Title Nine

Chrissy Ginieczki, vice president of marketing and e-commerce at Title Nine Sports, spoke to Total Retail at last month's Total Retail Tech summit about the women's athletic wear brand's current content marketing campaign, The B-Word, and how it's using content to connect with customers. In addition, Ginieczki offered her thoughts on which retail technologies she believes will have…

Social login — the ability to use social network profiles from Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and others for online registration in a few clicks — is gaining momentum despite some public relations and implementation hiccups. If you aren't on the bandwagon, now is the time to hitch up.

There was a time not that long ago when retailers exploring new ways to execute effective social engagement strategies would face a barrage of questions about return on investment. How do we know, CFOs and other company leaders would ask, if all that tweeting, liking, and pinning is doing anything for the bottom line? Where's the proof that the investments in maintaining, monitoring and updating an ever-expanding array of social media outposts are driving conversions and increasing profits? Fair questions to be sure.

Forward-thinking retailers have come to view online customer reviews as a key tool to help shoppers gain confidence in their purchases and drive conversions. Instead of being threatened by reviews, they embraced them, integrating them into their sites and social outposts and honing techniques to make them as authentic and useful to shoppers as possible. Here are a few ways to make sure your customer review program is best-of-breed:

Since launching in 1995, Amazon.com has expanded from selling books to offering just about every product imaginable, with revenues growing twice as fast as overall U.S. e-commerce. Virtually everything is presented and merchandised identically, like an online mega warehouse. Your opportunity to compete lies in stressing what makes your brand and products unique by forging personal connections with consumers and offering greater value. Amazon sells products; you can sell brand experiences.

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.

A compilation of this year’s best and brightest ideas in our annual 50 Best Tips issue.

In a fast-paced session at the opening day of the NEMOA directXchange conference in Boston, Ken Burke, chairman, founder and chief evangelist of MarketLive, an e-commerce software platform and service provider, and Kelly Goldsmith, e-commerce manager at Title Nine, a cross-channel retailer of women's athletic apparel, tackled the question all retailers want an answer to: How can I make money via social media?

Along with closely held Title Nine and VF Corp.'s Lucy brand, Lululemon belongs to an emerging class of retailers focused primarily on designing, making and selling athletic wear to women — and grabbing growing shares of the estimated $15 billion market for women's fitness attire.

Inventory flexibility is the best way to maximize sales in today’s economy. But many challenges prevent marketers with both direct fulfillment centers and retail stores from maximizing the inventory they have. E-commerce, catalog and retail have different planning methods and accuracy issues. It’s one thing to get the size distribution right for a region and store, but it’s another to plan for the way colors sell.