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.
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Labels: eCommerce

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 More»

Labels: eBay, eCommerce

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 More»

Labels: eCommerce, Internet Marketing, Online Advertising

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.

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Labels: eCommerce, online services, Yahoo

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 - More»

Labels: eCommerce

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 More»

Labels: eCommerce, Online Advertising