Commerce

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 […]

Not to be outdone by the brick and mortars, eBay announced today its acquisition of Seattle-based pricing research and data firm Decide.com for an undisclosed sum. Decide.com applies what it calls “patent-pending machine-learning and text-mining algorithms” to an avalanche of price points to connect consumers to highly rated products and services. Users gained access to competitive pricing […]

Independently owned-and-operated outdoor specialty retailer Rock/Creek  has realized early return as one of Twitter’s early beta advertisers. The brand was founded 25 years ago as a Chattanooga-based canoeing company. It operates five standalone stores in addition to an ecommerce platform, but has yet to mobile-optimize its site. Fifty-one percent of retailers cited this very optimization […]

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 […]

To Qubit, a London-based company founded by four former Googlers, proper optimization of Web technology deployments plays a critical role in the effectiveness of commerce experiences and online advertising. A range of publishers like the BBC and retail brands like Pandora rely on Qubit’s enterprise tag management product Opentag for digital marketing and other forms […]

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 […]

The evolution of commerce has made data the new “MVP” of retail marketing. A common theme at this week’s eTail East conference in Philadelphia, a gathering of 1,150 retail minds, was delivering personalized offers at scale. To do so, marketers are looking for ways to harness data across a range of sources ranging from loyalty marketing […]

Retailers that push fewer posts, but better and more targeted ones, are gaining an edge over those that pursue volume when it comes to publishing Facebook content, new data suggests. The 50 Social Retail Report from enterprise social media management company Expion analyzed 16,000 posts for the top 50 retail brands as designated by Interbrand. […]

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Ramsey McGrory, CEO at AddThis. The media industry was left stunned with this week’s news that The Washington Post and its 135-year-old legacy is now under the watchful eye […]

In a surprise Monday afternoon announcement, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has struck a deal with the Washington Post Company to buy its namesake newspaper for $250 million. Read the release. The purchase comes just a few days after WaPo’s Q2 earnings demonstrated some slight income and revenue gains, though, as usual, that was due to […]

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 […]

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 […]

Retail marketers are focusing most of their digital marketing efforts on paid search and email, according to new findings from Forrester Research and Shop.org’s joint State of Retailing Online 2013: Marketing and Merchandising report, released today. Mobile optimization, unsurprisingly, is another area of interest as more commerce companies look to the mobile device as a vessel […]

Internet business models have been turned upside down and ad-tech is no exception remarked Youssef Squali, global head of Internet media equity research for Cantor Fitzgerald, during a speech at today’s IAB Advertising Technology Marketplace in New York City.  As a result, he sees this disruption enabling faster, cheaper processes and ultimately, better pricing – […]

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 […]

BarkBox, the ecommerce subscription company catering to the canine-loving set, has “some pretty aggressive goals” for 2013, according to its Head of User Acquisition Marketing Rob Schutz. For one, the company wants to double its member base, which sits at 55,000 subscribers today. (Schutz says that if that subscriber-base hits the 1 million mark by […]

Specialty retailers are getting especially good at weighing the value of consumer behavioral targeting, but still have room to grow when it comes to mobile and, surprisingly, email strategies. According to L2’s newly released Digital IQ Index for Specialty Retail, more than half of specialty retailers are engaged in Facebook advertising, with “the majority of […]

Worldwide advertising revenue for Amazon will reach more than $800 million in 2013, as the company leverages its rich customer data and deals with the challenges of mobile advertising, according to a new forecast from eMarketer. “We’ve been looking at Amazon as a business for a while now, and at this point we felt there […]

A new venture from former Magnetic CEO Josh Shatkin-Margolis aims to help retailers consolidate their multi-channel interactions with consumers, using the smartphone as the hub. Called Purple Cloud, the company offers a consumer-facing app that creates incentives for users to interact and share data. The company is in beta with retailers and expects to close […]

Email and search continue to drive the most referrals to ecommerce sites, according to Q1 2013 data from website optimization company Monetate. But word-of-mouth through social media does influence purchases, despite a lack of last-click attribution for the channel. After analyzing more than 500 million online shopping experiences, the Ecommerce Quarterly report found conversion rates […]

The consumer packaged goods (CPG) market presents an opportunity for Amazon to better serve its customers, according to Lisa Utzschneider, VP of Global Advertising Sales at Amazon. Speaking at AdAge’s Digital Conference in New York City today, Utzschneider talked about her company’s approach to targeting ads and the growth of the CPG sector. In discussing […]

Tablet usage is on the rise but retailers have yet to catch up, shows a new report by research company L2. As more people spend time on tablets—which L2 categorizes as a separate device from a PC or mobile device—retailers need to adopt a distinct strategy for engaging shoppers on their tablets. “Tablets have been […]

Comparison shopping service Shopzilla has unveiled a business unit called Aisle A that will focus on display ad sales and retargeting. Shopzilla, which has been around since the practical dawn of the consumer internet in 1996, says it now has the capabilities to better leverage purchase intent data aroundwide range of retail products to create a […]

Since last fall, Google has shown a more aggressive stance in challenging Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce, particularly as Facebook has also been making its own significant maneuvers in the space. Google’s $125 million acquisition of Channel Intelligence, one of its four Google Shopping launch partners, is designed in part to develop more in-house capabilities to […]