E-Commerce

Food52, a crowdsourced cooking website co-founded by former New York Times food editor Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, is today making the move into e-commerce with the launch of an online shop called Provisions. Here, Food52 visitors will be able to browse through and purchase a variety of products, organized into themed collections, like "Rooftop Party," or "Freshly Picked: Plums," for example.

Low-price retailer T.J. Maxx plans to open an online store this year, as does rival Saks Inc's Off Fifth outlets, making 2013 the year technology may have caught up with the speed of fashion. For such chains, which feature clearance items, last-year's fashions and overruns, their fast-moving and often unpredictable inventory has made selling goods over the web complex. "Retail is chaotic. Off-price retail is even more chaotic," said Fiona Dias, a leading e-commerce expert and chief strategy officer at ShopRunner.

It looks like mobile will be the biggest Christmas present retailers will get this holiday season, according to recently relased survey findings from personalized customer experience solutions provider Baynote and e-commerce consulting firm the e-tailing group. One in three retailers forecast that mobile will drive more than 10 percent of their total holiday revenue this year.

H&M, to you finally started taking online orders in the U.S. this morning on its HM.com website, more than 2½ years after first promising to open an American Web store and almost two years behind a digital-shopping option from rival Zara. Fast retailing's Uniqlo, the world's No. 4 retailer, also beat sluggish H&M to the punch by opening an e-commerce platform in U.S. ahead of the 2012 holidays.

In the second and final part of this interview with Beth Guastella, the recently named president and COO of giggle, a specialty retaile

Sephora is one of the few brands whose retail prowess is equally matched by its digital savvy. Since LVMH acquired the company in 1997, it's grown to become the biggest beauty retailer in the world, now even gaining on hallowed luxury ground within its own company. LVMH has named Sephora its primary growth vehicle, with some analysts estimating that LVMH's Selective Retailing division (which includes Sephora) will overtake LVMH's luxury goods as its most lucrative business by 2018. That means it will outperform Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, Louis Vuitton, Celine, Fendi and Kenzo's sales combined.

I had the opportunity to chat recently with Beth Guastella, the recently named president and chief operating officer of giggle, an omnichannel specialty retailer of upscale baby products and resources. In part one of this two-part blog post, we discuss what attracted Guastella to giggle; what specialty retail is; and how giggle’s catalog business works. 

The enormous customer base created by social media has been realized and now the next evolutionary phase of the internet, Web 3.0, is just on the horizon and is already creating exciting new internet retail strategies and technologies that will push e-commerce to great new levels.

"The risk not taken is more dangerous than the risk taken," wrote Bonobos Co-Founder and CEO Andy Dunn, explaining his decision to turn down a secure job at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm and team up with Stanford business school classmate Brian Spaly to launch a new kind of men's apparel brand, focused on selling well-fitting pants online. After "creative differences," Spaly left the business in 2009, in what was a mutual though difficult split. But under Dunn's stewardship the company has not only survived, but flourished.

Welp, rumors that H&M's long-awaited U.S. e-commerce launch was finally going to happen in June appear to have been false, considering here we are, smack in the middle of July, and we got nothing. To briefly recap: after multiple delays, the brand announced that e-commerce would probably be ready by "the middle of 2013." Hope was bolstered last February, when an employee in a New York retail store leaked the news that a launch date of June 2013 was announced internally at a staff meeting.