Walmart’s latest attempt to stay competitive with Amazon reportedly includes taking the rival company’s iconic Prime service and making its own version. [More]
e-commerce
Jet.com Is Either The Future Of Retail Or A Doomed Wacky Scheme
By 5.1.15
This week, a new e-commerce site launched to about 10,000 beta users who signed up for a preview. The easy-to-remember name of this new site is Jet.com, and its goal is to remove some of the inefficiencies of shopping online. Will they succeed? [More]
Pinterest Reportedly Planning To Rollout A “Buy” Button As Early As This Year
By 2.12.15
It’s not always enough to just look at pretty things pinned to your Pinterest boards; sometimes you desire to have them in your physical possession. That need for instant gratification may be why the scrapbook service is reportedly laying the groundwork for a “buy” button that would allow users to purchase products straight from the site. [More]
Alibaba Vows To Step Up Efforts To Prevent Online Sales Of Counterfeit Goods
By 1.30.15
It’s been a whirlwind week for the relationship between e-commerce giant Alibaba and the Chinese government. After one agency released a report criticizing the company for allowing fake goods to be sold online through its vendors, and another government group promised to crack down on such practices in general, Alibaba is now pledging to shape up its business practices. [More]
China’s Ministry Of Commerce Pledges To Crack Down On Counterfeit Items Sold Online
By 1.29.15
After another Chinese government agency scolded e-commerce giant Alibaba and its eBayesque subsidiary Taobao over its mismanagement of its business and for selling or allowing bogus goods to be sold to the public, the country’s Ministry of Commerce has pledged to crack the whip on the online industry and try harder to prevent the sale of counterfeit goods. [More]
ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com Sells For $85,000 Now That Hype Is Over
By 1.23.15
The site ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com is an interesting case study in online marketing and being careful what you wish for. After accepting about $20,000 in very profitable orders, the site went up for auction, and has sold. The site’s owner is now free from the oppression of having to stick glitter in envelopes and mail it to people. [Flippa] [The Guardian] [More]
Skip Stores And Middlemen: Shop Directly From Chinese Wholesalers
By 12.19.14
Instead of buying inexpensive, mass-produced junk from China at your local big-box store, why not save time, avoid human interaction, and go right to the source? You can eliminate layers of middlemen by ordering from a wholesaler in China. It’s easy and affordable to do so online for everything from phone cases to wedding gowns, but should you? [More]
Online Shipping War: Amazon’s Shelf Robots Against Walmart’s Puny Humans
By 12.19.14
Amazon and other e-commerce companies have vast order fulfillment warehouses filled with shelves full of goods. Traditional big-box retailers don’t have the same kind of operations, but are trying to compete with e-commerce companies in shipping items directly to customers’ homes and to stores for pickup. How can they compete without building fulfillment warehouses of their own? By turning their existing stores and employees into a vast online order fulfillment operation. [More]
Can Retailers Make Us Stop Returning So Much Stuff?
By 11.24.14
After the holiday shopping frenzy is over, frenzy season isn’t yet complete: in malls and in post offices alike, shoppers then go into an item-returning and gift-card-spending frenzy. Unfortunately, this costs retailers a lot of money. Instead of accepting the cost of returns as a recurring annual thing, can they find a way to reduce them? [More]
Free Shipping Will Be More Expensive This Holiday Season
By 10.23.14
There’s no such thing as free shipping. What looks like free shipping from a shopper’s perspective is only subsidized shipping, and those subsidies come from shoppers. They could come in the form of higher prices, or higher spending thresholds to earn free shipping. This year, free shipping will cost you a little more. [More]
Spammers Take Advantage Of eBay Breach, Invade Etsy
By 6.5.14
When the usernames and passwords of a big, popular site like eBay are compromised, consequences can spread beyond the original site that was attacked. It’s possible that users of selling platforms Etsy and eBay use the same usernames and passwords on both sites, since security staff at Etsy say that they’ve noticed an uptick in spam and account hijackings since the recent eBay breach. [More]
Zulily Takes Weeks To Ship Merchandise, And Customers Love It
By 5.7.14
Flash-sale sites are merchants that offer items for a deeply discounted price, for a limited time and in limited quantities. (Woot is an example that most of our readers might be familiar with.) They became very popular during the most recent recession when high-end retailers had piles of merchandise that nobody wanted, but most of these sites have faded…except for Zulily. Why is that? [More]
Quit Wasting Money On Internet Impulse Purchases
By 4.28.14
The Internet has brought an amazing array of merchandise into our lives and onto our doorsteps. However, being able to order a crate of hamburger-shaped cookies from Japan or a complete DVD box set of “Friends” episodes at 3 A.M. during a spell of insomnia isn’t always a good thing. Especially when you’re trying to eliminate debt and/or cut down on spending. [More]
Amazon Now Using Lockers For Return Shipping
By 4.2.14
Do you know what’s an even worse problem for online retailers than customers who never get their packages? Shipping back the items that customers did receive, but don’t want. Fortunately, Amazon has found a way around this problem: since late last year, they’ve using their lockers designed for deliveries to send products in the other direction. [More]
You Don’t Say: Study Shows That Bad Weather Is Good For Online Merchants
By 2.20.14
From the Global Department Of Studies That Tell Us What We Already Knew, a recent study of online retail data shows that while retail spending is down overall, shoppers spent more money online in January 2014 than in January 2013. What could the reason be? Well, speculates the company that did the study, maybe it’s because of the run of really crappy weather in highly populated areas of the country in 2014. [More]
During Shipping Frenzy, Amazon Limited Prime Memberships
By 12.26.13
Now that the Christmas shopping and shipping frenzy is over, Amazon is providing free extensions of their Prime no-limit free shipping service to shoppers whose packages didn’t arrive. Before the holiday, though, Amazon was actually limiting signups for Prime during peak periods. Maybe they didn’t want to clog up the shipping works with boxes containing single packs of cookies and other small impulse items. [More]
Maybe Calling Itself A “Showroom” Isn’t The Best Holiday Marketing Plan For Best Buy
By 10.29.13
A showroom is a place where you go to look at stuff and think about buying it, but it may not necessarily be in stock or even available. In the e-commerce era, it has a slightly different meaning: the term “showrooming” means visiting a nearby store to check out an item in person, then buying that item online from a different company. [More]
Test Your Internet Knowledge With Consumerist’s History Of E-Commerce Quiz
By 9.10.13
We’ve mentioned it before and now Pizza Hut is proudly crowing over it again: The chain is laying claim to the honor of the first purchase ever made on the World Wide Web — a mushroom, pepperoni and extra cheese pizza back in 1994 — which brings up a good point: How much do any of us really know about the history of e-commerce? Take Consumerist’s quiz to find out. [More]
