E-Commerce

Chances are you're spending a lot of time, money and effort driving traffic to your online store. More and more, online retailers are realizing that the way to stand out from the crowd, and increase the return on investment of their reach and acquisition initiatives, is to optimize their site so that they're giving visitors exactly the experience they're looking for.

In anticipation of the holiday season, TopShop has partnered with Pinterest to create a campaign that will center around customers creating and submitting inspirational boards for the holiday season. This can cover all aspects of the holidays, including decorations, a dream dress, their ultimate festive tree and possibly even a few Topshop products. Entitled "Dear Topshop," the campaign plans to take a 360-degree approach and make its presence known online and offline. The collaboration will act as the ultimate gift guide that will feel personalized to each user. 

Treadmills for $33? Computer monitors for $9? The deals were even too good to be true — even for Wal-Mart. The megaretailer said a "technical error" caused certain products to be priced absurdly low or high on its website early Wednesday morning. By Wednesday evening, the discounter had fixed the glitch and decided to cancel the orders of customers who were able to snag the items at steep discounts.

RadioShack is giving shoppers the power to name their own deals with an interactive application on its e-commerce site where consumers can select the product and pricing, vote on and share the hot deals. On Nov. 27, consumers can redeem a limited number of coupon codes for "Name Your Deal" products at reduced prices. In addition, RadioShack has created holiday "Idea Centers" in its stores, featuring instructions cards for how to create some holiday fun using products from the surrounding shelves. 

The Company Store hasn't sent many flash-sale emails. In fact, among the 133 emails captured by Who's Mailing What! this year, only one recent email used the flash-sale strategy. However, The Company Store clearly did its homework.

Similar to showrooming at physical stores, consumers are shopping at some websites, but then going to other sites to make a purchase at a cheaper price. That's the view of John McCarvel, president and CEO of Crocs, in explaining why internet sales in the Americas region fell 32.8 percent in the third quarter. "We're certainly pleased to see that on Amazon.com in July, 23 of the top 100 styles sold were Crocs," McCarvel said on a conference call. "However, we believe we're seeing some of the same showrooming challenges impacting Crocs' direct growth of our own already significant e-commerce business."

China's Singles Day is a strange little holiday created in the '90s by university students who thought the date 11/11 looked like four solitary stick figures. Somehow, it's evolved into the country's largest e-commerce shopping event, with Western brands eager to cash in. And for good reason: Last year's Nov. 11 was so big the transactions overloaded banks, and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba logged $3 billion in sales — two times what U.S. retailers achieved on Cyber Monday. China's e-tailing fest exploded out of nowhere. Alibaba launched the holiday just five years ago with 27 brands.

Global online retailer Modnique launched a responsive web design (RWD) version of its website this past September in an effort to optimize the experience of visitors using screen sizes as small as the iPhone and as large as 36-inch monitors. Here's a look at the brand's experience with RWD. 

In the spirit of the season, I thought I'd check in with North Mankato, Minn.-based HalloweenCostumes.com, a leading online Halloween costume destination, to see how it was faring this season. HalloweenCostumes.com was started 10 years ago out of a garage; today it receives hundreds of thousands of costume orders during the Halloween season. The company attributes its growth and success to several factors, including leveraging scalable technology from partners such as PayPal, Google and Amazon.com.

Retailers typically focus on improving the online customer experience through personalization, omnichannel integration, rewards programs and other incentives, but as Amazon, Google and Nasdaq demonstrated, none of the bells and whistles matter if your site is unavailable. Consumers today expect 100 percent availability, so during and after any outage, organizations typically have two questions top of mind: One, what caused the outage and two, what did the outage cost?