Today’s biggest retail events are noisy, fast-moving and fiercely competitive. From back-to-school time and Prime Day to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the entire holiday shopping season, success comes down to securing attention before the rush begins.
Thanksgiving holiday shopping trends have shifted from surprising to predictable. At this point, the big news will be in some hypothetical, future November when ecommerce sales stop growing hand over fist. Ecommerce sales reached $18 billion combined for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, according to Adobe. Cyber Monday alone cleared about $8 billion, the […]
The Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend showed how mobile has grown from a retail investment-and-innovation channel to a true pillar of US commerce. On Cyber Monday, mobile commerce crossed a new threshold with $2 billion in sales, according to data from Adobe. Black Friday of 2016 was the first time US shoppers spent more than $1 […]
America’s most data-driven retailers and product manufacturers increasingly use mobile channels to drive shoppers to a store. Take the big kahuna. Walmart two weeks ago began offering discounts for products selected online and then picked up at a store. Walmart clears the margin on those discounts because the retailer can push products through its stores […]
The mobile monetization firm Button announced Wednesday it had raised a $20 million Series B round, led by Norwest Venture Partners. The investment, which brings Button’s total funding to $36.5 million, will go largely toward expanding Button’s headcount as the startup looks to tack on new products in fledgling verticals like travel booking and media […]
Bellwether retailers like Macy’s, Sears and Nordstrom that once anchored US malls never fully recovered from the onset of web-driven ecommerce. Now they’re facing something new that could either be an opportunity to get back in the game or another threat entirely: mobile commerce. Consumers are spending more time on mobile, including on retail app […]
The shopping app Ibotta, which gives users cash back for purchases, has streamlined app-to-app buying. Tech from deep-linking vendor Button now allows Ibotta users to make purchases from apps in Button’s network, which includes Hotels.com, Groupon, Jet and Spring. Ibotta hopes to connect commerce apps into an easy-to-use marketplace. While it’s easy to link and […]
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 […]
With the exception of back-to-school needs, office supply retailer Staples focuses on small-business owners. Like most brick-and-mortar retailers, Staples knew mobile played a vital role in its customers’ daily lives, but it was less clear from a media standpoint how mobile impacted the ultimate sales conversion. Staples wanted to use mobile to drive upper-funnel awareness […]
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 […]
Now with 14 million members and more than 50% of traffic and sales coming from mobile, Rue La La is finding more ways to understand customer acquisition paths, said the brand’s senior digital marketing manager, Feng Chang. “How you access us – device and source such as search, social or display – will help us […]
Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group is experiencing growing pains as it introduces mobile ad formats and weans itself from its pay-for-performance model toward one involving algorithmic-based advertising. On the company’s earnings call Thursday, COO Daniel Zhang called pay for performance a “great discovery mechanism,” but said focus on mobile monetization could have a short-term negative […]
You’re browsing the web and you see a retargeted web banner from eBay for a pair of shoes. You were on the fence before, but…those shoes really are nice. OK. You decide to buy. You click on the banner with credit card in hand and it takes you to — the eBay homepage? That would […]
The rapid adoption of tablets and smartphones has not been matched with equal intensity by the number of digital sales transactions occurring on those devices, but that divide is beginning to close. In the first half of 2013, m-commerce transactions totaled $10.6 billion in sales, which represents close to 10% of the total digital commerce […]
