Wholesale ecommerce retailer Boxed is taking its position as team leader seriously. The company pays for its employees’ kids to go to college. It looked at the industry-wide “pink tax” and started a campaign against the higher prices. It even started contributing $20,000 to pay for employees’ weddings.
A report from B2C marketing and analytics company Zaius shows that many companies, though they claim to be spotlighting personalization and segmentation as a way to engage customers, are actually not capably following through.
In the future, partnerships between brands, tech companies, and marketers will enable a massive shift in payments and change how shoppers access the goods they want. So said Mike Jaconi, CEO and co-founder Button, maintaining that U.S. commerce is not yet primed for purchase — but it’s getting there.
Prime Day brings noticeable increases in shopping, he says, but not at Black Friday levels. There is, however, a spillover effect on Prime Day, Criteo CEO Jaysen Gillespie says, and smaller retailers can benefit from the foot traffic drawn to anchor stores at shopping centers.
The days of viewing online and offline retail as completely separate are long-gone. Now major players such as Walmart look for ways to mesh online activity with their in-store operations. The ways these different channels of retail have become intertwined was at the heart of a panel discussion at Street Fight Summit in Brooklyn on Tuesday.
To have any chance for long term survival, retailers and brands need to bring more technology to bear in operating their businesses, enabling them to work smarter, not harder. Here are some strategic ways big retailers can use technology.
In many ways, Bonobos has become a model for e-commerce startups. Although the New York City-based company started out as an online-only men’s retailer in 2007, it has since expanded its physical presence with real world stores spread across the U.S.
This morning e-commerce fashion marketplace Tradesy is announcing an extended partnership with Happy Returns, a consumer returns startup that offers in-person returns for online retailers. Tradesy found that customers overwhelmingly preferred to return their online purchases in-person rather than by mail.
Getting the right product in front of the right consumer at the right time is the holy grail for both online and offline retailers, and it’s being made easier by new tailored recommendation platforms that use natural language interactions to assist shoppers across multiple digital channels.
New technology platforms are making it possible for online retailers of all sizes to expand locally into brick-and-mortar outlets. In other cases, technology is taking a back seat as e-commerce businesses form old-fashioned partnerships with stores on main street.
social media, data and analytics, and mobile—especially geotargeting—are the hot technology investments for marketing and commerce. The investment in data and analytics is in part driven by the biggest overall industry challenge, online-to-offline attribution measurement, and one of the most difficult issues facing individual companies, proving ROI to customers.
With a shift to mobile websites, most mobile marketing dynamics will remain, although implementation for sites versus apps will be more than nuanced. Mobile search is already undergoing shifts, and listings management must take into account the role of the mobile platforms, maps, and, probably, Amazon.
The early results of our annual survey indicate that suppliers of local marketing and commerce technology and services see their customers continue to increase spending on social media and mobile marketing — and their own investments are following the money.
The London-based startup wants to give brick-and-mortar stores the power to satisfy consumer needs as quickly as possible by offering them a platform to make their inventories searchable online — so users can search for and order specific items, and then get them right away.
While many onlookers think that increased comparison shopping, faster and cheaper delivery options like drones, and the convenience of shopping at home equal doom for physical stores, the reality is that the economy (like the people behind it) is largely driven by the irrational.
During the holiday season, we focus so much attention on when people buy, how much they spend, and whether it got there on time that we tend to overlook what happens once gifts are purchased. An equal test for retailers — both online and brick-and-click — will be making returns as easy as the purchase itself.
The mostly unreported story of Black Friday weekend is that much of the ecommerce growth came from “bricks-and-clicks” retailers, not pure-play e-tailers. The reason: Physical stores offer a critical customer experience and serve as a “brand anchor,” both of which support ecommerce for traditional retailers. Stores drive online sales because they instill a sense of confidence and trust in the consumer.
Cyber Monday was one for the record books. U.S. shoppers spent nearly $3 billion through digital channels, making it the single largest online sales day in history, according to Adobe, and continuing a string of firsts this holiday season. Mobile continued to display strong momentum from the holiday weekend in driving website traffic and sales.
If U.S. consumers proved reluctant to spend their Thanksgiving holiday in stores, they demonstrated few qualms about shopping online. Digital commerce was up significantly from 2014 levels. The momentum continued into Black Friday, which also saw brick-and-mortar spending reach its highest totals since 2012. The biggest winner over the holiday weekend was mobile: Its share of website traffic and online sales reached record highs.
The holiday season isn’t just a big time of year for retail spending; it’s also a big time of year for retail spending data. The stats indicate one common trend: Purchasing is going to be more omnichannel than ever. Here’s a rundown on some key data points for this holiday shopping season.