E-Commerce

eBay launched its eBay Deals program in Canada, replacing its former program there called The Big Deal. eBay's Deals program is a takeoff on daily-deals sites like Woot that offer a limited number of items at a significant discount available for a short time or until supplies run out. The eBay Canada Big Deal launched as a weekly feature — eBay worked with sellers and listed new items "at a significant discount, including free shipping within Canada" in fixed-price format each Wednesday.

The rapidly expanding online design shop Fab.com has just secured another $150 million from investors, which means, of course, more expansion. The e-tailer has announced ambitious plans to become one the top five e-commerce businesses in the world. "There are currently only four e-commerce companies in the world that are valued at more than $10 billion: Amazon.com, Alibaba, eBay and Rakuten," Fab Founder and CEO Jason Goldberg wrote on his blog. "We believe that Fab has a legitimate chance to be the fifth."

Discounts have been around as long as retail has. And on the web, the flash sales wave pushed them front and center. But I was still surprised when I recently visited certain non-flash sales e-commerce sites to find that young startups with aspirations of creating brands with cachet would be offering discount promotions to first-time buyers right on their homepage. So I asked three of them that offer homepage discounts in exchange for an email address — menswear maker Bonobos, high-end T-shirt startup Pickwick & Weller, and women's jewelry seller BaubleBar — to explain their thought process. 

Wantful, an online gift retailer, announced a partnership with Nordstrom to develop innovative gift giving experiences for Nordstrom customers. The first iteration of the partnership launched yesterday with The Nordstrom Gift Collection by Wantful. The Nordstrom Gift Collection, based on Wantful's popular service, offers an assortment of thousands of unique products curated by Wantful in categories from home decor to accessories to specialty food and wine. Nordstrom customers visiting the site answer a few questions about the person they're buying for, and the service helps them quickly and easily curate a customized collection of up to 12 gift choices. 

Online shoppers faced with buying a gift often don't know what they want to buy until they see a product that catches their fancy. That presents a challenge for online retailers, who must present shoppers with the right mix of products without knowing what they'll jump at. A variety of search and navigation tools can help guide your customers through the process of looking for a gift and zeroing in on the best options. Your job is to make this process as fast and easy and possible; consumers don't have time for endless, random browsing.

Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners are what Google calls "smartphone shoppers," meaning that they use their smartphones at least once a month in stores. That's a lot of people. If there are 130 million smartphone users in the U.S., then about 111 million Americans use their smartphones to prepare for shopping or to look things up while there. It's not surprising that Google wants to get in all those heads and see what's going on. There's money there!

In the increasingly competitive e-commerce industry, there's more pressure than ever to stand apart from the crowd and stay top of mind for consumers. With retail giants like Amazon.com and Alibaba.com continuing to scale and dominate on price, convenience and selection, the need to retain core customers is essential. Many retailers struggle with how to remain economically relevant and connected to their most influential customers.

In April 2011, men's apparel company Bonobos made a big announcement on its Facebook page: After years of only selling its clothes online, it would soon begin opening its first physical stores. The Bonobos page was flooded with questions about the planned stores, prompting the company to acknowledge what some observant Facebook fans had already figured out: The date was April 1, and the announcement was just an April Fool's prank.

Wellington Fonseca, vice president of marketing for Gilt Groupe, discussed strategies his company uses for engaging customers across multiple channels during a session at Integrated Marketing Week (imw) 2013 in New York this week.

Watch out, department stores: Amazon.com's gunning for your beauty business … and that's not all. The online giant could redefine the prestige cosmetics industry by offering big discounts on upscale brands like Chanel and Clinique to a mass audience for the first time. It's no secret that Amazon has a habit of shaking up entire product sectors. Its pioneering Kindle e-reader forever changed the book-selling business (and helped put Borders out of business), while its low-price model has forced consumer electronics retailer Best Buy, for one, to reinvent its store concept.