I’ve been keeping an eye out for interesting new ecommerce companies since I started at Spark a year ago.  It’s a space that I’ve been very interested in for a couple reasons.  First, as a consumer, I think that is a long way to go towards improving the online shopping experience.  Second, until pretty recently, we haven’t seen a lot of innovation in the economic model behind online shopping properties.  Third, with the explosion of advertising based online business models, I think commerce has largely been overlooked by many entrepreneurs and investors.

The last point is probably out of date.  I’ve noticed more and more commerce related investments of late, and a number of the “hot” venture backed companies I hear discussed are ecommerce related.  But I still think there is a lot of opportunity here.  Specifically in:

1. Experiential categories.  I’ve discussed this in a previous blog post, but morphing the online shopping experience so that it enhances the process of buying art, crafts, apparel, etc is a really hard but exciting problem.

2. Inefficient marketplaces.  There are a lot of ways to think about this.  This could be industries where the Ebay-like marketplace model has yet to be implemented (ie: Prosper).  I think there are a lot of examples of this flavor of inefficiency.  But I’m also thinking about industries where marketplaces already exist, but still have a lot of room for improvement.  One example I’ve been looking at recently is the event tickets space.  It’s a fascinating world.  Theoretically, team and venue managers should be able to offer dynamic pricing of tickets to really reflect the demand in the marketplace.  But because of a number of reasons, this does not happen, creating the potential for a $4B+ secondary market populated by brokers, scalpers and market makers like StubHub. Exactly why I still think this market is inefficient requires a separate blog post that I’ll get to in a few days.

3. New customers acquisition and aggregation models.  Retailers are always looking for new, more cost efficient channels through which they can push their products.  Over the last several years, merchants have mastered the art of SEM and SEO and are very comfortable managing a number of disparate channels.  I think companies like Woot and Vente Privee have shown that there are some very different and creative ways to aggregate traffic that retailers or product companies would love to tap into.  But given how social the web has become, it’s amazing that we don’t have another customer aggregation model that is much more interactive and viral than what these companies (and their imitators) provide.