Last year, Target announced that they would be ending their relationship with Amazon and bringing their e-commerce operations in-house. I only assume that many e-commerce platforms and integration partners were courting the large retailer, touting their services. Yesterday, the retailer announced the full list of vendors that will be involved in the nearly 2 year project:
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Sapient Corp., based in Boston, as the lead partner and integrator,
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International Business Machines Corp., based in Armon, NY, which will provide the multichannel e-commerce platform,
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Oracle, based in Redwood City, Calif., which will provide the database platform,
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Endeca Technologies Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass., which will provide search and navigation functionality,
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Autonomy Corp., based in San Francisco, which will provide content and digital asset-management functionality,
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Sterling Commerce Inc., Dublin, Ohio, which will provide global inventory visibility and cross-channel order-management functionality, and
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Huge Inc.,based in Brooklyn, NY, will provide visual and interaction design.
This is going to be an interesting project to watch and I can’t wait to see what Target and their vendors come up with. A highly visible, successful brand that is already known for a pleasant in-store shopping experience will have a very high bar to meet as re-platform their e-commerce offering.
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Valentine’s Day is just a few days away. I wanted to see how various retailers are promoting the holiday in order to see how they are working to increase last minute sales. Below you’ll see screenshots of various e-commerce sites that are ready for the Holiday: from department stores, to jewelry, candy, and lingerie.
I find it interesting to see a holiday like Valentine’s Day play out over the web. On one hand, there is the traditional retail focus on jewelry, flowers, and accessories but they are interspersed with free shipping promotions, shipping guidelines, and gift finders. Throw in a lot of red, red, and more red and you have the state of e-commerce as we run full force into the Valentine’s Day holiday.
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Handbag Planet is a new store that is launching tomorrow and they are using social media to promote their site launch. They’re giving away 24 handbags over the course of the launch day and entries to the contest are gained through posting about the site to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks.
The contest and social media campaign must be working as word of mouth seems to be strong on various networks. A search on Twitter returns 6 pages of results while a Google blog search returns close to 3,000 mentions. I’d assume that the positive word of mouth could lead into positive first day sales. If they also offer good customer service and a strong product, they can hopefully convert some of the first day customers into repeat customers.
I’m very interested to see how this plays out, how the website looks, and how their long term prospects look. I’ll sure be looking at the site tomorrow to check it out and, of course, with this blog post I wil hpefully win my fiancee a new handbag. It’s a win-win for all of us.
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Someone forgot to merchandise these products in the J.Crew store:
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The twitterverse is abuzz with the fact that Amazon.com is down. Reports of the outage seem to have come in around 1:25 PM EDT. Users trying to reach the site are greeted with a “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error.
Pretty significant outage for this major e-commerce retailer. My rough estimate is that the site outage costs Amazon 1.7 million dollars in revenue for every hour they are down. Pretty crazy.
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Almost one year ago, I discussed the number of reasons why Gap, Inc. should integrate all of their brands online. Today, they’ve taken the first steps to doing exactly this. They’ve announced upgrades to their website that integrates their brand websites into one shopping session. Now, the customer is able to shop all four brands (Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Piperlime) using one shopping cart, one checkout process, and one shipping method. Kudos to Gap for making it easier for the user to shop their brands all at once.
I would still like Gap to recommend products across brands – Sell me a pair of Old Navy shorts with my Gap hoodie. I would still like to see them blog about new fashion items and offer ways to mix and match items across brands. But an integrated shopping and checkout experience is a positive step forward for this retailer.
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