Shipping

Google “e-commerce tips” and you’ll get endless pages of great advice on how to leverage content marketing, social media, conversion rate optimization, user experience design and lots of other techniques to sell more stuff. Unfortunately, these articles commonly omit advice on one of the most important e-commerce business-building disciplines: shipping. Shipping makes everything you do…

Earlier this week, Total Retail reported that nearly 90 percent of respondents to our recent survey, The Amazon Effect: How Retailers Are Adapting Their Businesses to Better Compete With the Industry Leader, said they “strongly" or “somewhat" agree that Amazon.com has changed consumers’ expectations for order delivery. Today, we look at how retailers view free…

Nearly 90 percent of respondents in a recent Total Retail and IBM survey said they “strongly" or “somewhat" agree that Amazon.com has changed consumers’ expectations for order delivery (see the chart below). The report, The Amazon Effect: How Retailers Are Adapting Their Businesses to Better Compete With the Industry Leader, analyzes the impact Amazon’s growing…

Office Depot will begin offering same-day delivery service just in time for back-to-school students and professionals alike. The office supplies retailer is partnering with Deliv, a crowdsourced, same-day delivery startup, to provide the shopping option. The service will roll out in three markets, including Atlanta and Los Angeles on Aug. 28, and in the Fort Lauderdale/Miami area…

Lowe's confirmed last week that it's laying off an undisclosed number of delivery workers nationwide as the company shifts to a third-party delivery service. In an email to The Charlotte Observer, the home improvement retailer said its decision is in response to “the growing demand for timely delivery,” including next-day delivery, in select markets. The latest layoff announcement…

Both FedEx and UPS have announced new, temporary holiday surcharges that will impact shipping costs for e-commerce businesses this holiday season. UPS In June, UPS announced a new peak season charge applicable during selected weeks in November and December 2017 for U.S. Residential, Large Packages and Packages Over Maximum Limits. The increase means that every…

As retailers know, much of Amazon’s success can be credited to its many innovations, from supply chain to customer experience to merchandising and more. To keep pace with the e-commerce leader and its many technology innovations, retailers have started to implement new technology capabilities of their own. In the chart below, taken from Total Retail's…

The holidays traditionally come with a spike in sales for retailers. This past holiday season was no different — the fourth quarter of 2016 yielded a 17.8 percent jump in online sales. Projections for 2017 are nearly as high. However, to prepare for the mad rush that is the holiday season, you need to get started now.…

USA Today recently published a report stating that Target, Costco, Hewlett-Packard and other big-name retailers have benefited from California port trucking companies that forced their drivers into debt, made them work up to 20 hours a day, and sometimes paid them pennies per hour. Retailers and manufacturers usually rely on subcontractors to move their products…

United Parcel Service (UPS) will levy peak surcharges to U.S. residential packages for the holiday season, an unprecedented move by the shipping giant to pay for rising costs. The charges, ranging from 27 cents to 97 cents per package, will be applied to individual and commercial customers shipping to U.S. residences in November and December, UPS…