E-Commerce

Bill Bass, president and CEO of Direct at women's apparel retailer Charming Shoppes, took a step back yesterday at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Boston to reflect on five lessons he's learned from the 15 years he's spent in the retail industry, including stints at Lands’ End and Fair Indigo.

The deal-a-day company Groupon has seen better days. It's trying to go public into a stock market that can't quite figure out what it's doing. Its profit loss calculations have been called unreliable.

There's Black Friday, then there's Target Tuesday. In a scene that was reminiscent of the shopping frenzy that typically comes the day after Thanksgiving, Target's website crashed several times throughout the day yesterday. More than a hundred shoppers lined up at many of its stores early in the morning on Sept. 13 for a sale of limited offerings of its Missoni for Target collection of bikes, luggage, clothes and housewares.

Nielsen’s third quarter study, State of the Media: The Social Media Report, examines the increasing influence of social networking on consumers and points to trends that bode well for businesses active in the social media space.

Whole Foods Market was selling 1 million coupons via daily-deal site LivingSocial this week. The deal was for $10 for $20 worth of groceries and aims to help bolster children's health by donating to the Whole Kids Foundation, which works to help combat childhood obesity.

This interview from Google Think Voices with Avinash Kaushik details how to succeed in the digital world using key insights to evaluate and refine the customer experience.

Renowned e-commerce entrepreneur Michael G. Rubin announced the launch of his newest endeavor, Kynetic, a company singularly focused on building consumer internet businesses that capitalize on the digital transformation of commerce. Kynetic includes three brands at the forefront of innovation in the online commerce space: Fanatics, Rue La La and ShopRunner.

More than 50 percent of e-commerce shoppers cited shipping as a reason for abandoning their shopping carts online, according to research conducted by Royal Mail, the U.K. equivalent of the U.S. Postal Service.

Charming Shoppes’s plus-size Lane Bryant division announced the launch of Fashion Genius, a new technology that provides personalized product recommendation services. The technology offers one-of-a-kind fit and style solution guides through a simple survey that combines a woman’s curves, fit issues and signature styles to individual merchandise items in just three minutes and with no measurements required.

Groupon has begun offering discounts on products sold over the web in the U.K., thrusting the internet-coupon company into closer competition with the likes of Amazon and eBay.