E-Commerce

Vogue and Elle have long influenced what image-conscious consumers buy. Now, in a bid to reverse flagging sales and stay relevant, fashion magazines may sell the products they feature in their articles.

Hold on to your credit cards ladies, because Miu Miu is finally launching its first e-commerce site on April 6th. The site includes a fashion show selection offering exclusive key looks from Miu Miu’s Paris runway, a top zoom function that helps simulate a live shopping experience, and a newsletter for special online-only products, events and brand initiatives.

eBay is launching its deepest integration with Milo on its search platform. Milo’s local availability results will show eBay shoppers which local stores currently have a desired item in stock and how much it costs at each location. Milo currently provides access to millions of products from approximately 50,000 stores across all 50 states.

Baby boomers, college students, young professionals, empty nesters — you name a demographic, it's represented on Facebook. As a result, social networking sites, particularly Facebook, present tremendous opportunities for supporting your strategic needs for new customer acquisition every day.

Upon learning of the changes that Amazon was making to its product categorization mapping last summer, Signature Styles was faced with a di-
lemma: Make the necessary adjustments to its Amazon data feed in-house, or contract the work out to a third-party provider.

The cross-channel retail industry is at a crossroads. For starters, due to the economic downturn, the past couple of years have been difficult for the retail sector. But that's changing. Retailers are starting to see signs of life and are breathing a sigh of relief. At press time, for example, it was announced that February retail sales increased 0.6 percent over January and 4.2 percent year-over-year, according to the National Retail Federation.

Just when you thought Facebook couldn't get any bigger, a recent study from Webtrends shows that Fortune 500 brands are seeing more web traffic go to their Facebook pages than their websites.

Best Buy is expanding its online-only assortment in key product categories as a way to clear up some of the static that has clouded its financial picture in recent months. Revenues for the retailer's fourth quarter, which ended February 26, 2011, declined 2 percent (to $16.2 billion) compared to the same period the previous year, while same store sales dropped 4.6 percent.

Gap has opened an online store on China's biggest e-commerce platform Taobao, in an effort to lure savvy Chinese shoppers outside wealthy cities. Gap opened its store on Taobao Mall, alongside the likes of Adidas, Levi Strauss & Co and Japan's Uniqlo.

The more active a brand is on Facebook, the better chance consumers will "Like" it. This was the key finding from a recent study on retailers' growth on Facebook and Twitter conducted by marketing agency Media Logic. However, a follow-up study released this month shows that the majority of brands on Facebook saw their growth on the social media site lose steam as the holiday season came and went.