Great expectations

| Ken Magill

Attention online merchants: Your customers’ patience for technical foul-ups getting in the way of their purchases is wearing dangerously thin.

The reason: As e-commerce site experiences continue to improve, customer expectations improve right along with them.

FIRE UP your creative team

| KEVIN KOTOWSKI

It happens to every creative department. Between tight schedules, last-minute revisions and rush projects, the creative staff falls into a rut. Designers

Movers & shakers

| MCM staff

General merchant J.C. Penney Co. has hired Ruby Anik as senior vice president and director of brand marketing. Anik joins J.C. Penney from Best Buy, where

IAC splitting into five companies

| MCM staff

IAC/InterActiveCorp, whose properties include HSN and the Cornerstone Brands catalogs, will spin itself off into five separate publicly traded companies.

Best deal for FAO Schwarz

| MCM staff

Upscale toy merchant FAO Schwarz in November acquired Best & Co., a luxury children’s apparel and accessories merchant. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Children’s market growing up

| Monica Kitchen

From birth through their early teens, kids need a lot of stuff. The children’s catalog market includes clothing, home decor, toys, art supplies, educational

Listing forward

| Tim Parry

Is the list business dead? Or, to put it more politely, is it still serving the needs of multichannel merchants? Some list firms have added modeling services.

New tricks for Old Pueblo

| MCM staff

AMY AFRICA Whether we like it or not, users like Websites that have structure. That’s why the most successful e-commerce sites all look the same. Users