There’s an ever-growing opportunity for advertisers on Amazon, the commerce marketplace maven every retailer hopes to emulate (and simultaneously fears). The company has nearly doubled its global ad revenues since 2011, from $420 million to an expected $835 million this year, eMarketer estimates. If true, this puts it ahead of publishers like Pandora, Twitter, LinkedIn and […]
There’s a new breed of social platform in town, with direct-to-consumer and merchant wherewithal. The group includes social startups like Wanelo, a uniquely searchlike experience for “all stores in one place,” and OpenSky, which combines the microblogging feel of a Twitter with the slightly more visceral look of a Pinterest. According to OpenSky CEO John […]
Staples’ acquisition today of San Mateo, Calif.-based conversion marketing platform Runa is one more building block in the brand’s plan to construct a data hub within its own four walls. Although the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Staples spokesman Mark Cautela told AdExchanger, “We looked at this primarily as a technology acquisition, but […]
Designer apparel brand Tory Burch now sees 44% of its site traffic stemming from smartphones and tablets with more than 28% of sales attributed to mobile devices. During a keynote presentation this morning at the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org summit, Miki Berardelli, Tory Burch’s CMO, told an audience in the mid-thousands here in Chicago that […]
In a move to ramp up what TellApart CEO Josh McFarland describes as “programmatic personalization,” the developer of a customer data platform for commerce companies today acquired email marketing optimization provider AdStack. According to TechCrunch, the transaction cost the company, which has raised $17.75 million in funding to date over the course of three rounds, […]
With Amazon’s August rollout of Collections, the commerce giant appeared to go head-to-head with Pinterest on an offering affording merchants a direct link to products consumers “like, want and recommend.” Now, Japanese ecommerce company Rakuten appears to be working on its own image-centric platform following its $100 million investment in Pinterest last year. Yesterday’s launch […]
Customer data and analytics company dunnhumby today launched dunnhumby Ventures, a seed-stage strategic investment fund aiming to ferret out the innovators in the commerce startup space. According to Dave Balter, global head of investments at dunnhumby, “we have some goals we’re trying to hit, [which is to fund a] range of 10 companies a year […]
Advertising across devices and bridging the gap between online and offline campaigns should be key components of every marketer’s strategy, according to Lisa Utzschneider, Amazon.com’s global VP of sales, who outlined the ecommerce giant’s marketing tactics yesterday at the Dmexco conference. Amazon’s customer strategy is based on three rules: “Start with the customer and work backwards, […]
Consumers don’t mind sharing personal information with retailers, but they have varying preferences when it comes to the manner in which their data is collected, a new study says. In a survey of 2,500 shoppers in the US and Canada that started last spring, IT services and consulting firm Cognizant broke down consumer sentiments on […]
Michael Dubin might be best known as the “Our Blades Are (Expletive) Great” guy, who amassed close to 11.5 million views of his viral YouTube video that helped catapult his LA- based company DollarShaveClub.com into the upper echelons of subscription commerce startups. During a presentation at the Financial Times Future of Marketing Summit last week, […]
With mobile commerce forecasted to hit $25 billion by year’s end, according to comScore, digital agencies are naturally fielding more questions about device strategy. Or, in the case of Razorfish, “context strategy.” Jason Goldberg, VP of strategy for multichannel commerce & content at Razorfish and member of the board of directors for Shop.org, touched on […]
Founded six years ago by three former Yahoo engineers, social commerce community portal Polyvore has amassed 80 million product boards or “sets” since inception. To date, the company has raised more than $22 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and others, and now feeds 7.5 billion product impressions per month to brand and retail clients […]
Slice Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based startup that bills itself as the “best way to track and organize your online shopping,” has raised $23 million in Series B funding led by Japanese ecommerce company Rakuten, Russia Partners and NPD Group. Slice’s existing investors, which include Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, DCM and Lightspeed Venture Partners, […]
It all comes down to who owns the digital identity and the addressability that follows. Late this spring when Amazon launched the Login with Amazon service, it gave access to 200 million-plus active Amazon users to app developers and site owners. “Login with Amazon is the latest offering in an array of services that make […]
Following its spring acquisition of recommendations engine Avail, ecommerce personalization and shopping media company RichRelevance has acquired the assets of data analytics startup Precog, for an undisclosed sum. Founded by former Amazon exec David Selinger in 2006, San Francisco-based RichRelevance currently has close to 200 customers including Walmart, Target and Marks & Spencer. Precog CEO […]
