Retail News CRM

Tag: Online

  • Amazon Business makes online debut

    Amazon Business makes online debut

    Amazon has introduced Amazon Business, a new marketplace on Amazon.com.

    On Amazon Business, sellers can list their offers in more than 45 business-specific categories, including office, IT, MRO, tools, scientific and food & beverage. The new store is initially open to US shoppers only, but overseas vendors can list prodicts there.

    Amazon says the portal gives sellers an opportunity to grow their sales by reaching millions of business customers located across America.

    “Selling to businesses has now become as easy as listing your products on Amazon. Amazon Business features exclusive business pricing tools, the ability for sellers to list their credentials and quantity discounts for qualifying purchases,” the company said in a statement.

    “Through Amazon Business, sellers can benefit from Amazon’s eCommerce expertise, visibility for their full product catalog on an established online marketplace and greater access to business customers to grow sales. Amazon Business is available to sellers based domestically and internationally, and compatible with the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service to meet rigorous delivery requirements expected by business customers.”

    Amazon Business features available to sellers now include:

    • Amazon Business Seller Program: Sellers that meet the performance and service requirements will be prominently featured to business customers.
    • Business Pricing and Quantity Discounts: One of the most requested features by business sellers is quantity pricing. Sellers can offer discounts when businesses purchase larger quantities. Sellers can also differentiate pricing to business customers.
    • Seller Credentials: Sellers can add credentials such as ISO 9001 certified, small business, women-, minority- and veteran-owned businesses to their seller profiles, which will be displayed to business customers.
    • Business Product Identifiers: Products that will be easily discoverable by customers using manufacturer and distributor part numbers (MPN/DPN) or National Stock Numbers (NSN) for purchases for government procurement.
    • Fulfillment by Amazon: With FBA, sellers store their products in Amazon fulfillment centers. When customer orders are received, Amazon will pick, pack, ship and provide customer service for these products.
    • Tax Exemption: Sellers participating in Amazon’s Tax Collection Services may also elect to participate in the Amazon Tax-Exemption Program (ATEP). ATEP allows customers to make tax-exempt purchases from participating sellers by providing a tax-exemption certificate and automates the process for participating sellers to accept tax-exemption certificates from customers.
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  • ‘Go mobile’ urges Alibaba

    ‘Go mobile’ urges Alibaba

    Mobile and differentiation were the key words when Alibaba Group Holding’s top executives introduced their strategy to 800 merchant attendees last week at the annual meeting of sellers on Taobao, its largest Chinese web marketplace.

    About 9 million merchants sell 1 billion items on Taobao.com, according to Alibaba, and mobile has become the marketplace’s major shopping venue. Alibaba reported that purchases from mobile devices accounted for 42 per cent of sales on its Chinese retail marketplaces in the quarter to December 31, 2014.

    Taobao.com is responding by creating new mobile services for merchants, including some that focus on social media marketing. In March, Taobao.com launched Xiaopu (which means “small booth” in Chinese), a feature in the Taobao app that enables merchants to upload product listings more quickly through mobile devices and connect more effectively with consumers through social media.

    “Xiaopu simplifies the steps to manage a store and could reduce the time to upload a product listing from 20 minutes to three minutes. For example, merchants can scan a bar code on a product to post a product,” says Zhang Kuo, director of Alibaba’s mobile business.

    “Xiaopu also allows merchants to post messages on Chinese social network Weibo to reach followers based their location. Consumers could buy products that are close to them, and even get the product from a merchant in person.”

    More than 2 million merchants have begun to use Xiaopu, according to Taobao.com.

    The focus on social media reflects its growing role in driving traffic to Taobao merchants, and the declining traffic from mobile consumers using Taobao’s internal search engine. “The mobile traffic from searches is decreasing. Now only 50 per cent of our mobile traffic comes from search, and more traffic is coming from recommendations in online communities and social media,” Zhang says.

    Alibaba also is taking steps to promote products that are unique or novel, as it tries to move away from its reputation as a wide-open online bazaar where sellers compete solely on price. In its latest move in this direction, Taobao.com launched a promotional event in March called Week of New Forces to sell about 100,000 apparel products through banners in prominent positon on the home page of the marketplace. Almost all the products come from youthful designers or rising web-only apparel brands that target a specific group of young consumers, according to Alibaba.

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  • Smart shopping list concept debuts

    Smart shopping list concept debuts

    Smart brands are quickly moving beyond simple eCommerce, using omni-channel retail to maximise their sales and customer relations.

    New from Australia, Booodl is a smart shopping list which helps consumers get the most out of their physical shopping trips by connecting the online and offline worlds.

    Booodl is a smartphone app that notifies consumers when they come in close proximity to products from their digital wish list. To begin, users create their list adding ‘wants’ online. Then, when they are out and about, the app notifies the customer when one of their ‘wants’ is stocked nearby: the user can then get directions to the shop, message the store or even order an Uber to the location, all within the app.

    They can then either pop in for a closer look or make the purchase and simply visit the shop to collect it.

    Booodl is currently available in Sydney where there are already over 1400 stores onboard. It plans to expand to other cities in the near future.

