Tim Parry
Did the 2012 calendar year end on a high note for retailers? It depends on which retailers you ask. And in a case like Limited Brands, the answer could simple be “yes, no and maybe.” But indications are customers were buying from their desks during the workday or from their tablets in front of the television at night.
Free Shipping Day is Dec. 17, and more than $1 billion in ecommerce sales will be generated that day. To score sales wins on Free Shipping Day, merchants need to promote what discount they offer widely, while at the same time clearly communicating deadlines and limitations.
Every merchant
Baseball is a big sport, but you need tiny little fingers to navigate the MLB.com Shop on an iPad. The left-hand nav and the dropdowns are tough to maneuver if you have fat fingers, or are just clumsy like me. But once I got to where I wanted to be
Placing an order with Harry & David was as simple as you could expect. Getting a reminder that I haven’t completed my order was not. I signed in and purposely abandoned my cart with hopes Harry & David would send me some sort of reminder to buy. But that has not happened.
Online measurement firm comScore today reported U.S. retail e-commerce spending surpassed $1 billion on Black Friday, up 26% vs. Black Friday 2011. But Black Friday was not the only big day for ecommerce. comScore reported a 32% rise in Thanksgiving Day shopping to $663 million.
Total Black Friday weekend spending online and in store reached an estimated $59.1 billion, up 12.7% from $52.4 billion last Black Friday weekend, according to a National Retail Federation survey conducted by BIGinsight.
Overall, online sales were up close to 24 percent over 2011. But what really stood out this year was the impact of mobile. As retailers continue to deliver multi-screen experiences that connect customers with personalized deals across multiple screens including PCs, smartphones, and tablets, mobile traffic soared to 27.8 percent, with the number of consumers using a movable device to make a purchase reaching 14.4 percent.
Sales that originated from paid search grew on Thanksgiving Day, despite trending down in November, according to statistics compiled by ChannelAdvisor.
The National Retail Federation said today that low October retail sales figures were down due to Superstorm Sandy and the impending fiscal cliff. NRF chief economist Jack Kleinhenz said in a press release that Superstorm Sandy will have short-term and long-term reverberations on the economy, and here’s why NRF president and CEO Matthew Shay said in the same release that the looming fiscal cliff is a larger threat to the overall economy.