Merchandising

What matters most to online shoppers? Hint: It has less to do with specific products and everything to do with communication, and that includes shipping and returns. You'll find key insights into what makes online shoppers click, consumers’ online shopping preferences, what shipping and post-purchase services enhance the customer experience most, and more with this fact-filled whitepaper. Check it out here!

Two years after Target angered gay marriage supporters with a political donation that benefited a fiery gay marriage opponent seeking t

Nordstrom and GQ have announced a multimedia strategy designed to integrate GQ editorial into the Nordstrom online shopping experience. Nordstrom will host an online store that will feature "GQ Selects," a selection of men's products handpicked from the pages of the magazine by the editors of GQ. Beginning with GQ's July issue, the items will be designated in-book, compiled on GQ.com and available for purchase on NordstromMen.com. "Our customers look to us for style advice," said David Witman, Nordstrom general merchandise manager, menswear. "Who better to partner with than GQ, the authoritative style experts?" 

HanesBrands, the parent of Champion and Hanes, said it plans to narrow the focus of its worldwide imagewear business by restructuring to exit noncore segments and reduce risk. The company announced the sale of its European imagewear division and, in the U.S, the exit from the private-label category and the planned divestiture of its OuterBanks brand. Imagewear, which sells basic apparel to wholesalers in the screen-print market, accounts for 8 percent of the company’s sales before the actions. Hanes expects to incur pretax charges in the second quarter of up to $85 million to $95 million.

Online retailing has existed for nearly 20 years, and product recommendations have been around for almost as long due to the pioneering work of Amazon.com, which applied for a patent on its collaborative filtering technology in 1998. Since then, a majority of retailers have adopted online product recommendations. Yet many of these implementations are still fairly primitive because they fail to understand an online shopper’s real-time product needs.

Workers at a Cambodian garment factory that makes clothes for Levi's, Gap and other well-known international brands are striking for more pay and better working conditions. More than 5,000 workers from the Singaporean-owned SL Garment Processing (Cambodia) Ltd. failed to reach an agreement with their employers Tuesday to end an 11-day strike. Ath Thon, director of the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers, said workers are demanding an increase in their base pay of $61 a month for 8-hour days, six days a week. He said they want a $5 salary hike and an extra $25 a month for transportation and housing.

Giving potential customers the information they actually want is one of the most effective ways to grab their attention in today's fragmented media landscape. With the right tools in place, once you have a visitor's interest, it becomes easier to guide individual website experiences, with conversion as the ultimate goal.

What you will learn:

- The importance of making a great first impression through relevant website content
- How PODS employed a relevancy strategy to double its percentage of business that is booked online
- How to use customer segmentation strategies to drive more relevant content
- How triggered marketing campaigns can help improve the online retail experience

Marketers have developed quite a bag of promotion and coupon tricks to get consumers to spend more at the checkout counter or when mailing in the order form. The good news for online retailers is that modern e-commerce software lets them easily adapt these proven promotional techniques to an online environment to lift average order sizes, revenues and profits.

You Will Learn About:

- Free Shipping
- Premiums
- Discounts
- Coupons
- and more!

Digital Content is everywhere - your website, blogs, social media outposts, and every mobile device imaginable. And with customers and prospects radically adjusting to this wealth of information, companies are investing in developing digital content like never before. Despite their efforts, however, these same companies often miss valuable opportunities because they lack a well-rounded content marketing strategy.

This new whitepaper from Bridgeline Digital identifies the top 10 steps to building a content marketing strategy that you can execute within your company in an effective and timely manner.

What you will learn:

- What is content marketing management
- Why you should treat content like a critical business asset
- How to understand the content needs of your audience
- Why maintaining an editorial calendar is so important
- Why you need to give your content a "voice"
- Why content management and web analytics tools can best help you deliver relevant content

Better known as an electronics and appliance retailer, Minneapolis-based Best Buy entered kitchenware retailing when it joined forces with Cooking.com to launch the Best Buy Kitchen Shop microsite. The Best Buy Kitchen Shop is operated by the online kitchenware retailer and adds more than 3,000 kitchenware products to the Best Buy site. "We're always looking for ways to enhance our customers’ online shopping experience, and this partnership delivers more ways to shop when and where they want," said Liz Haesler, vice president of Home Business Group for Best Buy.