    Trend spotting service Springwise.com observes it has seen other products such as Amazon’s Dash button looking to create an effortless consumer experience and break down barriers between digital and physical retail environments.

    “How else could online be used to enhance real world purchasing, rather than competing with it?”

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  • foodpanda partners with HSBC in HK, Southeast Asia

    foodpanda partners with HSBC in HK, Southeast Asia

    Online food delivery service foodpanda is partnering with HSBC in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia.

    Customers and cardholders in eight Southeast Asian countries – Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Philippines, and India – will benefit from the partnership through discounts.

    In the first quarter of 2015, cardholders will get 25 percent off on all orders, and will enjoy HKD50 off on their first order for the rest of the year; subsequent orders will be discounted 10 percent for standard cardholders, and 15 percent for Premium cardholders.

    food panda has nearly nearly 500 restaurants in the region and offers the largest variety of restaurants and cuisines of any food delivery service in Hong Kong.

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  • Cyber attacks on US retailers drop, but records stolen remain high

    Cyber attacks on US retailers drop, but records stolen remain high

    Cyber attacks agains US retailers declined by as much as 50 percent since 2012, but the number of records stolen from them remains at near record highs, a new IBM study shows.

    IBM Security researchers recently reported that during the year cyber attackers still managed to steal more than 61 million records from retailers despite the decline in attacks, demonstrating cyber criminal’s increasing sophistication and efficiency.

    According to the research, cyber attackers are using new techniques to obtain massive amounts of confidential records with increased efficiency. This is why despite the decline in the number of attacks, the perpetrators were able to impact a far greater number of victims with each incident.

    “The threat from organized cyber crime rings remains the largest security challenge for retailers,” said Kris Lovejoy, General Manager, IBM Security Services. “It is imperative that security leaders and CISOs in particular, use their growing influence to ensure they have the right people, processes and technology in place to take on these growing threats.”

    Surprisingly, majority of cyber attackers scaled back their hacking efforts around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the two biggest shopping days of the year.

    IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark, the number of daily cyber attacks during the two week period (24 November – 5 December) was 3,043, nearly one third less than the 4,200 average over this period in 2013.

    In a year’s time, the number of breaches also dropped by more than 50 percent for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In 2013, there were more than 20 breaches disclosed including several large breaches that caused the number of records compromised to rise drastically, reaching close to 4 million. Over the same period in 2014, 10 breaches were disclosed which resulted in just over 72,000 records getting compromised

    Despite this “cyber threat slow down,” the retail and wholesale industries emerged as the top industry target for attackers in 2014, a potential result of the wave of high profile incidents impacting name brand retailers.

    IBM need that while there has been a rise in the number of Point of Sale (POS) malware attacks, the vast majority of incidents targeting the retail sector involved Command Injection or SQL injection. The complexity of SQL deployments and the lack of data validation performed by security administrators made retail databases a primary target.

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  • Myntra rejigs top management

    Myntra rejigs top management

    Ganesh Subramanian, Chief Operating Officer at Myntra.com, has been given a new responsibility as Head – New Initiatives with immediate effect. Confirming the development, Subramanian told BusinessLine: “As a company, we are thinking long term. Therefore, we are investing to look at continuously creating unique value for customers by challenging the way the fashion business is run at present. For instance, it takes 12-15 months to deliver fashion products from concept to retail to consumers; why should it take so long?”

  • Made-in-China.com increases website traffic with cloud

    Made-in-China.com increases website traffic with cloud

    Made-in-China.com, a global trade commerce company, has grown its website traffic over 2000 percent using a managed cloud portfolio.

    The dedicated hosting solution from Backspace, which is part of its managed cloud offering, allows the company to have full control over its servers while also enjoying high levers of speed and performance.

    “As an ecommerce company that connects worldwide buyers with Chinese suppliers, it is critical that we provide a user-friendly and quality experience to our customers around the world,” said Tao Yan, IT Manager, Made-in-China.

    The company started working with Racks[ace in 2006 and has since then grew its website traffic from 1 to 2 million to 25 to 35 million today. Revenues also increased from CNY43 million (USD6.9 million) annually in 2006 to approximately CNY500 million (USD80.5 million) a year today.

    “Because of the company’s support, we’ve been able to focus on growing our business year-over-year, as opposed to investing our time handling IT issues, as we did with our previous provider,” Tao Yan added.

    In the eight years that Made-in-China has worked with Rackspace, the company’s infrastructure has also grown dramatically, from just two servers in 2006 to a total of 23 servers hosted in the US, as well as seven cloud servers hosted in Hong Kong.

    While Made-in-China is based in Nanjing, China, over 70 percent of Made-in-China’s web traffic comes from overseas, meaning it needed a reliable hosting provider that could support its business globally.

    “With more and more China-based companies expanding West, demand has spiked for stable and flexible hosting solutions that can manage traffic around the globe,” said Ajit Melarkode, managing director, Rackspace Asia-Pacific.

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  • Tmall growing out of Taobao’s ‘little brother’ role

    Tmall growing out of Taobao’s ‘little brother’ role

    Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has for the first time unveiled the trade details of its major global business unit Tmall Global, revealing a tenfold increase since it was founded 10 months ago, reports the Shanghai-based China Business News.

