A new online retailer of toys, YoYo.com, goes live today, out to grab its share of the coming holiday gift buying season. YoYo is the latest addition to Jersey City-based Quidsi’s gallery of online specialty shops, which also includes Wag.com, Diapers.com, Soap.com, and BeautyBar.com. Quidsi is part of the Seattle giant Amazon.com.
“There was a huge opportunity for us to apply the model we’ve proved out with our existing sites to the toy space,” says Galyn Bernard, site director of YoYo.
She says YoYo was designed to make gift buying less overwhelming for customers while offering an assortment of 20,000 different toys, books, and games. For example, YoYo’s staff curates lists of toy ideas appropriate for different ages from infants through 13-year-olds to ease some of the decision-making burden that shoppers face. “In some instances, customers know exactly what they want, and sometimes they are looking for guidance,” Bernard says.
Visitors to YoYo will find features such as a toy finder that can be set by age, gender, and price. There are also filters to sort toys by such parameters as not requiring batteries or assembly. YoYo shares its online shopping cart with Quidsi’s other sites, which allows customers to gather purchases for different needs into one order. YoYo offers free two-day deliver for orders of $49 and up, though that threshold is reduced to $39 when purchases are combined from more than one of Quidsi’s sites.
Though YoYo does not currently have exclusive toys, Olivia Marks, director of merchandising for the website, says some niche brands plan to provide select items in the future. “One exclusive [agreement] we have for later in the year is with Wentworth Wooden Puzzles, a high-end British puzzle maker,” Marks says. YoYo will offer
