E-Commerce

Learn to meet the needs of the always-connected shopper by evolving your marketing strategies, notably making mobile a top priority.

Loehmann's will live again … but this time you won't have to worry about elbowing your way through the communal dressing room to get those bargains on designer clothing. The beloved department store, which went bankrupt in late 2013, will return as an online retailer in May, WWD reported Tuesday. Esopus Creek, a private equity fund, bought the fabled off-price name after the bankruptcy. The last Loehmann's closed in February. Loehmann's, with its low prices and shared dressing rooms, was a successful brick-and-mortar department store since its founding in 1921, peaking in 1999 with 100 stores nationwide.

When the people in charge of keeping websites secure and sensitive data private are running scared, you know it's time to worry. A vulnerability called the Heartbleed Bug was discovered recently, and, one of the things that has people freaking out is that companies don't know if their data was ever compromised over the two-year period of vulnerability. To online shoppers and merchants alike, that's frightening news. 

Product Listing Ads (PLAs) represented a significant shift for e-commerce pros who had previously been able to promote products through Google Shopping for free. Google has supported this new emphasis with AdWords updates in recent months. By late summer, advertisers will find an even bigger change for PLA campaigns set into place. Those updates will be expanded upon very soon according to Google. February's Google Shopping campaigns and March's API support for AdWords generated "great feedback" according to Inside AdWords, and some new supporting features are on the way.

Surprise, surprise, retailers may be exaggerating their ability to hit shipping deadlines for online orders. Take this past holiday season. The few retailers brave or cocky enough to promise Christmas delivery on orders up until midnight on Dec. 23 only got about two-thirds of those packages down the chimney in time, according to a new study by retail consultancy Kurt Salmon. Most retailers gave more conservative guidelines, setting cutoffs on Dec. 25 delivery a week to five days earlier. But that bunch wasn't too reliable either, posting a success rate of only 80 percent.

Nordstrom is bringing low-price fashion jewelry into its luxury department store chain with the hope that younger shoppers will follow suit. On Monday, the company will begin selling jewelry from BaubleBar, a popular online retailer. BaubleBar launched its website three years ago with the hopes of making fashion jewelry more accessible to the average shopper. With online traffic now at more than 1 million visitors per month, the founders have decided to expand the company's presence into traditional retail spaces, too.

Q: "I recently started my own e-commerce website selling natural health products, and I'd love some best practices around how to better commercialize the website to increase sales. Thanks!" — Angela Garcia, team leader, NHT Global

Guess is rapidly expanding its omnichannel presence, yet remains faithfully loyal to a tool from retail's past: the printed catalog. The apparel retailer produces and mails four catalogs a year to hundreds of thousands of customers. To keep pace with rising printing and postage costs, the retailer has increased its marketing spend for the coming year to account for both its old-school and new-school marketing initiatives. In addition to its print-centric approach to marketing and advertising, GUESS has fully embraced social media and digital marketing, but still sees value in traditional outreach and its ability to fuel the omnichannel experience.

This webinar discusses the trends that are impacting the world of omnichannel eCommerce and how you can deal with them.

People like getting their toys fast. They also like getting them cheap. Amazon.com is gambling they care more about the first than the second. The retailer told the 25 million members of its Amazon Prime program on Thursday that it was increasing the annual fee for the two-day shipping service by 25 percent, to $99. The new price takes effect on the renewal dates for existing customers, starting April 17. Amazon is famous for squeezing its suppliers for a better deal.