Commerce

MediaMath on Wednesday announced a new business unit, named Helix, meant to translate the company’s existing retail data assets into a unified product offering. The move follows a string of MediaMath investments in consumer data, beginning with the acquisition of Adroit Interactive in 2010 and continuing with the purchase of Akamai’s Advertising Decision Solutions (later rebranded […]

Q4 ecommerce sales were marked by a strong increase in transaction volume and a spike in mobile conversions, a smattering of retail reports shows. Among specific retailers, Amazon was the runaway winner (no surprise there) and brick-and-mortar players may emerge as losers, if an early glum report from Macy’s is any indicator. Amazon reported dramatic […]

The remnants of eBay Enterprise (which, despite the name, is no longer owned by eBay) is seeking to plant a stake in “post-click” commerce. This is why its private equity owner Sterling Partners merged eBay Enterprise, back in November, with a commerce tech company in its portfolio called Innotrac. The combined entity will be rebranded […]

David R. Bell is a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He will present his research at the upcoming Industry Preview 2016 conference in January at a session on the confluence of digital marketing and the real world. By day, David R. Bell is a professor of marketing at […]

Programmatic email platform LiveIntent has acquired Mojn, a Copenhagen-based data onboarding company, following LiveIntent’s recent acquisition of the European recommendation engine AVARI. Terms were undisclosed. All 12 of Mojn’s employees, a majority of whom are data scientists, will join LiveIntent, said Matt Keiser, LiveIntent’s founder and CEO. The acquisition will support LiveIntent’s international expansion, an […]

With turkeys almost in the oven, retailers and ecommerce companies are hoping the investments they’ve made all year long in audience segmentation, mobile tech and cross-channel measurement will pay off in the make-or-break holiday season. Ecommerce in particular is looking to benefit from the maturation of ongoing retail and ecommerce trends – such as offline […]

Digital marketers spend a disproportionate amount of budget during the holiday season – but is all that cash actually generating incremental sales? Jewelry brands spend more in Q4, roughly 60% of their annual spend, than they do in the other three quarters of the year combined, based on analysis from Nielsen. Toy brands spend around 56% […]

Marketers are known for demanding ROI and previous results before they embrace new strategies, but they’re going all-in on the assumption that mobile will be a far more prosperous channel this year than in previous holiday seasons. Industry analysts like eMarketer project a strong holiday for retailers, with mobile commerce expected to grow 32.2% over […]

If someone asked you to rattle off the big buzzwords in media, it’s a pretty good bet mobile, native ads and programmatic would be somewhere near the top of your list. Google has just knocked down all three in a single gesture, allowing its publisher customers to expose native ad inventory in their mobile apps to buyers […]

If late-year sales are particularly important to you, then your holiday strategy and product development should now be entering its final lap. What remains is a race to retain customers coming in during the blitz of holiday marketing. “The actual user connections should be in place before the holidays, not just a strategy,” said Richard […]

Deep-linking vendor Button announced the Button Marketplace on Thursday in an attempt to sustain the mobile app world without the need for digital ad dollars. “It’s an entirely different paradigm for apps,” said Michael Jaconi, Button’s co-founder and CEO. “You can’t capitalize on search and intent in this world like you did for the web.” […]

The realm of brick-and-mortar retail data has been steadily absorbed by digital technology in recent years, and that trend took another step forward on Wednesday with the launch of the Cross Device Marketplace by Placed, an in-store attribution firm. While Facebook and Google have put considerable effort into developing retail-specific solutions, Placed founder and CEO […]

Build-A-Bear Workshop, the children’s specialty retailer with strong roots in American shopping malls, is getting a facelift. Plagued by the realities of brick and mortar retail—Build-A-Bear was in a slump with steady profit declines, but has more recently ignited a comeback in sales—the company is transitioning away from its focus on traditional retailing. Instead, it’s […]

HookLogic raised $15.5 million in Series C funding and will sell AutoHook, a suite of lead-gen and marketing tools designed for automotive companies, the company announced Thursday. Terms of the AutoHook sale to auto consultancy firm Urban Science were not disclosed. In addition to previous investors Bain Capital and Intel Capital, this funding round included […]

The wonderful thing about ordering food online is that you can get what you want quickly and accurately, without ever once talking to the indifferent high school stoner taking your order through a choppy phone connection. It’s like consumer nirvana, and it certainly explains why restaurants delight in talking about their upgraded ordering systems. Case […]

