We’re not sure which shoppers have been sitting around dreaming of the day when they could place an online order and pick it up from their neighborhood drugstore, but Walgreens is making that scenario real by adding site-to-store to its e-commerce offering. Is this all a ploy to get you into a store? Yeah, pretty much. [More]
e-commerce
Why Did Fab.com Collapse So Quickly?
By 10.11.16
Fab was a company that you might remember seeing ads for everywhere around 2012, including TV commercials. It’s that heavy spending on marketing that helped doom the company, along with rapid expansion and other problems. The site still exists under new owners, but the company that started it was once a startup worth $1 billion. Two years later, it was dead. What happened? [More]
Walmart Slowing Store Openings, Accelerating Distribution Centers
By 10.6.16
It’s no secret that Walmart is gunning for some of Amazon’s customer base: gobbling up e-commerce site Jet.com for $3.3 billion, mulling the idea of investing in Amazon competitor Flipkart, launching the $50/year Prime-rival Shipping Pass, and increasing distribution channels. As an indicator of the retailer’s online-focused future, Walmart has announced it is slowing the growth of its bricks-and-mortar stores while building more warehouses to expedite deliveries. [More]
Walmart May Invest $1B In Flipkart To Fight Amazon Overseas
By 9.28.16
Walmart’s apparent plan to become more like Amazon wasn’t realized when the company launched its $50/year Prime-rival Shipping Pass or after the company snatched up e-commerce site Jet.com for $3.3 billion. But not one to give up, the big box retailer is now reportedly in talks to invest more than $1 billion in fellow Amazon competitor Flipkart. [More]
Lands’ End Partners Up With Amazon To Move Some Clothes
By 9.2.16 — Updated: 11.21.16
If you’re a retail business, and you want to sell your merchandise, you should go where the shoppers are, right? Lands’ End, the retailer of preppy clothing and canvas tote bags that is not L.L. Bean, is doing just that. While maintaining its own website and stores, most of which are inside the department stores of former parent company Sears, the company will begin selling some of its merchandise through Amazon’s new fashion section. [More]
Want To Sell Big Name-Brand Products Through Amazon? There’s A Fee For That
By 8.29.16
It’s no secret that online marketplaces like Amazon have a problem with third-party sellers offering counterfeit copies of name-brand products. The company’s latest effort to cut off the stream of fakes involves charging a fee to sellers who want to include certain big-name brands in their stores. [More]
What Should Walmart Do Now That It’s Landed Jet.com?
By 8.23.16
It’s no secret why Walmart bought Jet.com for $3 billion: the company’s e-commerce know-howo and experienced could be the key to the brick-and-mortar retailer’s plans of catching up with Amazon, finally, after all these years. But now that the honeymoon is over, it’s time to look at how, exactly, this marriage will work. [More]
Report: There Are 1.2M Fewer Retail Workers Than There Would Be Without The Internet
By 8.18.16
What would the retail landscape look like if we didn’t have the Internet and online shopping? No one can say, for sure (unless you know someone who can travel to parallel universes*), but one analyst says there’d be about 1.2 million more people with jobs in retail. [More]
Walmart CEO Explains Why Company Spent $3 Billion On Money-Losing Jet
By 8.9.16
When the CEOs of Walmart and of Jet met for the first time, they fell in corporate love. The two men couldn’t stop envisioning the future of their companies together, sketching out their dreams of combining Walmart’s inventory and supplier relationships and Jet’s e-commerce algorithm. The companies announced their engagement this week, and Walmart CEO Doug McMillon explained what it was he ever saw in the startup, which has barely been selling to the public for a year. [More]
Walmart Officially Acquiring Jet.com For $3 Billion
By 8.8.16
It looks like last week’s rumor mill was right on the money: this morning, Walmart has officially announced its plan to buy Jet.com. [More]
Report: Walmart In Talks To Buy Jet.com
By 8.3.16
Just a year after it launched, Amazon challenger and fellow e-commerce site Jet.com could soon become the property of one of the largest bricks-and-mortar retailers in the world: Walmart. [More]
Walgreens Closing Beauty.com, Drugstore.com
By 7.29.16
With easy-to-remember names like drugstore.com and beauty.com, one might expect these Walgreens-owned websites to be doing gangbusters business. Yet the retailer says it will shutter both sites by the end of September. [More]
As More Shoppers Go Online, Retailers Cut Back On In-Store Inventory
By 6.28.16
When you envision a Home Depot store, you probably picture rows of huge shelves packed to the rafters with boxes and pallets of products waiting to be unpacked. But with more shoppers buying things online, these shelves could start looking a lot different as the Depot and others rethink how much stuff they need to keep on hand.
[More]
Report: Amazon’s Strides In Apparel Could Be Serious Threat To Brick-And-Mortar Stores
By 6.10.16
As if retail chains aren’t already having a rough time of it lately, a new report says Amazon’s clothing business could prove to make things even worse in the future. [More]
UPS Survey: Online Shopping Has Surpassed In-Store Buying For The First Time
By 6.8.16
While there are no doubt innumerable studies, surveys, and reports on the habits of modern shoppers, at least one survey says that consumers are buying stuff online more than they are in stores, for the first time ever. [More]
Twitter Dissolves Commerce Team, Ceases Development Of “Buy” Buttons
By 5.26.16
For the past year or so companies have been working to streamline the buying process by cutting out the need to toggle between several pages to purchase a product. There’s one social network that’s decided dipping its toes into the world of e-commerce apparently isn’t worth it anymore: Twitter has shifted its focus away from the concept of a “buy” button. [More]
Is Costco’s “Meh” Attitude Toward Online Sales Hubris Or Good Business?
By 5.25.16
By this point, bricks-and-mortar stores that haven’t also established a solid online presence are often put on death watch, but Costco continues to take a “we’ll get there someday” approach to its internet business without raising too many alarm bells. Is that shortsightedness or good business? [More]
Gap CEO Says He’s Open To Possibly Using Amazon To Reach More Customers
By 5.18.16
Although Amazon may be the big bad wolf at the door coming to blow the house down and eat up their business, some retailers are considering teaming up with the tech giant instead of fearing it. Like Gap, whose CEO said the company would consider working with Amazon if it means reaching shoppers. [More]
