ecommerce Archives - Page 7 of 17

How Barneys’ New Flagship Store Goes Beyond Physical Retail

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Lab Team

What Happened
Upscale retailer Barneys New York is opening a new flagship store in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, and it comes equipped with new retail technologies that aim to elevate the shopping experience. Barneys is launching a new beacon network in the store that can send location-based notifications to customers who have Barneys’ app installed on their phones. The sales staff will also be equipped with tablets so they can quickly pull up customer profiles and make personalized recommendations to shoppers based on their purchase history. Moreover, the retailer is also launching same-day delivery service for online shoppers in select areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

What Retailers Need To Do
With over two-thirds of Americans now owning a smartphone, mobile is becoming an increasingly important touchpoint for retailers. So it makes perfect sense that Barneys is using beacons, customer profiles, and an on-demand delivery service to bridge the online with the offline via shoppers’ smartphones. Barneys’ new flagship store provides a good example for retailers looking to modernize their stores and provide customers with a consistent retail experience across online and offline channels.

For more information on how retailers can better utilize customer data to connect with shoppers across channels. check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

Source: Digiday

PayPal Launches New Platform To Proliferate Mobile Buy Buttons

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Lab Team

What Happened
PayPal is building a platform for small businesses to integrate buy buttons across platforms and sales channels. Named PayPal Commerce, the new service launches today in closed beta, setting the stage for how PayPal could potentially reboot its platform for mobile payment using technology from Modest, a company PayPal acquired shortly after splitting from eBay. Third-party services will be integrated in the back end to the Commerce platform via a set of APIs, which allows merchants to easily place customizable buy buttons across their mobile sales channels to process digital and mobile payments via PayPal.

What Brands Need To Do
The growing prevalence of buy buttons goes hand in hand with the development of social ecommerce and increasing adoption of mobile payments. Brands selling on digital and social channels need to consider using services like PayPal Commerce in order to translate the convenience of “buy buttons” and the network effect on social platforms into actual sales.

For more information on how brands can better utilize buy buttons to reach prospective customers with an omnichannel approach. check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

Source: ZDNet

Amazon Plans To Open More Physical Stores

Posted on February 3, 2016 by Lab Team

What Happened
Three months after Amazon opened its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle, the ecommerce giant is said to be planning as many as 400 bookstores across the nation, according to Sandeep Mathrani, CEO of mall operator General Growth Properties Inc. Amazon uses the data it acquires from its online properties to stock its Seattle store, and we anticipate a similar approach will be applied to its other stores as the company pushes deeper into physical retail.

What Brands Need To Do
As more and more online retailers venture into physical retail, they gain retail presence and leverage what they have learned about their customers online to enhance their in-store experiences and at the same time develop more personal relationships with their customers which can inform the online experience. Amazon is tapping the location and purchase data it has to bridge the gap between online and offline retail, and all brands with an owned retail presence need to start doing the same in order to develop a holistic CRM system that covers the entire purchase cycle.

For more details on how retailers can utilize all customer touchpoints to improve shopping experiences both online and offline, click here to read the Boundless Retail section in our new Outlook 2016.

Editor’s note: A new report from Re/code now indicates that while Amazon does have plans for more physical stores, including retail stores that aren’t bookstores, it has no immediate plans for opening 300-400 stores.

Source: Wall Street Journal
Header image courtesy of Amazon

Venmo To Enter Mobile Commerce With In-App Payments Solution

Posted on January 27, 2016 by Lab Team

What Happened
Beloved peer-to-peer digital payment app Venmo is preparing to launch a new “Pay with Venmo” service that will let users pay for mobile purchases. Similar to its parent company’s “Pay with Paypal” button frequently featured on ecommerce sites, the new feature is aimed at facilitating shopping and payments in mobile apps. Instead of putting in their credit card information, users will be able to simply log in and pay with their Venmo account. The first two apps getting this Venmo integration are on-demand sports tickets delivery app Gametime and food delivery app Munchery.

What Brands Need To Do
For brands, especially brands that use branded apps as a sales channel, this new mobile payment solution can help remove friction and encourage purchases. Venmo has a fast-growing user base and enjoys well-documented popularity among Millennials. Therefore, brands targeting Millennial consumers on mobile should consider giving this new service a try.

Source: Quartz

Best Of The Lab 2015: Improving Physical Retail With A Digital Touch

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Lab Team

Welcome to the Lab’s year-end review, looking back at some of our best and most popular posts from 2015.

2015 saw tremendous growth for ecommerce, so much that it has seriously eroded Black Friday sales. But that doesn’t mean it’s all over for the brick-and-mortar retailers. In fact, traditional retailers have been actively incorporating digital components such as beacon technology, mobile payments, and in-store display of social media activities to build out rewarding interactive retail experiences that connect with shoppers. Here are some highlights on how they are improving physical retail with a digital touch.

Fast Forward: How Yext’s Xone Can Reach Black Friday Shoppers On Cyber Monday
JCPenney and Shopkick Inspire Cinderella Moments for Consumers
How Elle Used Proximity And Beacon Tech To Drive 500,000 Retail Store Visits
Ralph Lauren And Sephora Testing Interactive Retail Experiences

On Trend: How Ecommerce Is Eroding Black Friday

Posted on November 19, 2015 by Richard Yao

Amazon might have just severely undermined the cultural relevance of Black Friday.

