E-Commerce

Amazon.com dominates in a way other companies don't. It's a technology company with a physical presence. Over the past year, Amazon has added about 25,000 employees. It's planning to build a new 3.3 million square-foot headquarters near downtown Seattle, complete with biospheres. It's expanding its square footage by additional millions as it builds new warehouses across the U.S. and around the world. Amazon has reached a point in its evolution where the company is now surfing a feedback loop of dominance.

Just as cash-strapped consumers in the developing world bypassed so-called landline phones in favor of mobile devices, China's lower-income consumers are skipping physical stores in favor of e-commerce sites. A recent report by McKinsey & Co. shows that e-commerce sales in China reached an estimated $190 billion last year, almost equaling the U.S. market as largest in the world. China's online retail industry is expected to grow to at least $420 billion by 2020 — which would total more than the U.S., Japanese, U.K., German and French markets combined.

Men’s Wearhouse has launched a revamped version of its e-commerce site which features upgrades and personalized features that improve the overall online shopping experience, from browsing to buying. Among the site’s new features are

Zabar's, the world-renowned New York-based gourmet specialty food retailer, has replaced its homegrown subscription e-commerce program with a new autoship program called Z-Peat. Z-Peat offers customers the ability to subscribe to their favorite and/or frequently purchased Zabar’s items, everything from coffee and teas to babka, bagels and rugelach. Products are automatically shipped to customers who register online at zabars.com for the replenishment program.

Every marketer struggles with accountability. It keeps chief marketing officers up at night and makes it more difficult to fund new marketing initiatives. The key is the ability to demonstrate return on investment. We've developed a simple methodology to model web ROI using basic analytical tools.

Few retailers have brand permission to sell everything to everyone, according to Wal-Mart's Neil Ashe, who expects to win the e-commerce showdown with the help of brick-and-mortar. Ashe, CEO of Wal-Mart global e-commerce, spoke to investors yesterday at the Barclays 2013 Retail and Consumer Discretionary Conference in New York.

In this month's edition of SmartBear Software's Retailer Web Performance Report Card, the website performances of Nike and Blockbuster are examined. The idea behind this column is to help retailers deliver a great online user experience for the purpose of positively impacting business performance. I hope that retailers are continuously monitoring quality in terms of website availability, performance and user experience. With the help of SmartBear's AlertSite, I've looked at website response times and availability percentages from April 1 to April 16. For better or worse, Nike and Blockbuster are our featured retailers this month.

Site speed has been associated with every business metric you care about: page views, bounce rate, conversions, customer satisfaction, return visits and revenue. These effects are felt at companies of all sizes, from online giants like Amazon.com to small e-commerce shops.

After releasing a barrage of new reports to help you understand attribution from multi-channel funnel reports, attribution modeling, and social data partners, Google realizes that site owners need to better understand customer journey from first visit through to conversion, no matter how long that takes. Google Analytics has launched a new tool, the Customer Journey to Online Purchase

I spend a good deal of time looking at websites that have been developed using responsive web design (RWD). Often, many of the websites using RWD are agency sites or personal blogs, and sometimes it seems like a RWD design might only be practical for the more creative type of website. However, this is simply not true. Every type of website can benefit from using RWD to allow web visitors to access the same site and content no matter what kind of device they're using.