Mobility has meant marketers can deliver high-value messages to consumers using less real estate, Nicholas Franchet, Facebook’s head of global ecommerce, told a crowd of 1,150 marketers and retailers today at the eTail East conference. The good? Nearly 50% of time spent on retail sites now happens through mobile devices, according to comScore. Tablet sales […]
With global ecommerce sales exploding at a rate of 16% year-over-year in Q2, reaching $49.8 billion, according to comScore, the industry is primed for growth. Yesterday, the eTail East conference kicked off, drawing some 1,150 marketers, retailers and technology vendors to Philadelphia for the week. Last year, eTail Boston attracted 990 attendees, event organizers said. […]
Many consumer tech companies are zeroing in on local advertisers. Take Foursquare, which has rolled out a self-service tool to facilitate small-business ads, and Groupon, which is backing away from the deal-a-day email (direct-offer emails accounted for less than 40% of transactions in Q2) in favor of mobile and a burgeoning local marketplace to draw […]
Quirky arts-and-crafts catalog company Oriental Trading Co. has been in business for 80-some years. Begun as Japanese immigrant Harry Watanabe’s church-and-carnival sales operation, it has since weathered a 2010 bankruptcy and made its way through multiple hands and advisers before being acquired by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway last fall. More recently, it acquired toy […]
On the heels of Accenture’s acquisition of digital marketing and strategy consultancy Acquity Group and the announcement that followed of a partnership with ecommerce platform hybris, executives from all companies gathered today in New York to talk forward moves with hybris’ new parent company, German enterprise giant SAP. “We have, in the past, spent a […]
Walls between channel-specific and traditional retail marketing roles are beginning to crumble, according to new data outlined in Forrester Research’s “Commerce Technology And Platform Investment Trends – 2013” report. With online retail spend in the US forecasted to grow 9.9% between 2012 and 2017 and digital channels (online, mobile and tablet) estimated to account for 10% […]
Yahoo bought back old talent in the form of Amit Kumar with the acquisition of e-commerce startup Lexity, which he founded four years ago. A former engineer and head of product management for Yahoo Search, Kumar graduated to display ads startup Dapper.net, which was snapped up by Yahoo three years ago for $55 million and […]
Akin to an infant reaching its “Terrible Two’s,” designer flash sale site Fab.com has changed a lot in the period following its second year. The good? The ecommerce company, founded in 2011, inked $150 million in Series-D financing from Atomico, Andreessen Horowitz, Tencent, ITOCHU and others, bringing its running tally to $310 million in less […]
Ask any retail marketer what their greatest challenge is and a recurring theme could very well be – close the loop on digital and in-store offers and promotions. Brick-and-mortar stores are increasingly upgrading their point-of-sale solutions to account for digital payments and other new waves of commerce capabilities. Sparkfly, which originated just over 10 years […]
Designer fashion flash sale site Gilt Groupe has been in the daily deals mix for six years and has racked up about 8 million members in that time. With no shortage of competitors – Fab.com and RueLaLa among them – Gilt has diversified its reach through a variety of avenues, including paid media in luxury […]
As a number of large technology vendors race to create full-spectrum digital marketing suites and omnichannel customer experiences, one player is here to remind them that it knows a thing or two about commerce. And, when it comes to its advertising and paid media play, eBay’s launch of eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions today has much […]
For luxury retail brand Stuart Weitzman, Facebook ad buys are a pertinent part of its strategic process for brick-and-mortar store rollout. By combining offline data, such as in-store sales reports, with online performance data, the company has made headway in gauging international audience preferences to ignite interest regionally. “Stuart Weitzman is expanding globally at a […]
One of the first – and now, largest – e-commerce companies in the Netherlands, wehkamp.nl has tapped IBM to help the platform improve its marketing and dynamic-merchandising strategies. Using myriad IBM cloud products, including Digital Analytics, LIVEMail and Campaign, the e-retailer has noticed significant gain in click-through rates on banner ads (500%) and a 271% […]
Ecommerce is on the upswing. This sector saw a compound annual growth rate of 18.7% between 2008 and 2012, suggesting it’s one of the fastest-growing industries, according to new research compiled by global boutique merchant bank Siemer & Associates. Worldwide spending on ecommerce totaled $820.5 billion in 2012, which was nearly 21% higher than the […]
Since its inception in 1999, Restaurant.com has helped customers save $1 billion by offering more than 50,000 gift certificate options at dining destinations across the country. Its premise is simple – help diners and restaurants discover one another, and encourage loyalty to local merchants by brokering savings through discounts. Restaurant.com also acts as a stand-in […]
