E-Commerce

Nordstrom's online sales are exploding. Therefore the company is investing $1 billion over the next five years to support its e-commerce infrastructure. Nordstrom will add about 400 e-commerce employees to its direct business and flash-sale retailer HauteLook.

Williams-Sonoma announced the launch of Cultivate.com, a content site and online resource for kitchen inspiration and design. The new website provides information about kitchen design and remodeling in one single destination, offering consumers advice from kitchen experts, inspirational photos, recommendations for local kitchen professionals and unique planning tools. Part online design magazine, part community networking site, Cultivate.com is focused on providing information and inspiration for kitchen design and remodeling.

As e-commerce continues to mature, refinement is the name of the game. Over a fourteen year span of annually mystery shopping merchants we've observed the evolution of browsing, research and buying via the online channel as well as the recent merging of social networks and mobile devices into the fold.

HauteLook will become the latest online player to use TV advertising to boost awareness and attract subscribers. Like Groupon and LivingSocial before it, the flash-sale site is using mass media to define its brand to a broad audience.

The ongoing joke that Ikea's flat-pack furniture is confusingly complicated to assemble might be rendered moot now that the Swedish company is rolling out video assembly instructions that look considerably easier to follow than its printed manuals.

Ralph Lauren saw significant e-commerce sales growth during Q3 of 2012, with online sales climbing 31 percent compared to the same quarter the previous year. Sales via mobile devices have also made a strong showing, accounting for 20 percent of the traffic to RalphLauren.com and nearly 10 percent of sales.

Don't call it a flash sale. Fab.com, the popular design-focused timed-sale site, launched its new weekly fashion-focused boutique, and it wants you to know this isn't an ordinary fashion flash-sale destination.

Amazon.com has found itself in hot water with environmentalists. The company "allows" (or at least has turned a blind eye to) its Japanese website to "traffic in whale and dolphin products."

High Street retailer Marks & Spencer has unveiled a new section of its transactional website which offers its discount clothing to online consumers for the very first time. M&S Outlet was launched in November 2000 and currently sells older products from the retailer's clothing range, with discounts of up to 40 percent from their original selling price.

Online sellers Amazon and eBay gained brand value last year at the expense of brick-and-mortar retailers such as Best Buy, according to an Interbrand report. Amazon's brand surged 32 percent in a year, the most in U.S. retailing, while eBay's increased 16 percent, Interbrand said in a statement.