Consumer packaged goods companies, historically big TV spenders, are moving money to digital video. MyWebGrocer, an ecommerce platform and ad network for grocers and CPGs, is witnessing this shift. The company, which manages $40 million in digital media spend and which helps CPG advertisers target ads based on its retail partners’ first-party data, has built […]

A few years ago, industry observers wondered if retailers would survive in the face of ecommerce competition. Now it’s become apparent that brick-and-mortar companies have not only weathered the storm, they’ve emerged as a kind technology platform for vendors to build on. But despite numerous startups catering to retailers, there aren’t any major players like […]

Consumer packaged-goods startup Hello Products is combining TV with offline activations to create a competitive edge for its oral care products. As a challenger to household names like Crest and Colgate, Hello aims to differentiate its ethos through natural formulas and bright and alluring packaging. The brand is now activating digital video and TV with […]

When Alison Lewis joined Johnson & Johnson as its first-ever consumer marketing chief in 2013, the purveyor of popular baby-care products like No More Tears and the ubiquitous Band-Aid, was at a crossroads as a company. “We had really great marketers and agency partners, but we realized we needed a unified approach to brand-building for […]

While affiliate marketing is hardly new – perhaps you’ve heard of Google and Amazon – for some publishers its real value comes from the data and optimization it enables, as opposed to the incremental revenue it generates. At least, this is what Alicia Navarro, CEO and co-founder of content monetization company Skimlinks, was led to […]

Pinterest’s advertising business took its next step toward scale with the official launch of its ads API on Thursday. The ads API, which Pinterest introduced in beta in April, comes on the heels of a flurry of brand-focused products from the social platform, including an imminent buy button, a content API for businesses to manage […]

Macy’s, Walmart, Best Buy: all brick-and-mortar giants looking to go multichannel. But what about the smaller shop owners that don’t have the resources to invest in and maintain digital presences? Many young ecommerce providers are aggregating small businesses into a single, online bazaar. If you’re an independent retailer, these service providers can give you the […]

In 2012, Target had to swallow a few hard truths. Its digital platform relied solely on third-party code and it had little to no engineering talent in-house. And it was playing catch-up with mobile. “My focus has been on moving toward an agile product model where we rewrote our code [over three years] for about […]

Amazon has an ever-growing deluge of data that it’s putting toward a trio of ad units and new consumer-facing projects. In addition to Sponsored Products, Product Ads and Sponsored Links, which underpin its nearly $1 billon advertising business, Amazon is testing numerous consumer features designed to strengthen its ecommerce data set with search activity. “Amazon […]

Retailers might look like they’re under siege, according to Gartner VP and analyst Andrew Frank, but they’re actually sitting on a pile of “underleveraged data.” Unfortunately, much of this data isn’t digestible by marketing technologists. In February, The University of Minnesota published a report demonstrating the causal relationship between search engine advertising and local in-store […]

EBay rolled out the beta version of Promoted Listings on Tuesday, a self-serve cost-per-sale ad product, to select eBay Stores merchants. Promoted Listings, which will be widely available in June, appear in desktop and mobile searches and are optimized based on past searches or purchase propensities. They loosely mimic Google’s Shopping Ads (formerly known as Product […]

Most people think of Overstock.com solely as a discount ecommerce retailer, which is no surprise considering the company ranks No. 31 in Internet Retailer’s recent list of the nation’s biggest e-tailers. But Overstock also features a range of services beyond ecommerce that aren’t intended to be revenue generators, but are instead designed to turn general […]

Because a dress at Intermix will likely cost you in the four-digit range, the Gap-owned fashion retailer incorporates the needs of discriminating consumers into its commerce marketing strategy. Last Easter and Passover an asset allocation team moved product from Intermix’s flagship Madison Avenue store to high-end vacation spots like Bal Harbour in Miami to meet […]

Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has replaced CEO Jonathan Lu, effective May 10. Announced Thursday during its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call, the company revealed incumbent COO Daniel Zhang would be promoted to CEO while Lu will continue on as vice chairman of the board of directors. Zhang, an eight-year Alibaba vet and original founding member, has held […]

Finally. British grocer Tesco’s customer data science and loyalty division dunnhumby, reportedly on the market for several months now as its parent company explored “strategic options,” will transfer many of its employees and data assets to Tesco’s US-based joint venture partner Kroger. Under the transaction, “dunnhumby Ltd and Kroger will replace their existing exclusive joint venture with a […]