E-Commerce

eBay is gearing up for the back-to-school shopping season with several marketing and affiliate initiatives, including Pinterest contests, a Facebook backpack drive and a promotion for its affiliates. The marketing is designed to increase user engagement with eBay on social media websites, encourage sellers to list back-to-school items and to reward affiliates for driving traffic to back-to-school listings. eBay is holding a Pinterest sweepstakes where one grand prize winner will receive a $5,000 eBay shopping spree toward a dorm room makeover. Students must follow eBay on Pinterest and create a new Pinterest pin board called "My eBay Dorm Room."

Quiksilver recently launched e-commerce sites in 10 countries over just a few months’ time. The outdoor sports lifestyle retailer's use of the Demandware cloud-based e-commerce platform made possible rapid rollouts of sites in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. "Quiksilver had a very aggressive market expansion strategy and we needed a platform that would allow us to roll out multiple sites across geographies in a fast, efficient way," said Quiksilver's Senior Vice President of Digital Nicolas Foulet in a statement. 

As Amazon.com has grown aggressively in recent years, expanded into diverse businesses and achieved profitability, its impact on the e-business and retail sectors is greater now than ever before. For many businesses, Amazon is simultaneously a sales channel, potential service provider and competitive threat. To explore this complex relationship and to understand Amazon both today and where it's going next, my colleague Sucharita Mulpuru and I conducted many interviews with retail industry leaders, former Amazon leadership and industry thought leaders, culminating in our latest report.

Online sales are soaring. State budget deficits are growing. And tax-free internet sales are once again in the spotlight. Congress is considering bills that would level the playing field by allowing states to require all online merchants doing business in that state to collect sales tax. Web retailers have largely had a free ride since a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that only merchants with a physical presence in a state are responsible for collecting sales tax.

Retail survey results released by CashStar indicate that retailers have not only recognized the importance of offering e-gifts, they have significant plans to expand these offerings this year. The vast majority of retailers believe e-gifts are a successful tool in building loyalty with their customers. Nearly half plan to improve their mobile shopping experience in time for the fast-approaching holiday season.

As the head of Sephora Digital, Julie Bornstein oversees the international cosmetics company's online and technological operations and strategies. For the last several years she's worked to integrate technology into the brand's physical stores and to make Sephora a force in online sales. Bornstein talked to Wired Business about the importance of offline retail in an online world and how technology can enhance the real-world retail experience.

Unhindered by federal background checks or government oversight, the 24-year-old man accused of killing a dozen people inside a Colorado movie theater was able to build what police called a 6,000-round arsenal legally and easily over the internet, exploiting what critics call a virtual absence of any laws regulating ammunition sales. With a few keystrokes, the suspect, James E. Holmes, ordered 3,000 rounds of handgun ammunition, 3,000 rounds for an assault rifle and 350 shells for a 12-gauge shotgun — an amount of firepower that costs roughly $3,000 at the online sites in the four months before the shooting.

In its struggle against surging online retailers such as Amazon.com, Wal-Mart has unleashed a weapon long shunned by Sam Walton: lobbying. On July 24, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on a bill to let states collect sales tax from out-of-state merchants that sell to their residents. If passed, online retailers, which now mostly don't collect sales tax, will lose a price advantage that's helped them take business from brick-and-mortar stores.

Following a trial run with custom-produced videos on its site a few years ago that yielded favorable results, Allenhurst, N.J.-based Heavenly Treasures realized that the medium was an effective sales driver. The problem was that the cross-channel retailer of fine jewelry didn’t have the resources in-house to optimize the technology.

Empathica's Consumer Insights Panel surveyed more than 6,500 U.S. consumers and found that mobile and social customer experience strategies are becoming more important than ever for brands, with retail and restaurant consumers using these channels to make decisions — even while in-store.