stocks in your local store.

Also getting properly underway is the B&N in-store Wi-Fi, free for use with the Nook. You can grab free content when in store and even flash your Nook at the counter staff to get a 10% discount on CD purchases. This last assumes that e-book users still buy silver disks with music on them.

And what will I be buying the Lady for Valentine’s Day? Nothing. I’m saving up for an iPad. If she’s lucky, I might let her touch it.

Nook eBook Readers in Stock This Week in Barnes & Noble Stores Just in Time for Valentine’s Day

See Also:

• Barnes & Noble Improves Nook With Firmware Update


• Nook Will Be Sold (Almost) Only Online


• Barnes & Noble Unveils Kindle-Killing, Dual-Screen 'Nook' E-Reader …

Yet another deal among European online buying clubs in the space of a few short months. This time, it’s one club taking a stake in another, rather than a VC investment.

Brands4friends.de, an online shopping club in Germany, has taken a “significant” investment in Secret Sales, a buying club in the UK. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but TechCrunch is reporting it to be in the “multi-million” pound region.

The investment will help Secret Sales with its “aggressive” growth strategy in the UK, Nish Kukadia, the co-founder and CEO of Secret Sales, said in the release (PDF in German), while the deal also gives brands4friends a foothold in the UK online shopping market.

Brands4friends.de made €80 million in sales in 2009, a three-fold increase on the year before, and it ranks as the biggest online shopping club in Germany and Austria, the two markets where it already operates. It became profitable within two years of its launch in 2007 and has 2.5 million members and currently stocks products from around 400 fashion brands.

The rapid growth of brands4friends.de demonstrates how the market for buying clubs is still relatively nascent. It is picking up 10,000 users a day, with about half of those coming on viral recommendations. It’s also telling that the average age of the users is 32: that older bracket means that there may be more money spent by the average user.

Secret Sales was also founded in 2007 and sells products from about 450 fashion, lifestyle, household and leisure brands. No word how many active users there are, or details on the company’s turnover, but this afternoon when we logged on there were about 11,600 members connected.

There have been a number of other deals in online sales clubs recently although mainly in the form of VC investment: In January, Mycitydeal picked up €4 million from eVenture Capital Parnters, Rocket Internet and Holtzbrinck Ventures (which also coincidentally backs brands4friends); the Russian site KupiVIP.ru raised $20 million, and last May Spain’s Privalia got €8 million.

France’s Vente Privee is by far the biggest of these all with revenues of around €650 million annually. Tech Crunch says that Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) has been courting it, eager to move into the buying clubs market.