New Ebay iPad App Lets viewers shop directly from T.V.

The software is central to eBay's campaign to help consumers buy the things they see on television - a concept known as TV commerce. On Monday, the company offered the features as part of its iPad application, letting users browse merchandise from shows and movies. "You'll be able to buy exactly what's there," said Steve Yankovich, who runs mobile services at the San Jose company. The new product works with TV-guide data to show relevant merchandise in eBay's store.

While the first version will only run on the iPad, the company plans to make it available on other tablets and mobile phones, Yankovich said. Getting cooperation from Hollywood may be the biggest challenge for eBay. While the concept of making it easier to buy items shown on television has been discussed for years, the foray into television commerce is part of Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe's turnaround effort for the e-commerce company, which saw sales growth slow over the past decade.

EBay is investing in new products and making acquisitions to attract more users - especially on mobile devices, where the company expects to get $5 billion in payment volume this year. Separately Monday, eBay announced the purchase of Hunch.com for an undisclosed sum. The service recommends products and services to shoppers based on their activity on social networks and other sites. EBay shares fell 3.6 percent to $28.75 at the close in New York amid a broader market slide.

EBay is trying to woo multitaskers - the 86 percent of tablet and mobile-phone users who use their devices while watching television. EBay will rely on its selection of new, used and antique items to serve up relevant products, Yankovich said.

J.C. Penney and Esquire collaborate on an online men's store

J.C. Penney Co. Inc. and men's magazine Esquire have joined forces to launch Cladmen.com, an e-commerce site geared toward fashionable men who need style guidance when shopping for clothes.

Following a year of market research, Penney's Growth Brand Division determined the area of opportunity to grow revenue online was in men's apparel, says Cladmen's vice president of marketing, Amber Benson.

"The Growth Brand Division was looking for an opportunity to leverage Penney's knowledge of retailing and e-commerce infrastructure, and they saw a unique need in the market," Benson says.

Aimed at men ages 25 to 54, Cladmen sells apparel, accessories and grooming tools; the retailer says the average price of items on the site is $185. The retailer is collaborating with Esquire on the venture to deliver what it calls editorial commerce. Shoppers on Cladmen.com, which launched last week, will see Esquire Picks throughout the site, as well as a Damn Good Advice section where Esquire editors include instructional articles such as How To Tie a Bowtie.

Each outfit is built with items from several brands and shoppers can purchase each item separately or buy the whole outfit at once. Some issues of Esquire will include a 16-page Clad Report in which editors comment on outfits pulled from Cladmen merchandise. J.C. Penney is following in the lead of such retailers as Macy's Inc., Target Corp. and Gilt Groupe in combining editorial content with online retailing.

The campaign included social media marketing, the Clad report printed in September and November issues of Esquire, print ads in the magazine and on Esquire.com, and an interactive iPad advertisement within Esquire's iPad app.
When the site launched last week, Benson says, Cladmen sent an e-mail to those consumers who signed up and got a warm response. The retailer has mounted an online marketing campaign that includes paid search, feeds to comparison shopping engines and banner display ads. The retailer also plans to roll out a mobile-enhanced site early next year.

Fluid Inc. contributed to designing the site and imc2 LLC developed Cladmen's "Own It" digital marketing campaign.

Recruiters Seek E-Commerce Executives

The moves are being spurred by the fast growth of online sales and a realization by some big brick-and-mortar chains that they're still behind the curve.

Target Corp. is looking for a new president of Target.com after a disastrous website crash in September led the last person in the job to resign.

In hopes of catching up with competitors, department-store chain Kohl's Corp. is bringing in a new senior vice president, a person familiar with the matter says. The company had $18.4 billion in sales in 2010, but only $717 million came via the Internet.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has said it will announce a new CEO of global e-commerce in January, succeeding Eduardo Castro-Wright, who will retire in July. Recruiters are seeking e-commerce executives who can build and manage websites and handle complex inventory management.

