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Online Fashion Retailers Tackle the Gender Gap

Female shoppers are the default target for most apparel retailers, and that’s just as true online. Increasingly, though, online fashion retailers are targeting men — and generating surprisingly positive results.
In his analysis of male online shopping behavior, Ray Smith writes in the Wall Street Journal that “recent research by analysts and retailers has turned [...]

MasterCard: “Online Sales surged 32% in December”

MasterCard SpendingPulse reports that online sales surged 32% in December. (Reported by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan in the Wall Street Journal today).
While these numbers aren’t directly comparable to the more widely-reported Comscore stats about holiday season shopping, they reflect greater strength than other reports we’ve seen. Two facts stand out:

MasterCard’s numbers include gift card [...]

US Retail E-Commerce Sales to grow to $245 billion by 2011

Here’s some more interesting data from eMarketer: online retail sales are expected to grow to $245 billion by 2011, from about $131 billion in 2007. That’s a 17% annual growth rate from 2007 to 2011.

Cyber Monday — how big is it?

ComScore is reporting that Cyber Monday generated $733 million of online revenue. They’re estimating $123 billion of total online revenue for 2008, which implies that Cyber Monday accounts for about 0.6% of annual revenue. That’s a bit of a surprise; apparently Cyber Monday is only 2x the volume of the average online shopping [...]

How to use video to expand your business in a YouTube world

What are the rules for making effective online videos? How do you get viewers from a video? Who are the role models to examine?
The Wall Street Journal offers up answers in Lights! Camera! Sales! How to use video to expand your business in a YouTube world. The key takeaways:

Be Funny
Tap Into Current [...]

Did Yahoo Stores lose $20 million in one day?

2007 is a turning point for “Cyber Monday” — the year this invented concept turned from obscure marketing gimmick to industry rallying cry. The best part is that customers seem to be playing along.
Every rose has its thorn, though… and this year, perhaps the most dramatic prick happened to Yahoo Stores. Yahoo Stores [...]

Slow Servers on Cyber Monday

According to Keynote Systems (as reported in the WSJ), up to a third of retail websites are seeing major slowdowns. Some sites are 400% slower under heavy customer traffic. Sears.com actually locked out customers for a big chunk of Friday!
No retailer wants to “lock the doors” on customers. Site uptime is [...]

not new anymore

My high school philosophy teacher Mrs. Levy used to say: once it’s in the news, it’s not “new” anymore.
The cover story of this month’s Internet Retailer magazine is “Blending video and e-commerce”. Video for e-commerce has arrived.

“Blending video and e-commerce” by Bill Siwicki is a must-read for anyone thinking about the future of online [...]