Online Holiday Sales Grow

E-tailers came out ahead of traditional offline retailers this holiday season. The rumblings about a possible recession, high gas prices, housing market crisis, and high credit card debts have negatively impacted holiday sales this year. Offline retailers felt the pinch and are reporting a small increase of 2.4%, whereas, online sales were up 22.4% from the 2006 holiday shopping season according to the MasterCard SpendingPulse. comScore is also reporting that online retail sales increased 19% over a year ago, hitting a record $26.2 billion from Nov. 1 through Dec. 21.

eBay Versus Tiffany

eBay, the online marketplace bringing circa 248M buyers and sellers together, is embroiled in a legal battle with Tiffany & Co. which is claiming that eBay is a distribution network for the trading of counterfeit Tiffany items.

This is a precedent setting case should Tiffany win which could open the floodgates for lawsuits against eBay from other retailers being squeezed by the online marketplace. But is it a reasonable expectation that eBay should be liable for the authenticity of each of the 102 million products sold at any point in time on their site. As eBay states, they "never take possession of any of the goods sold on the site" and they "go above and beyond what the law requires[...] to keep counterfeits off the site." Clearly, that's not working all that well. Some experts believe that if eBay really wanted to keep counterfeit off their site, they could.

Tiffany is arguing that eBay profits from these sales and as such is liable for copyright infringement. eBay's argument is that the burden of policing responsibility lies on the trademark owner, Tiffany, because Tiffany has the necessary expertise to identify counterfeits of its products. The judge has cited legal precedents that have found that if a manufacturer or distributor continues to supply a product knowing it is engaging in trademark infringement, that manufacturer or distributor is "contributorily responsible" for any harm done as a result of the deceit. The jury's out on this one for now.

10 Successful Email Campaigns Tips

There’s much that marketers can be doing right now to ensure a smooth and successful holiday marketing campaign, and email is an easy channel to plan ahead for.

Top tips for polishing your holiday email marketing campaign include:

1. Send out emails early to capture those early-bird shoppers.

2. Prepare an auto-responder for those periods when you may be too busy to create new content..

3. Promote your gift cards, which are proving to be a very popular gift option this year.

4. Increase convenience by providing easy web-to-store deliveries or entice users in to their local store.

5. Ramp up relevancy – your customers will be inundated with emails over the next few weeks, so make sure yours are relevant, targeted and relate to any historical shopping data you may have on each customer.

6. Keep your delivery dates clear or consider a delivery countdown clock to ensure your customers won’t be disappointed or caught unawares.

7. Offer free shipping, most of the big online stores are offering free or heavily discounted shipping rates.

8. Concisely categorize your products so consumers can go straight to the items they are looking for, i.e. Gifts for Her, Gifts for Pets, Gifts for Teens.

9. Include a call to action in every email, whether it be to update their personal information, download a new brochure, view a special offer or enter a competition.

10. Last, but not least, check your email deliverability to ensure your messages aren’t being deleted before they even get to your customer’s inbox.

By Helen Leggat Bizreport.com

Cyber Monday Shuts Down Yahoo

Yahoo! Small Business the service for powering shopping carts for small businesses is down and closed for business. The services is suffering from intermittent outages today as shoppers flock to e-commerce sites on company time. “Cyber Monday” is an important day for e-tailers, and such an outage is quite embarrassing for Yahoo.

Black Friday Sees $531 Million in Spending

Online retail spending was up on Thanksgiving Day 29 percent to $272 million and Black Friday 22 percent to $531 million. Per comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni "the Friday after Thanksgiving is known for heavy spending in retail stores, but it’s clear that consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet to make their holiday purchases. We would expect Cyber Monday sales be even stronger than Black Friday’s and to exceed $700 million."

And what are people buying: (detailed breakdown)
- Video Games, Consoles & Accessories
- Furniture, Appliances & Equipment
- Consumer Electronics
- Sport & Fitness
- Apparel & Accessories

Cyber Monday Showdown

Online retail sales for Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving and the online version of the traditional in-store Black Friday, is being watched with anticipation. Cyber Monday sales in 2005 were $608 M, a 26% increase from 2005 according to comScore. Online retailers are pulling out the stops on promotional activities such as email campaigns, free shipping, and one-day only sales. Cyber Monday specials are up from 43% two years ago according to BizRate Research. The convenience of online shopping, high gas prices, and crowd aversion are some of the reasons why some shoppers might opt instead for making their purchases online. Overall, Black Friday sales were good and are sending a signal of a stronger than expected holiday shopping season.