E-Commerce

Alibaba's 2019 Singles Day generated $38.4 billion in sales, a 26 percent increase over last year's total of $30.8 billion and and a record for the day. The day got off to a strong start for Alibaba, according to the company. Sales hit $12.01 billion in the first hour. Within an hour and a half, Alibaba’s…

In this episode of Retail Right Now, Total Retail's Joe Keenan and Kristina Stidham discuss next week's Singles Day, the online shopping holiday created by Chinese e-commerce retail giant Alibaba, which will takes place every year on Nov. 11. This massive global shopping event — it's twice as large as the five-day Black Friday/Cyber Monday…

There's an evolution occurring in a crucial segment of e-commerce: digital goods and services. Companies like Netflix, Airbnb, and FanDuel have built digital empires that have reshaped the media, travel and gaming industries. In doing so, these businesses (and their peers) are not only driving digital commerce forward, they're reshaping the purchasing expectations of a…

Brands have increasingly recognized the need to add direct-to-consumer (D-to-C) distribution to their traditional retail channels. Our research suggests broad adoption of some kind of D-to-C activity across categories (from 100 percent of major footwear and apparel brands to under 20 percent for food and beverage brands selling online), but we've seen surprisingly few firms…

It’s no secret that customer experience — whether in-store or online — is a critical part of business success. Shoppers have more options than ever to acquire the product or service of their choice, and increasingly simple ways to move from one brand to another if the experience they’re having is subpar. The statistics back…

Every online retailer knows the importance of a well-optimized shopping cart. However, cart conversion strategies have mostly been driven by gut feeling in the past. Marketers often rely on intuition to determine what features make website visitors become customers. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) and personalization tools are making it easier to gain more insights into…

In episode 220 of Total Retail Talks, Executive Editor Joe Keenan interviews Louis Amoroso, president, direct-to-consumer at DRINKS, which operates Wine Insiders, the leading consumer marketplace for high-quality and affordable premium wine available for delivery across the United States. Amoroso discusses the brand's history, how it evolved from a mail order catalog to an online…

Amazon.com is one of the world’s largest online retail platforms. In the e-commerce industry, it isn’t unusual to hear comments such as: “There’s e-commerce, and then there's Amazon.” With Amazon enlisting over 1 million new sellers in 2019 alone, how can new entrepreneurs and startups compete? The following are some useful tips that will help businesses…

The American Catalog Mailers Association (ACMA) recently conducted a follow-up poll to see how e-commerce, catalog, direct and other remote merchants have fared since the Supreme Court’s June 2018 decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., which overturned the old Quill v. North Dakota remote sales tax collection physical presence standard. The first poll was…

There's a rising trend for technology companies to invest in the grocery space, with Amazon.com's acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017 being the most dramatic indicator of this. The acquisition gave Amazon the brick-and-mortar presence it needed for minimizing returns, making delivery easier and maximizing marketing, and it gave Whole Foods a national network for…