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  • Urban Ladder to hire 1,400 more this year

    Urban Ladder to hire 1,400 more this year

    Online furniture vendor Urban Ladder will add 1,400 employees to its workforce this year to beef up its rapid expansion plan. The Bengaluru-based company’s current headcount is 600 across seven cities. The company is also planning to expand its presence to 25 more cities, including Coimbatore, Mysore, Kolkata and Vizag, by 2015-end and to add more product lines and categories to its existing portfolio.

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  • Amazon’s third-party merchants are a growing piece of the sales pie

    Amazon’s third-party merchants are a growing piece of the sales pie

    To help fuel its growth, Amazon.com is increasingly turning to the millions of businesses that use its site to sell their own goods. That’s a good thing for Amazon, because those third party sales tend to have higher margins, according to some analysts, and it’s an inexpensive way to fill out its online catalog.

    To view the full article (note: you must be a Wall Street Journal Online subscriber), visit The Wall Street Journal Online.

  • PLDT, Rocket Internet create JV for mobile payment in emerging markets

    PLDT, Rocket Internet create JV for mobile payment in emerging markets

    Looking to drive the massive adoption of online and mobile payment solutions in emerging markets, the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) Internet platform Rocket Internet AG are establishing a global Joint Venture for payment services.

    Under the agreement, PLDT will contribute the intellectual property, platforms and business operations of its mobile-first payment platform Smart e-Money Inc., a pioneer in mobile banking and mobile wallet services in the Philippines, which has handled transactions valued at approximately EUR3.4 billion (USD4 billion) in 2013.

    With over 5 million active customers and 300.000 trade accounts, SMI owns and manages the Philippines’ biggest “branchless banking” network, certified at the highest global security and governance standards as a financial service platform.

    “We look forward to continuing the long-term success story of Smart Money and optimizing the synergies between e-commerce and innovative mobile-first payment solutions,” said Napoleon L. Nazareno, President and CEO of PLDT.

    Rocket, on the other hand, will contribute its participations in Paymill Holding GmbH and Payleven Holding GmbH, two of its payment platforms for high growth, small-and-medium-sized e-commerce businesses across Europe.

    Oliver Samwer, Founder and CEO of Rocket Internet, said its network of companies combined with PLDT’s 14 years of experience in the mobile payment industry will allow the partnership to deliver world-class innovations in mobile money and micro-payments around the world.

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  • Brands now targeting online and stores differently

    Brands now targeting online and stores differently

    In order to steer clear of the war between online and offline retailers, consumer brands may soon ensure that their products on e-commerce platforms such as Flipkart and Amazon are different from those retailing at traditional brick-and-mortar outlets. For example, Taiwan-based BenQ, manufacturer of LCD monitors and projectors, has already diversified its portfolio.

  • After Delhi-NCR, Snapdeal to offer home services in other metros

    After Delhi-NCR, Snapdeal to offer home services in other metros

    E-commerce giant Amazon.com might be planning to launch local handymen services in the Indian market after having done it in the US a few months ago, but Snapdeal.com has already started providing plumbing, electrical and other household services in some cities.

    The Gurgaon-based company, the second largest online marketplace in the country, is betting big on the growing needs of consumers for such services.

    After a pilot project in Delhi and NCR in October, the company has started offering the services in Bengaluru last month, and will go live with Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune in January. By March next year, it plans to target about 10 more cities, where people can call for a plumber, electrician, hardware professionals, carpenters and home cleaning services online.

  • Pricey Singapore: Savvy shoppers go online

    Pricey Singapore: Savvy shoppers go online

    A recent Visa study found that 26 percent of Singaporeans shop online at least once a week – the highest in Southeast Asia. And analysts say that with mobile phone apps that allow consumers to hunt for bargains anytime in a city that is ranked most expensive in the world, the potential for growth in the online retail sector cannot be underestimated.

    Lazada, also known as “Asia’s Amazon” for its online offerings of electronics, toys and other general items was founded almost three years ago and is one online retailer that has made headway in Singapore in recent years. Others include fashion website Zalora and online grocer RedMart.

    There is 19 percent year-on-year growth in e-commerce transactions performed by Visa cardholders in the city, Visa Country Manager for Singapore and Brunei Ooi Huey Tyng was quoted in the local media last month as saying.

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  • Online sites expand in China’s rural areas

    Online sites expand in China’s rural areas

    Plagued by poor transport and less purchasing power, rural buyers remained mostly untouched by the wave of online shopping that swept across China in recent years. However, the situation is changing as the burgeoning market in villages has shown great potential and intrigued the country’s major e-commerce businesses.

    China’s leading e-commerce giants have stepped up expansion of online retail business in rural areas in hopes of tapping the new territory to offset a saturated urban market.

    JD.com Inc, a Nasdaq-listed firm, announced they would set up a county-level operating centre in Guangdong Province. The move followed the e-commerce giant’s decision to open a physical shop in a small county in north China’s Hebei Province in November to help farmers purchase home appliances via its online shopping store.

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