Commerce

For the first time, Amazon extracted its lucrative Amazon Web Services (AWS) business from its “Other” category, which traditionally included co-branded credit cards and advertising services. When coupled with AWS, the category came in at about $1 billion each quarter. As it turns out, Amazon’s North American ads business brought in $187 million in Q1, a 22% […]

Jet.com, the stealth upstart from Marc Lore, the man who sold vertical ecommerce company Quidsi – parent of Diapers.com, Soap.com and BeautyBar.com – to Amazon for $545 million in 2010, wants to remake the commerce model. Primed to launch in late spring, Jet.com seeks to democratize the Amazon marketplace model. Buyers who subscribe for $49.99 […]

Razorfish Global is updating its media strategy. Or, more specifically, it’s complementing its expertise in customer experience design and commerce with media. “Historically, the organization has gone after standalone media RFPs,” said Razorfish Global Chief Strategy Officer Scott Sorokin. “We can’t win against a media company. We have to pivot around technology and experiences – […]

Linking up internal data assets is a great start – but while this can lead to nifty business results, it also has the potential to disrupt numerous employees and departments within a company. Brand marketers from Macy’s, Sephora and Walmart told their stories about combining customer and marketing data sets during a panel at LiveRamp’s […]

If data is currency, then eBay’s ecommerce marketplace is a bank. But what of eBay Enterprise, the marketing services division that eBay hopes to spin off? While the eBay marketplace has 155 million active users, generated $2.3 billion in Q4 and fields mobile apps that helped transact $20 billion in sales last year, eBay Enterprise […]

Michael Jaconi, CEO of freshly funded mobile commerce startup Button, sees untapped opportunity in the app economy. Specifically, he’s tailoring Button’s Deep-Link Commerce Platform as a utility to help encourage ongoing app usage rather than a one-time app install ad. Uber is among the company’s customers. With a new $12 million Series A round in […]

Single life nears for PayPal as it approaches its emancipation from parent company eBay, a split ostensibly designed to let each company play to its unique strengths. “PayPal will always be vitally important to the success of eBay and vice versa,” said Robert Clarkson, VP, GM, North America, merchant and retail solutions at PayPal, in […]

Instead of investing $25,000 to create a couple of different marketing segments, online luggage retailer eBags wants to invest only a couple thousand to create about 50 different segments. It’s part of eBags’ move from demographics to psychographics, one of many ways it’s refining its approach to digital advertising. Around since the dot-com boom and […]

Data is a bit like a little black dress – it goes with everything. That’s especially true for women’s apparel brand Cache, which maintains an active ecommerce site and more than 230 brick-and-mortar stores in malls across the US. The data collection potential is huge. “In-store transactional data, online behavior, CRM data, offline purchases down […]

CPGs are starting to spend more on digital – and that makes Snuggle Bear very happy. “It’s no secret that we’re all dealing with ongoing media fragmentation,” said Brendan O’Marra, director of digital and promotion for the fabric softener’s parent company, Sun Products Corporation, the laundry conglomerate also responsible for Wisk and Surf. “It might […]

Goodreads’ 30 million members save books to their “want to read” shelves, write reviews and share recommendations with friends. Started as a place to help readers find books through real-life friends, it’s since become a social destination for people connecting with online and offline friends, attracting 45 million unique visitors a month. The trove of […]

A new report from Interpublic Group’s MAGNA Global media research and buying arm reinforces earlier predictions that consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands would invest as much as $7 billion in digital advertising by 2018. According to MAGNA’s 2015 Global Advertising Revenue Forecast, released Monday, verticals like CPG and pharmaceuticals, which once invested more heavily in […]

Answers.com, a knowledge resource site, has evolved from a basic wiki to a publisher and marketing tech provider. “We’ve made a lot of positive changes to the site,” said David Karandish, CEO of Answers.com, “have added support for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter for [gated] logins (Answers.com now has over 180 million registered users) and turned […]

It’s become generally accepted wisdom that brands aren’t dedicating dollars to mobile at a rate commensurate with consumer time spent. That said, certain big brands like Walmart and Heineken are embracing mobile as a key part of their advertising initiatives. “Going forward, we will always view campaigns as mobile-first,” said Ron Amram, senior media director […]

As more networks like HBO and WWE Network develop a la carte streaming services, competing streaming video or TV providers (and some e-commerce companies, for that matter) are pressed to develop good content that resonates with subscribers. Hulu, which pulled in about $1 billion in revenue in 2013 and has over 6 million Hulu Plus members, airs […]

