E-Commerce

In an interview with Retail Online Integration at the Shop.org Annual Summit this week in Seattle, John Bergquist, Saddleback Leather's direct of content and communications, and David Meidam, director of IT for Saddleback Leather, discuss the origins of the company and where it's headed, as well as why having a cloud-based commerce platform is valuable for its business. 

Sellers all over the internet were scrambling when payments went missing from their PayPal accounts for hours on Oct. 1. And it impacted not just sellers on eBay, but on Etsy, Bonanza and even people who transferred their money from one account to another. Sellers reported the issue on Wednesday morning on the Ecommerce EKG board beginning at about 12:30 a.m. EST: "Item shows paid in eBay but payment is not in PayPal." There was no sign of an acknowledgement on the PayPal blog, on the PayPal discussion threads or on the AskPayPal Twitter account.

I'm at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Seattle and having a great time catching up with old friends and colleagues, meeting new contacts, and learning about new digital marketing strategies and technologies. Also, as usual, as I walk through the exhibit hall I'm being greeted by smiling vendors, eager to share with me information about their latest and greatest shiny new objects. For the most part, I actually enjoy talking with vendors and learning about their wares. But I have noticed many folks — retailers, probably — with their badges turned the other way or tucked into their jackets, and I know why: they don’t want to be singled out and aggressively sold to by vendors.

Segmentation drives results within your customer base and is centralized on driving satisfaction through better user experiences. It helps customers discover products and entices them to take action, and can have a dramatic impact to your business and bottom line. Segmentation is an effective way to speak differently to varied segments in a concentrated effort to construct a more personalized experience, hence increasing the conversion rate.

Even by the anything-goes ethical code of the corporate jungle, Amazon.com's alpha male Jeff Bezos is considered a ruthless predator by businesses that deal with him. As overlord of Amazon, by far the largest online retailer in the U.S. (with more sales than the next nine U.S. online retailers combined), Bezos has the monopoly power to stalk, weaken and even kill off retail competitors, going after such giants as Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart, and draining the lifeblood from hundreds of smaller Main Street shops. 

Lands' End Business Outfitters has launched a new online customer shopping experience. The new website provides functionality that lets business customers do everything from seeing how their logo looks on a selected fabric to managing account information and accessing order history. The new website allows customers to directly upload their logos and see exactly how their logo will look on their selected fabric, as well as change thread colors and see alterations immediately. In addition, high-resolution product images can be viewed in full-screen mode, enabling customers to zoom in to view details. 

John Rossman, an executive at Amazon.com in the early 2000s, has written "The Amazon Way," about the 14 leadership principles that drive the online retailer, including obsessing over the customer, hiring and developing the best employees, and practicing frugality. The relatively brief book, which was published through Amazon's self-publishing platform, discusses how these rules can benefit any company — should it be brave enough to put them into effect. 

Who would've thunk it. A company that sells barf bibs, Buddha-shaped pears, a portable fat-freezing machine and inflatable walking-on-water shoes that was started by a poor Chinese schoolteacher who first used the internet while visiting the U.S. in 1995 and is nicknamed "Crazy Jack" by reporters had an initial public offering last week that now ranks as the world's biggest at $25 billion. Of course, I'm talking about Alibaba, China's biggest online commerce company.  

Amazon dot buy forward slash … what? Our minds are spinning with the possible creative uses Amazon.com might get out of its latest purchase — the entire top-level domain name .buy, which recently sold for a cool $4.59 million to the online retail giant. Other top-level domain bidders included Google, Uniregistry, Nu Dot Co, Donuts, and Minds+Machines. Only two bidders, however, offered to spend more than $1.5 million for .buy. Google also missed out on the other two domain names offered as part of ICANN's latest "auction of last resort." 

Our marketing experts will discuss key online and offline merchandising best practices and strategies.