eCommerce Best Practices

Wal-Mart’s ecommerce website gets a revamp with new social features like ‘Trending Now’, which is designed to match the shopping patterns of the new-age online customers.

The world’s largest retailer is making extensive use of its 4,000-plus store footprint along with mobility to achieve dominance in the digital sphere.

Walmart now credits revenues to brick-and-mortar stores for online purchases that are picked up there, reducing the sense of internal inter-channel competition, according to Neil Ashe, CEO of Walmart’s global ecommerce division. He added that about half of the merchandise ordered on Walmart’s website is shipped directly to a store, according to published reports, and that Walmart is also the only e-commerce site that allows its customers to pay cash for online purchases.

Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has decided to acquire 17% stake in Weibo, microblogging website owned by online media company Sina Corp, for $586 million. Both companies have also agreed on another term in which Alibaba will increase the stake to 30% over a certain period of time on for a mutually agreed valuation.

Both companies decided to forge partnership in the areas like online marketing, data exchange, online payment, and account connectivity. Weibo and Alibaba also looks to explore new business models in the social commerce arena to leverage their large user base in their ecommerce platforms.

Over the next three years, Weibo is expected to generate $380 million in advertising and social commerce through this deal. Read more

Forrester, the global research and advisory firm, predicts that ecommerce will create another 161,000 jobs over the next 5 years in addition to the existing 409,000 jobs. The new jobs will be created mainly in Customer Service, Technology and Fulfillment departments.

Baynote has created an infograhic to give a broader perspective on this:

According to Internet Retailer, Asda, the subsidiary of retail giant Walmart and one of the largest grocery stores in United Kingdom, plans to strengthen its ecommerce presence.

Asda is planning to invest about £ 700 million ($1.07 billion) to bolster its ecommerce, as per Internet Retailer. This massive investment will create more than 2500 jobs within ecommerce, supply chain and other few areas.

“By focusing on their needs through accelerating our investment in the technology and infrastructure to make shopping more convenient, customers can shop for what they want when they want it,” said Andy Clarke, Asda CEO.

Much has been made in recent months about the phenomenon of ecommerce conducted over multiple devices. The age of the desktop PC as the main method of connecting to the internet in general seems to be on the wane.

People want ecommerce on mobiles and all the conveniences that retailers can provide. Such convenience generally comes down to mobile applications, or apps, used by consumers on their tablets and smartphones.

Arbitron recently noted in their research how Apple’s iOS, a mainstay on the company’s iPhones and iPads, leads Android-equipped devices in terms of usage of shopping apps. 67.5 percent of iOS users are using apps for mobile commerce in Arbitron’s mobile U.S. smartphone panel compared to 43.9 percent of Android users.

For those Apple devotees using mobile commerce apps, this translates into 35 online shopping trips per month, occupying 105.3 minutes of a consumer’s time on average. Android shoppers spent 87.6 minutes on their 29.5 sessions per month. Read more

The Polish ecommerce market is now valued at 21.5 billion Zloty (5.2 billion Euro), according to research website NoKaut.pl.

“The prognosis for 2013 anticipates that the market in Poland will grow once again by more than 20 percent,” said Stefan Nowak, a management consultant for Nokaut.pl, as cited by the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

Meanwhile, analysts are predicting that the largest growth of the coming years will be in mobile commerce (m-commerce), which covers online shopping made with mobile phones or tablets.

However, in a separate report by internet research firm Gemiusz, it was found that 42 percent of respondents who shop online believe that the process is risky, even though they continue to do it.

Generally, respondents stated that they found e-commerce to be cheaper and quicker than traditional shopping. Read more

Magento, the premier ecommerce platform provider, acquired by eBay in 2011, announced the upgrade of its enterprise version with PayPal integration, the payment processor eBay acquired recently. The announcement came in the Imagine ecommerce conference organized by Magento. Magento also offers a free version on this application as ‘Community Edition’, which is used by several small businesses.

The company called the new edition the “most dramatic step forward in this history of our platform” when it came to offering merchants the ability to scale their businesses.

The new edition offers optimized catalogue indexing, improved content caching, streamlined checkout flow, and improved tax recommendations enable customers to extract ever-greater value, including faster load times and lower overall costs, from their Magento platform. Read more

Myntra Designs, the parent company of Myntra.com, an ecommerce website, acquired San Francisco based virtual fitting room startup – Fitiquette for an undisclosed amount.

Fitiquette is a developer of virtual fitting room technology founded by Andy Pandharikar and Anant Kumar. Supported by patented technology, Fitiquette enables shoppers to create a body replica to try-on clothing in different sizes. The product is still in pilot mode, but it has already gained some traction: a limited beta launch attracted some 20,000 users and somewhere between 2 million and 3 million try-ons, as reported by Techcrunch.

Victoria Beckham, the spice girl-turned-fashion designer and the wife of ace footballer David Beckham, has finally launched her ecommerce website – victoriabeckham.com

Mrs. Beckham’s ecommerce website went viral just hours after its launch, courtesy the celebrated couple’s fan following and brand value. The website also sold out the retro-inspired tops and sun glasses designed by Victoria Beckham.

Driven by an unprecedented growth in smartphones and tablets, US ecommerce sales is set to reach $370 billion by the end of 2017, predicts Forrester.

In the newly released report titled – ‘US Online Retail Forecast 2012-2017’, Forrester indicates that mobile will play a critical role in the prevailing ecommerce boom in US.

“Mobile’s effect is largely to influence sales in other channels. Conversions are small and likely will be small for most sites into the foreseeable future, says Sucharita Mulpuru, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.