News

With Hurricane Katrina and the chief justice nominee hearings further complicating matters in Washington, postal reform is on the back burner for now.

Lake Forest, IL-based industrial maintenance, repair and operations distributor W.W. Grainger has 45 of its 400 U.S. branches located in the Gulf Coast region, including two in New Orleans.

LAS VEGAS–Online retailing is barely in its infancy and other than a few notable exceptions, such as Amazon.com and eBay, most online merchants have yet to deliver a truly compelling merchandising proposition, said Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of online media conglomerate IAC/InterActive Corp., during his keynote presentation here yesterday.

E-mail marketing saw a decline in bounce-back rates, but click-to-purchase conversion rates, and orders per e-mail delivered also slipped in the second quarter of 2005 compared with the same quarter last year, according to DoubleClick

E-commerce technology start-up Allurent introduced its first product here, a rich-media shopping cart aimed at reducing the number people who abandon purchases during checkout.

New York-based cataloger/retailer J. Crew Group reported a 150% leap in second-quarter operating income, to $20 million for the 13 weeks ended July 30.

Having changed its name from CatalogCity, Shop.com is in the midst of a rebranding effort to boost sales for its merchant customers and for the first time etch its name into consumers’ minds.

In a surprise move, $14.4 billion office products cataloger/retailer Office Depot on Sept. 12 said it planned to close the domestic operations of its Viking Office Products business and merge it within its Office Depot operations.

Shares of the initial public offering from Medford, OR-based Harry and David Holdings, the mailer of food gifts cataloger/retailer Harry and David and horticultural mailer Jackson & Perkins, will be offered at $13-$15 a share