In a news released dated June 25, 2014, IBM announced that it leads in private and hybrid cloud services for enterprise organizations. In fact, IBM was placed in the top three providers in the cloud market for the first quarter of 2014 with nearly 14 percent of worldwide revenue market shares from the third quarter of 2013 through the first quarter of 2014. This is according to global analysis conducted by the Synergy Research Group, a business focused on emerging IT...

According to an article that appeared in the May 5, 2014, issue of Forbes, “Wayfair is as much a data miner as it is a retailer. It constantly probes and processes information about its customers to interact with them, anticipate their wishful thinking, personalize their home pages and turn search into a form of entertainment.” And that was the exact message that Wayfair.com CEO and co-founder, Niraj Shah, told attendees at the 2014 Internet Retail Conference & Exhibition in his keynote...

In a back issue of Real Simple, a popular monthly magazine for today’s modern woman, the editors presented readers with tips and tricks to “outsmart the Internet.” With the goal of getting what you want when and how you want it, Real Simple explained that online shoppers should play hard-to-get. In the article, readers were clued into the idea of abandoning a cart in hopes of getting a follow-up e-mail that would offer a discount if they went back to the...

Nearly 10,000 attendees visited the Internet Retail Conference & Exhibition, held in Chicago from June 10-13, 2014. The strong attendance numbers speak to the importance of the event for those in the eCommerce industry. As has been the case over the past 10 years, IRCE 2014 served as a pedestal for leaders in online retailing to showcase their new products and expert services. With more than 600 exhibitors at the show, there were countless products to learn about. One, however, stood...

Making customers create an account to shop on your website can be incredibly tempting. The lure comes in the form of capturing e-mail addresses to grow a contact database – one of the most valuable assets for any retailer. When marketers are able to gather shopper contact info, they can reach out to consumers – again and again – in hopes of gaining repeat business and creating a customized shopping experience. However, research has shown that forced registration can be a...

At the IRCE 2014 eCommerce trade show in Chicago, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, chairman and founder of Joyus.com, talked about her newest love: video commerce and video shopping. Not only is it her newest love, it’s the driving force behind her new company, Joyus.com, which uses video from the top of the sales funnel all the way through conversion and retention. As the content and commerce convergence came into light, Cassidy recognized that the stage had been set for her to launch her...

On June 11, 2014, the 10th annual Internet Retail Conference & Exhibition kicked off in expected style. As in years past, the eCommerce industry’s biggest event delivered in the department of big names and hot topics. John Donahoe, CEO and president of eBay Inc., discussed the wisdom of crowds and the commerce revolution in his keynote speech, titled Connected Commerce: The New Opportunity for Retailers in an Evolving Retail Environment. With 16 years of experience under its belt and a revenue growth...

Creating an exemplary product page that instills consumer confidence should be top of mind for eCommerce business owners. To shed some light on the task, the following five best practices should be adhered to when producing a product page. Although it’s not an exhaustive list, the following product page elements should get the wheels turning.     1. Ratings and reviews: Giving customers their two cents According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research, a whopping 90 percent of respondents who read...

When Jeff Bezos told Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes that drones might one day be able to deliver packages the same day Amazon shoppers ordered a product, the rumor mill was set on fire. How would it work? When would it start? What about the regulations? What about the cost? Regardless of the oodles of questions and comments coming from said rumor mill, Amazon’s drones were nothing more than a vision for the future. But as it turned out, Amazon’s same-day...

Taking the idea of the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” an eCommerce website finds its strength from a collection of multiple elements that work together in harmony. Although an eCommerce solution can be powerful standing on its own, it finds greater effectiveness when paired with complementary systems.   One complementary system, the Smart Merchandiser from Zobrist, is giving a boost to websites powered by IBM’s WebSphere Commerce. Created to help merchandisers keep up with the pace of today’s...