Commerce

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 […]

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 […]