Las Vegas – Notice anything different on the retail landscape? Chapter 11 filings by well-known retailers have slowed, and both merchants and vendors are beginning to announce some major moves and changes.
Speaking Sept. 22 at the Shop.org annual summit at Mandalay BayResort and Casino, Richard Last, vice president – new business development for general merchant J.C. Penney, said there have been several game-changing events over the past 60 days that are making retailers think about the future.
And in each of the six Last outlined, he said it’s more proof that e-commerce is the shining star of retail.
First there was the July 22 purchase of Zappos.com by Amazon, which Last said gave Amazon a greater presence in apparel.
What followed about a week later was a 10-year partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft that would allow Yahoo to focus more on its pay-per-click ad platform and also give Microsoft another channel for its relaunched Bing search engine.
At the end of the summer, mega discount retailer Walmart announced it was going to open an online marketplace and open it up to third-party retailers (Sears announced a similar plan last week).
Target.com also this summer announced it would not renew its partnership with Amazon, and would launch Target.com on its own platform by holiday 2010.
European advertising firm Publicis also made an announcement that it would acquire interactive firm Razorfish from Microsoft, which would allow the traditional advertising firm to grab a better footprint in the digital world.
And just last week, Adobe announced its plans to buy online analytics firm Omniture in an attempt to enter that field.
Multichannel Merchant is Tweeting live from Shop.org. Twitter.com/mcmerchant