Retail E-Watch
1-800-FLOWERS—from InternetRetailer.com: “When shoppers abandon a shopping
cart or browsing session,” this company “sends automated emails to woo them
back. The open rate on those remarketing emails is five times higher than on
regular emails.”
BIG WEEK—in the week ended Dec. 16, 2007, e-retailers chalked up $4.70
billion in sales, according to comScore (as reported by InternetRetailer.com).
In the week ended Dec. 13, 2009, the record was broken—at $4.744 billion.
BOOKS—“for the first time ever, Amazon.com says it sold more e-books
for the Kindle on Christmas than paper books.” That’s “on Christmas,” as in,
on the very day (Dec. 25, 2009). What happened, according to InternetRetailer.com:
Many people received the Kindle as a gift, and the first thing they did was…to
buy and download a book, to try the thing out!
EMAIL-HAPPY—“in 2009, the 100 largest online retailers sent out an average
of 132 promotional messages to each subscriber, an increase of 12% over 2008
and 38% more than two years ago,” according to Smith-Harmon, as quoted by InternetRetailer.com.
MOBILE GIFT BUYING—between the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas
Eve, “consumers bought 1.5 million items using Internet retailer giant eBay’s
mobile apps,” three times what happened in the same period of 2008 (according
to InternetRetailer.com).
PROCTER & GAMBLE—the company is testing an “eStore”—on which it
will sell directly to consumers (competing, of course, with all of the retail
stores that carry all the P&G brands on their shelves). A Jan. 14 Associated
Press report noted that P&G’s executives “say it is a consumer research
‘lab’ and retailers will benefit because they will get to share its findings
on how shoppers respond online and in stores to digital ads, coupons, store
promotions, and other factors.”
TARGET—the big-box retailer, which plans to launch a new website by
the end of 2011, has chosen vendors—Sapient, IBM, Oracle, Endeca, Autonomy,
Sterling Commerce, and Huge (according to Chain Store Age).
WALMART—the gigantic company is dominant here, too. An Associated Press
report that ran one week before Christmas noted that the CEO of Walmart.com
said the site’s holiday sales were “growing two or three times faster than web
sales overall.”
Picks To Click
Cap and trade—“Quick Facts About Cap and Trade”
are offered on the EPA website.
Data center on Facebook—a data center to be built in Prineville,
Ore.—for the people who run Facebook—has its own Facebook
page. If you’re on Facebook, you can actually become a “fan” of the data
center!
Green vehicles—every year, the ACEEE updates its ratings of green
vehicles of all kinds. Well, they’ve done it again—at www.greenercars.org.
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