Jeweler David Yurman has just hired Beth Sash, a former e-commerce vice president at Polo Ralph Lauren, to run its online operations, a person familiar with the matter says. E-commerce heads-who a decade ago made $50,000 to $100,000 a year and lurked in the back offices of retailers' catalog businesses or in tech support-have joined the C-suite.

Les Berglass, the founder of executive-recruitment firm Berglass & Associates, says that 20% of his assignments now involve looking for someone to head a company's online operations. The scramble has been spurred by the strong performance of online sales, which are growing quickly even as brick-and-mortar growth remains sluggish.

When brick-and-mortar retailers took their first steps online, they typically gave e-commerce responsibilities to the executives who ran their catalog businesses, says Hal Reiter, chief executive of headhunter Herbert Mines Associates.

Coach Inc. now has e-commerce sites in three countries, informational websites in 17, and a mobile-commerce platform.

That sort of complexity is forcing companies to boost spending for both talent and infrastructure. Kohl's, for instance, plans to make large capital expenditures to increase its online sales, which are now only 5.5% the size of its regular business, Chief Executive Mansell says. This year, Kohl's added its third e-commerce distribution center, and it plans to add another in 2012.

Mr. Rohling's résumé-former vice president of direct marketing and online sales for Office Depot and e-commerce positions at other companies-is typical of what retailers and their recruiters are looking for. The company has unveiled a mobile app, has designed a tablet app and has expanded its online product offerings from 3,000 items last year to more than 40,000 this year, Mr. Boire, the CEO, says.

Julie Bornstein, the senior vice president of Sephora Direct, has an M.B.A. from Harvard. Some retailers are looking to acquire Web help wholesale. With the online space relatively new, companies are wrestling with who makes the best candidates. Reporting lines are also in flux, with e-commerce bosses reporting to everyone from the CEO to the marketing team. Retailers are under growing pressure to get it right.

U.S. Online Retail Consumption Jumps 13% In The Third Quarter

Internet shopping continues even if the economy falters as retailers hope to enter the critical holiday shopping of the season on a strong note.

Online retail spending in the U.S. grew by 13 percent in the third quarter compared to the corresponding period a year ago, to $36.3 billion, as more people rely on the Internet to shop, according to a report published on Wednesday, by comScore, Inc., a Reston, Va. - based company in digital analysis.

The results showed of the best types of categories were digital content and subscriptions, tickets, jewelry and watches, consumer electronics and computer software - with each category will increase by at least 15 percent of the previous year.

Solid performance marked the eighth consecutive quarter of positive year after year growth and the fourth consecutive quarter of double digit growth.

"The third quarter of 2011 saw a continuation of the year's strength in U.S. retail e-commerce spending, even in the face of renewed economic headwinds and uncertainty facing the U.S. consumer," said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore. "As we approach the critical holiday shopping season, we are optimistic about the continued health of the e-commerce sector despite other factors -- including stubbornly high unemployment and volatile financial markets -- currently weighing on the economy."

The last time Internet sales rose at a 13 percent clip was for the second quarter of 2008. Online sales have been stable for a return trip in 2008 when the recession prompted an e-commerce sales decline for the first time in history. E-commerce did not begin to grow again until the fourth quarter of 2009.
Growth of 13 percent in the fourth quarter was primarily a function of an increase of 22 percent in the number of buyers, with 74 percent of all Internet users to make at least one purchase online in the quarter, comScore said.

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Target Trying To Fix Website Malfunctions by Black Friday

The new Target.com has crashed six times since it went live on Aug. 23, and accounted for more than half of the major outages this year at the top 100 sites in the U.S. by revenue, according to Web monitor AlertBot. Baird & Co. The chain, based in Minneapolis, decided to bring Target.com in-house to improve the experience, eliminate the commissions to Amazon and integrate it with Target’s more than 1,700 stores.

That meant it had to go outside its comfort zone by hiring developers and working with several partners to build a new site from scratch that generated more than $1 billion in annual sales. Target’s problems aren’t unique and point to larger obstacles within the industry to improving e-commerce, according to Sucharita Mulpuru, an Internet analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. "This isn’t a-list development talent."

