Marketing Tactics

Image Courtesy: news.nike.com

It seems safe to say the novelty of shopping online has worn off.

According to a new study examining the online shopping and purchase habits of the U.S. population from e-commerce platform BigCommerce, 96% of Americans are shopping online. E-commerce customers spend an average of five hours per week making online purchases and allocate an average of 36% of their shopping budgets to e-commerce.

Respondents ranked online shopping ahead of smartphone GPS and streaming media as a basic essential they could not live without.

The expansion of online fulfillment availability is giving retailers new avenues for selling goods via the Internet.

The latest example of how non-traditional e-commerce opportunities are popping up is a just-launched partnership between Food Network and Instacart. The lifestyle network/website does directly sell a variety of cooking-related products and utensils online, but until now has not been involved in the sale of food items.

West Elm will open its first Idaho store, in downtown Boise, on Thursday, June 9.

The 14,158-sq.-ft. -store incorporated wooden “Tater Blocks” salvaged from the renovation of Simplot’s Caldwell-based potato storage facility into the store’s custom interior design. The blocks, once used as industrial flooring for potato storage facilities, have been repurposed to create a unique art installation at the new store.

Image credit: Ted Eytan, CC by 2.0   While many retailers are focused on making stores a destination to experience, some aim for an even higher level of customer engagement by casting themselves in the role of community center.     Others have even become a global destination for enthusiasts. These retailers understand that one way to energize a fervent fan base is to offer a singular fan base. Here are a few examples:   

The Marketplace Mall located in the Henrietta area of Rochester, New York, will convert to an outlet center.     The mall will undergo capital improvements, remerchandising of the retail mix, and will be rebranded as Marketplace Outlets. This is a first-of-its-kind full conversion of an enclosed regional mall to an outlet center.   

Consumers love to shop and love using social media, but somehow the two passions are not connecting.
 
Twitter, which has been piloting an embedded buy button in tweets since September 2014, is abandoning the effort. Recent studies from Forrester and GlobalWebIndex indicate generally low consumer usage rates for social buy buttons, which are also offered by platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram.
 

Watch out Target — Walmart is also looking to reinvent its store experience.
 
Walmart is testing an array of new initiatives, from sleeker fixtures and signs to a cool BBQ eatery to a giant kiosk for online order pick-up — at a new store in Arkansas, according to TheStreet.