Amazon.com

Borders Group has launched its first e-bookstore. The company said its goal with the new store and e-reader is to take 17% of the electronic book market by next July. Amazon has the Kindle e-reader and Barnes & Noble has the Nook, and all the players are cutting prices to lure shoppers.Borders was later to this market than its rivals but said it took time to craft its strategy, which rests on selling books that can be used across multiple platforms rather than just one device.

1. Online retail growth in the context of overall retail and Amazon.com. Online sales today far outperform retail stores, and they continue to be a bright spot in the industry and a growth driver in retail overall. But retailers should also think about the web's impact on offline sales. "Looking at the impact the web has on offline sales makes you think about things differently, and makes you think about the fact that online sales are just the tip of the iceberg," Silverman said.

PROBLEM: ElectricShopping.com, a London-based online retailer of electronic appliances and accessories, wanted to increase the conversion rate on its website while reducing bounces. SOLUTION: Implemented an onsite comparative pricing tool to prove to consumers that its prices were the lowest. RESULTS: Sales increased in last year's fourth quarter after the tool's launch, with the website's conversion rate up 18.7 percent and bounce rate down 7.2 percent.

A request by the North Carolina Department of Revenue for personally identifiable Amazon.com customer data that could be linked to purchases is unconstitutional because it violates Internet users' rights to privacy and free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday. The ACLU, on behalf of seven Amazon customers, has intervened in a lawsuit that Amazon filed in April over an information request from the North Carolina Department of Revenue for all the purchase records of customers with a North Carolina shipping address since August 2003, as part of a tax audit.

As Best Buy faces heightened competition from rivals Wal-Mart and Amazon.com, the largest U.S. electronics retailer is confronting a longstanding disadvantage: fewer women shoppers. Best Buy's customers and worker are overwhelmingly male, a vestige from its days as a seller of speakers and stereo equipment. While Best Buy estimated earlier this year that it commanded roughly 22 percent of U.S. consumer electronics sales, its share of sales to women was just 16 percent, and only 31 percent of store workers are women. Now, the Richfield, Minn.-based retailer is trying to bridge its gender gap.

Welcome to Online Retailing 2.0. Traditional brick-and-mortar retailers once outsourced their online sales to specialty "fulfillment" companies. Today they are running their own online operations — and increasingly challenging their executive brainpower to find more sophisticated ways to compete with online-only retailers such as Amazon.com.

Amazon.com, the world’s largest online merchant, won the top spot in an annual survey of the healthiest U.S. and Canadian retailers for a second year in a row as more shoppers make purchases online. Amazon’s technology keeps inventory levels and expenses down, said Consensus Advisors Chief Executive Officer Michael O’Hara, whose firm did the survey. Aeropostale, Urban Outfitters, CVS Caremark Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores round out the top five in the list, released this week.

Sears has been delivering refrigerators and washing machines to U.S. homes for decades. Now the company is looking into delivering groceries too. The service, an expansion of Sears' year-old MyGofer online shopping portal, quietly launched on Memorial Day in Manhattan and in the Hamptons, said Tom Aiello, spokesman for the Hoffman Estates-based company. The home delivery service — which brings groceries, prescriptions, electronics and other goods from its Kmart stores — is slated to roll out to Chicago and other markets this summer, he said.

In a session he led at the refocused Retail Marketing Conference in Orlando, Fla., Bill LaPierre, senior vice president of direct marketing and list firm Direct Media/Millard, discussed why traditional catalog marketers have encountered difficulty transitioning into online merchants. A recap of LaPierre's session follows, along with five pitfalls to avoid when shifting from a catalog-centric business to an online-driven operation.

Whether you want to grow your business or maintain your database size as customers age out, prospecting is a challenge every successful cross-channel retailer needs to master. For some, buying lists and using paid search are the beginning and end of their prospecting efforts. But many eventually realize that to grow their businesses — and combat limited list universes
and increasingly competitive paid search pricing — they need to look at expanding further into multichannel prospecting.