Adding to the pressure on Target to make the transition to running its own site is that several of its largest rivals, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have already gone online. Its shares have fallen 12 percent this year.

In the press release announcing the debut of the revamped site, Steve Eastman, president of Target.com, said the new platform would create a “more user-friendly, reliable experience.” So far, that has not happened.

The first major sign that Target.com was not ready came on Sept. 13, three weeks after its launch, when the release of a collection from Italian fashion house Missoni brought a rush of visitors to the site that rivaled the traffic on Black Friday and crashed it for most of the day.

A month later, on Oct. 13, the site went down again during peak shopping hours. Later that day, Target announced in a one-sentence statement that Eastman left the company to “pursue other opportunities.” Eastman joined Target in 1982, and was head of merchandising for consumer electronics when he moved to president of Target.com in June 2008. Target refused to comment on the departure and Eastman could not be reached.

Since Eastman’s departure, the site has crashed four more times, including once last week, and when it has been running shoppers have complained about problems with checkout and gift registries. Eastman’s position has not been filled and the site’s staff is reporting to Kathryn Tesija, executive vice president of merchandising, Morgan O’Murray, a Target spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. “We have a team dedicated to addressing concerns, and are working diligently to ensure that the site is operating efficiently for the holiday season,” O’Murray said.

Target is trying to improve its website as shoppers this holiday season plan to go online more than ever. Forrester estimates that while 90 percent of buying still takes place in stores, more than 40 percent is swayed by the Web.

The Web generates about 2 percent of Target’s almost $70 billion in annual sales, and many more purchases are influenced by browsing on Target.com, the company has said. The performance of its site won’t make or break the holiday season for Target because its stores matter more, and yet “if anybody’s Web site keeps crashing, it will be bad for the holidays,” it has been said.

In any case, Sebastian of Baird says that, in the long run, Target made the right move.

Holiday Shoppers May Herald Year Of Mobile

When the frenzy of holiday shopping 2011 begins later this month, it could be the year for the mobile client.

A record number of consumers will buy from their mobile devices in the future season, as projected by IBM Coremetrics, which studies the online data from 500 leading U.S. retailers. And retailers who seek to exploit this trend will be forced to adapt.

"It's going to play a big part of how consumers are buying this holiday," said John Squire, chief strategy officer for Coremetrics IBM, in an interview. "Mobile users have less patience. They are surgical shoppers. Retailers are going to have to do a really good job in targeting their messages and promotions for mobile users."

A mobile device shopper spends an average of about 4 minutes on a site while in a little over seven minutes, he visited the site on a regular computer.

Mobile clients also tend to do less browsing and see fewer products in their act, making it imperative for retailers to customize the messages and content to serve to visitors.

Among retailers that have won awards to address mobile users are department stores Macy Inc., Nordstrom Inc. and JC Penney Co. All have launched apps based on streamlined pages specifically for mobile use, and fast downloads, designed as an alternative to conventional Web browsing, Squire said.

As an illustration of their online and mobile strategy having paid some dividends, the department store group posted above the average of 20% of online sales growth every month this year so far. Squire added: "Retailers that saw these trends early have made some good bets and investments."

For the first time, the percentage of shoppers buying from their mobile phones is expected to rise above the double-digit threshold to 15% in November, compared to 4.5% in last year's holiday season, and less than 1% in 2009, Squire said.

In October, 9.6% of online shoppers purchased via their mobile devices up from 3.4% a year earlier.
It is not only department stores that are catching on. The boards of directors of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Home Depot Inc., Gap Inc. and Victoria's Secret parent Limited Brands Inc. have been ramping efforts to expand sales online and mobile.

Sears Holdings Corp said earlier this week that its namesake department stores and discount chain Kmart launched mobile "trading walls" located in high traffic areas, such as cinemas, airports and bus stations.

