E-Commerce

For the last 25 years, Dennis May has been involved in the retail industry — and he's loved every second of it. From his modest beginning selling audio equipment to help support himself while in college (that was the cool job at the time, May recalls) to his tenure today as president and CEO of one of the fastest-growing cross-channel retail brands out there, the one constant has been retail. But that's just part of the reason we've chosen May as our 2011 cross-channel retailer of the year.

In the July/August issue of Retail Online Integration, I discussed how important merchandising, strong navigation, instigated chat and customer reviews will be to achieving online selling success this holiday season. Here are five more things you should consider doing with your e-commerce site before it's too late.

An investigation continues into whether Kansas State University's online merchandise store is skirting sales tax law. Now some state legislators also are beginning to question its online practices. In early August it was reported that purchases made by Kansas residents at the "K-State Official Online Store" weren't being charged any sales taxes.

Urban Decay, the color cosmetic company, has relaunched its e-commerce site on the Demandware Commerce platform to support the growth of its online business in the U.S. and into international markets.

Has Groupon's ship sailed? With its IPO pending, the group-buying leader has seen traffic decline nearly 50 percent since its peak in the second week of June. That's according to new Hitwise data, excluding mobile and app specific traffic.

Facebook is getting out of the daily-deals business after four months of testing, a move that may ease some competitive pressure on industry leaders Groupon and LivingSocial. The world's largest social network launched Facebook Deals in April and started making offers in five cities with a small sales team arranging deals with local merchants. But the company also ran offers that were set up by 11 other daily-deal companies, including ReachLocal, Gilt City and Zozi.

Nordstrom announced it's now offering free standard shipping and returns from Nordstrom.com every day for online orders of every size. The company said it's broadening its online free shipping and returns policy to all customers in an effort to improve the online shopping experience.

For retailers with both online and physical stores, customers frequently use both channels to browse and buy products. Therefore, it's important for customer service employees to have visibility into all customer interactions and be able to answer questions related to both channels.

As retailers gear up for the holiday shopping season, many hope that the recent stock market turbulence won't prevent the strong end-of-year performance of years past. Retailers have come to count on the sales spike that traditionally occurs during Q4.

Online retailers like Amazon and eBay may see their sales growth cut if the economy goes into another recession, but they won't suffer as much as they did in the last one, an analyst wrote.