On Wednesday, the ecommerce giant announced its plan to start offering its Black Friday deals on Nov. 20 – a full week ahead of Black Friday. Amazon Prime members will be granted a half-hour earlier access to many deals than the general public. Facing pressure from Amazon’s aggressively proactive approach, traditional retailers like Best Buy, Toys “R” Us, Kmart, and Sears are all starting their Black Friday sales early this year so as not to be left out.

More importantly, as more and more people start shopping online and taking advantage of easier comparison shopping, most retailers are now offering the same Black Friday deals online, giving customers less incentive to visit the store. No more lining up for the doorbusters at Walmart this year, as the retail giant has opted to provide nearly all of its deals both online and in stores, with the online deals becoming available at midnight on Thanksgiving day, 18 hours before the stores open.

Overall, the disruption ecommerce has caused what analysts call the “graying” of Black Friday, where holiday sales start earlier and are spread out evenly throughout the holiday, thus making Black Friday less relevant. For retailers, this means a longer holiday sales period that starts earlier. Some retailers, such as Amazon and Toy “R” Us, are offering their loyalty program members early access, which creates smart sales windowing to incentivize the shoppers.

Besides starting early and rewarding loyal fans with early access, retailers should also consider making a push for mobile shopping this year. Amazon, for example, plans to offer a slew of mobile-only deals in hopes of driving more consumers to its app. Using mobile-exclusive deals to incentivize more shoppers to download branded retail apps can help retailers establish a digital touchpoint on shoppers’ smartphones, allowing them to connect with shoppers on the go. Apps can also provide consumer data for retailers to learn valuable insights into consumer insights.

Ecommerce may be eroding Black Friday’s importance as the biggest annual sales event, but it is also what will help retailers to reach today’s connected consumers and stay relevant in the long run.

How Burberry Tripled Its Base Of Mobile Shoppers

Posted on November 13, 2015 by Lab Team

What Happened
Burberry has been embracing digital channels with a bullish strategy, and its effort is starting to pay off. The British luxury retailer retooled its online store to be more mobile-friendly and built a frictionless checkout and payment process. Those changes helped it triple its base of mobile shoppers since the site relaunched at the end of 2014, with online and mobile sales doubling their share of the company’s revenue in the past year.

Moreover, Burberry has been eagerly experimenting with new mobile platforms to reach younger consumers. It debuted its Spring/Summer 2016 collection on Snapchat, became the first brand to have a branded channel on Apple Music, and partnered with messaging app Line in Japan to court shoppers with branded stickers.

What Brands Need To Do
Burberry’s success shows the importance of building a frictionless online shopping experience and engaging today’s consumers on the popular mobile platforms with branded content. More retail brands should take some cues from Burberry and revamp their mobile strategy to cater to today’s mobile-first consumers.

Source: Digiday

Pinterest Launches Visual Search To Help You Find Specific Items

Posted on November 9, 2015 by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Pinterest started to roll out an interesting new image search tool for its apps and website. The visual search allows users to zoom in on a specific item – for example, a lamp, a coffee table, or a pair of shoes – in Pinterest images and search for pins that contain that item or similar-looking ones. Users can also filter the visual search by topic to narrow down the results.

What Brands Need To Do
Hailed as a “sales conversion powerhouse,” Pinterest has been beating all other social media sites in ecommerce conversion rate, especially in categories such as fashion, home goods, and food. In order to capitalize on Pinterest’s conversion prowess, brands marketing on Pinterest would be smart to create a pinned inventory of their products, with each pin linked to the corresponding purchase page. This will make them more likely to show up in the new visual search results. Popular items can also be promoted with Pinterest’s one-click “buyable pins” to boost sales.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Header image is a promotional image courtesy of Pinterest Blog

How Amazon Powers Its First Physical Bookstore With Data

Posted on November 3, 2015 by Lab Team

What Happened
Amazon may be responsible for the demise of traditional bookstores, but that certainly won’t stop the ecommerce giant from opening one itself. The company that first started as an online bookseller has opened its first ever physical retail store – a bookstore, to be exact – in Seattle’s University Village on Tuesday.

Unlike other brick-and-mortar bookstores that typically categorize books by genre, the store will be relying on Amazon’s existing data — including customer ratings, sales totals, and Goodread popularity — to decide which books to stock and how to display them in store. In addition to books, Amazon is also setting aside a section of the store to its hardware products such as the Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, and Fire Tablet.

What Retailers Need To Do
Amazon’s physical bookstore showcases an interesting example for retail brands to take advantage of the data it gathers from online shoppers and use it to optimize the offline shopping experience. Visiting physical retail stores also allows customers to browse at leisure rather than searching for specific items, encouraging the kind of serendipitous buying that is rare in ecommerce. With some ecommerce brands dipping their toes into the brick-and-mortar space, it is key for retailers to bridge the gap between online and offline shopping with user data.

Source: The Verge

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