Greater use of mobile purchases has also added pressure on retailers including electronics giant Best Buy Co. for comparison consumers to shop from their mobile devices while shopping.

Retailers have also been more active arming their employees with iPads or other tablet devices to provide buyers with better service. Sears, for example, began using iPad and iPod Touch devices in the deployment of some 450 of its Sears and Kmart stores to help customers to control inventory, have access to product information and order products online.

In the mobile world, retailers may want to place more attention on the iPad users. About 6.8% of October site visits through the iPad concluded with a purchase, compared to a 3.6% rate on other mobile devices, Squire said.

Online sales in November are expected to increase from 12% to 15% this year, IBM estimated. For comparison, the National Retail Federation has planned total holiday sales to increase by 2.8%.

Social networks, led by Facebook, are also a factor emerging in the retail trade. According to IBM more than 9.2% of consumers in October coming to a retailer's site from a social media site made a purchase, compared to 5.5% wwho visited the site of the store directly.

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How Mobile Is Revolutionizing The Retail Industry

It's changing the way retailers do business, and proving to be a daunting transformation for them to manage. We examine what retailers have accomplished so far and where they're headed in the short term.

A year ago STORES.org described mobile technology as game-changing. Research conducted by Ipsos finds that tablet usage increases the frequency of mobile shopping, and suggests that tablet users buy almost twice as much from their mobile devices as smartphone shoppers. Hoping to cash in on this mobile revolution, retailers are experimenting with everything from mobile selling, marketing and clienteling to mobile POS, task management and security monitoring. Over the last year, retailers have tested devices used for guided selling, mobile payments, task management and more.

This month, holiday shoppers are expected to hit stores with smartphones in hand, and a recent Accenture survey finds that 54 percent of consumers will use their mobile phones to compare prices as they shop.

PayPal and Ipsos are predicting that 46 percent of smartphone users 18 and older will make holiday purchases using a mobile device. In June, Forrester Research forecasted that mobile commerce will reach $31 billion by 2016. The figure represents a compounded annual growth rate of 39 percent from 2011 to 2016, and is expected to amount to 7 percent of overall e-commerce sales in five years.

While progress is undeniable, Mobile in Retail Special Report's (RSR's) September "Keeping Up with the Mobile Consumer" benchmark report reveals that retailers are grappling with critical business challenges, including "difficulty coordinating the mobile experience with other channels" and a consumer technology landscape that is "evolving too quickly." We're seeing more creativity in mobile than we've seen in some time, and we're encouraging retailers to keep moving forward. Customers will reward retailers for trying - you don't have to have the coolest mobile site, but you need to get the basics right," says Steve Rowen, managing partner at RSR.

"Retailers need a business strategy that takes into account mobile's capabilities across the enterprise [and must] realize that a cut-and-paste version of their e-commerce site is not a viable mobile strategy."

Just over half of retail respondents expect their mobile sales to grow "significantly" in the next three years, and another 42 percent expect at least some growth. The findings suggest that the prevailing benefit of using mobile to connect with consumers - deeper customer engagement that fosters loyalty and drives sales - is now paramount in retailers' minds.

Sucharita Mulpuru, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, says 57 percent of online retailers have already developed a mobile commerce strategy, and 48 percent already have a mobile-optimized m-commerce site. Leslie Hand, research director for IDC Retail Insights, identifies two factors that continue to hang retailers up. "Retailers need more choices to feel comfortable with enterprise-scale deployments," Hand says.

The price tag for the ET1 is roughly twice that of an iPad, but Motorola director of global product marketing Sheldon Safir insists that businesses will need to buy 40 percent fewer ET1s because of the way they're built. The most compelling feature for retailers is likely to be the built-in RhoElements development platform that allows any existing applications running on Windows Mobile or Windows CE on Motorola Solutions mobile computers to migrate to the Android platform.

"The days of segmenting the business by stores, e-commerce, catalogue and mobile are over. The consumer looks at your brand and sees one retailer. If a retailer's mindset is not in sync with the consumer, their days are numbered."

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