Retail Stores

A move away from online channels and toward physical spaces — e.g., pop-up, outlet and brick-and-mortar stores — to market products is trending for Retail Online integration readers, at least according to this year's Annual Trends Survey. They'll also rely more on television, digital catalogs and social media this year to increase consumer engagement and ultimately grow sales. Their biggest challenge? For the third year in a row, customer acquisition.

Welcome to Retail Online Integration's third annual list of the best and brightest women in the cross-channel retail industry. The women highlighted on this list are marketing and merchandising professionals, e-commerce experts, and chief executive officers at cross-channel retail companies of all sizes. They've all helped to position their companies to succeed in today's fast-paced cross-channel retail environment.

True confession: I love it when mail quantities in the United States are down. Although this trend is overall bad for our industry, in the here and now it's good news. The reason? There will be less competition in the mailbox for my clients. As a result, their response will soar. Catalogs and direct mail continue to drive sales for niche and specialty B-to-B companies, but a question persists: Through web optimization, can't you get all of these sales by spending a lot less money?

What's old is new again for some e-commerce retailers. After bowing to the realization that customers often like to see items in person before buying, a growing number of online retail companies are setting up physical stores, while at the same time redefining what brick and mortar means for them.

Just browsing? That will cost you at some retailers. At Vera Wang's bridal boutique in Shanghai, consumers must fork over about $482 (or 3,000 yuan) for a 90-minute time slot to try on dresses, China's Global Times newspaper reports. The store isn't alone. At a Brisbane, Australia, specialty food store, shoppers have to pay $5 for just looking, according to a post on Reddit. "There has been high volume of people who use this store as a reference and then purchase goods elsewhere," the company's sign said.

There was a 79 percent drop in shopping integrations showing retailers’ products within universal or "blended" search results on Google last year, according to new research from search and social analytics provider Searchmetrics. The drop coincides with Google starting to charge retailers to use its Google Shopping service. The previously free service, which gave retailers the opportunity to have their products displayed in shopping integrations for shopping-related Google searches, switched to a pay-for-inclusion model in the U.S. in October 2012.

Amazon.com and omnichannel are sexy topics that grab a lot of retail press. But at the end of the day, Wal-Mart is the largest retailer on the planet, and the second largest company in terms of revenue. To continue to grow and remain profitable is a remarkable feat given the size of its worldwide operation. And Wal-Mart is never one to rest on its laurels! I've posted previously about Wal-Mart's Lab, ventures in social media and its own initiatives in "long tail" e-commerce.

The path to operational agility hasn't yet been forged. Lots of companies are investing in technology to get them there, but most are making a fundamental IT mistake. They're trying to solve the agility challenge with the same business software they've been using for the past 30 years. Unfortunately, traditional business software systems come up short when it comes to supply chain orchestration on a global scale. Those systems were designed to work within a single company, not between the different companies and partners which make up a global supply chain.

With website load time affecting multiple critical business metrics — including return visits, bounce rate, customer satisfaction and revenue — speed has become an increasingly urgent issue for online retailers. To understand how this urgency has translated into improved web performance, Radware, a provider of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, released a new study, State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance, Spring 2013. 

CPG companies are increasingly entering the retail world through their own brick-and-mortar stores and online sales as they continue to expand the brand and seek added-revenue streams. It used to be if you wanted a product produced by a CPG (consumer