E-Commerce

Retailers must leverage mobility to stay competitive.

Using tools from MicroStrategy, Celerant is now building on its experience with data mining applications to expand the value of data access and processing through data warehousing.

It's widely known that customer reviews can boost trust and credibility, as well as drive significant improvements to conversion rates and search rankings. Just as well known is the challenge of actually getting customers to provide feedback and reviews. Feedback is often difficult to come by and, in most cases, isn't representative of a retailer’s entire customer base. Here are some of the current challenges retailers face in gathering feedback, as well as insight into the direction customer feedback is heading in 2012.

A new study by MarketTools shows that providing a good customer experience, bolstered by good customer service, is crucial for retailers both online and at the store. According to the study, 60 percent of consumers said they shop more often at certain online sites because of a good shopping experience marked by good customer service.

Overstock.com is launching a new travel site powered by Priceline after selling its original travel site in 2007. The new site, called O.co Travel, is powered by the Priceline Partner Network, which is a business unit of priceline.com.

With a vast array of products, product pages, categories and themes, personalized party products retailer Shindigz was faced with the daunting task of manually merchandising products and providing product recommendations across its four websites, including brands Stumps Party, American Prom and SpiritLine. Shindigz sought a product recommendation platform that integrated data, wisdom of the crowd and click behavior to streamline and automate recommendations across multiple shopping channels.

According to a new survey, merchants that have had positive experiences working with daily-deal providers like Groupon aren't flocking back to those services to sign up for more. What does that say about the daily-deal model? To investors, it suggests that it simply isn't sustainable, judging from the pummeling Groupon shares took on Jan. 3.

Employees with specialized skills that can help web retailers continue to drive higher customer retention rates and repeat business will be in big demand in 2012 and beyond, says one e-commerce recruiting specialist.

Customer experience analytics firm ForeSee released the results of its annual Holiday E-Retail Satisfaction Index, showing that after seven years spent jockeying for first place in the Index, Amazon and Netflix are headed in divergent directions.

comScore reported holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 56 days of the November through December 2011 holiday season. For the holiday season to date, $35.3 billion has been spent online, marking a 15 percent increase vs. the corresponding days last year.