You’ve come a long way, baby. Product listing ads (PLA), which some consider the crown jewel in Google’s commerce crown, didn’t cost a thing in 2012. Today the paid search product, now referred to as Google Shopping Ads, may be bringing in as much as $8 billion for Google, according to Evercore Partners estimates. Based […]

Amazon’s rumored development of an ad-supported video-streaming service was resurrected Friday when the New York Post reported the ecommerce company’s launch of a “Netflix killer” is, indeed, nigh. Although Amazon says it often experiments with new offers and experiences for customers, it has not announced plans for an ad-supported video-streaming service. According to The Post’s […]

Online sales during China’s annual discount event topped $9 billion this year, once again thrusting the country into the spotlight as a commerce powerhouse, and not by a little bit.  Singles Day, which was originally created in the late ’90s by a group of Chinese college students celebrating their singleton status, falls on Nov. 11 […]

MyBuys creates “recommended for you” modules on retail sites, but then it goes a step further: It buys display ads based on a user’s behavior or viewed products and sends triggered emails enticing customers to complete abandoned buys. MyBuys’ expansion into paid media—display advertising—is now its fastest-growing line of business. While it first got into managed […]

Considering two of the usual pure-play suspects in Forrester’s Cross-Channel Attribution Wave (Convertro and Adometry) were snapped up by AOL and Google on the very same day in May, its latest release Friday had all kinds of new implications – media neutrality and a platform mentality among them. The report, authored by Forrester analyst Tina […]

E-commerce giant Alibaba – often referred to as the Amazon of China – had a rosy third quarter, its first as a public company after a whopping $25 billion IPO (the one that put about $6 billion in stakeholder Yahoo’s pocket). (Earnings release.) Alibaba’s Q3 revenue growth was “mainly driven by the growth in online […]

Amazon remained tight-lipped about its developing ad network during the company’s Q3 earnings call, about which CFO Thomas Szkutak only said: “There’s not a lot I can say there.” Amazon’s “Supplemental Revenue” category, which includes advertising, Web services and co-branded credit cards, raked in $1.3 billion in Q3, up 40% YoY from $960 million. Amazon’s supplemental revenue […]

Walmart, one of the last bastions of big box retail, is investing for a digital future – one with considerably less square footage. Walmart recently revealed plans to invest between $1.2 to $1.5 billion in its ecommerce and digital operations for fiscal year 2016. Subsequently, its in-store investments are taking a temporary hit. In its […]

At the outset of Advertising Week in New York City, WPP chief Sir Martin Sorrell turned his attention to Amazon’s VP of global ad sales Lisa Utzschneider on the stage they shared with Live Nation, CBSi and ESPN. “Your job, I guess, is to demonstrate the value of Amazon’s data for off-platform advertising,” he quipped. “Your revenues […]

As a CPG newbie that launched last March, Hello Products competes with household brands like Crest and Colgate. In order to break into a $30 billion oral care market, the company first partnered with BMW Group’s agency DesignworksUSA to craft a visual identity around green living and innovative design. But as Hello ramps up, it […]

One of the best things about Deep Eddy Vodka is the taste. At least that’s what Brandon Cason, VP of marketing, has to say about the 4-year-old spirits brand that’s based in Austin, Texas. But prospects aren’t going to seek out a product they’ve never heard of. That’s one reason the brand, whose efforts are focused […]

Pinterest is one of those up-and-comers in the world of social advertising. The image-based social network doesn’t divulge audience numbers, but comScore pegs it at around 60 million monthly active users (MAUs). Of course, that’s not quite the volume of Twitter’s 271 million MAUs or Facebook’s 1.3 billion, but it’s still nothing to sneeze at, especially as […]

An emerging theme at the Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference (DMEXCO) in Cologne, Germany – where 30,000 digital marketers are convening – is building for future cross-channel experiences. Amazon is no stranger to the concept. Although the ecommerce giant has, of late, been reportedly developing an ad platform to rival Google’s, the company maintains a […]

As Asia-Pacific commerce powerhouses like Alibaba and Rakuten push West, it’s still unclear how they will grow large US-based audiences. One such method is through acquisition. Alibaba late last week priced its IPO at $60 to $66 per share and expects to raise $24 billion when the company begins trading on the New York Stock […]

Facebook and Twitter are keen to build more commerce functionality into the social stream. Earlier this summer Facebook began working with select commerce brands to support direct transactions on its platform, and Twitter has been expected to produce something similar after sharp-eyed users spotted a semi-functional “buy” button on the site in July. Well, now that other […]