eCommerce

Credit card chargebacks are a costly reality for online merchants. Chargebacks occur when customers contact their credit card issuers to dispute charges. If an issuer deems a dispute valid, the e-commerce merchant is required to pay the amount owed for the transaction plus a chargeback fee from the processer – which can range from $15 to $100.  

Blue Nile is expanding its fledgling store portfolio.    The online jewelry retailer has opened its second physical location, at The Westchester mall in White Plains, New York. Blue Nile opened its first store in June 2015, at Roosevelt Field mall in Garden City, New York. Two additional locations will open later this summer: one at Tysons Corner Center mall in Fairfax County, Virginia, and one at the Washington Square mall in Portland, Oregon.      

Cost cuts helped Abercrombie & Fitch Co. put a sizable dent in its net loss during first quarter 2016, but the teen apparel retailer reported lower than expected sales and earnings as store traffic declined, particularly overseas.  
 
Abercrombie reported a net loss of $39.6 million, down from $63.2 million in the year-ago period, Expense reduction efforts and the realization of savings on lower sales drove the loss reduction.
 
Net sales dropped 3% to $685.5 million from about $707 million, missing Wall Street projections.

The launch of “buy buttons” in the past year on major social networks like Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter received a lot of attention, but so far they are not catching on with customers.
 
According to Digiday, research firms including Forrester and GlobalWebIndex are finding low consumer usage rates for social buy buttons. Reasons include limited functionality and visibility of the buttons.

Over the last 12 annual trips I’ve made to Las Vegas for ICSC’s RECon real estate convention (which officially makes me a rookie in this industry of 20-, 30- and 40+-year veterans), I have always been able to detect some distinct trends.  

That doesn’t as much make me a trend-watcher as it does a good listener.  The retailers and shopping center operators and brokers who attend RECon each year tend to talk avidly in the aisles about the current events shaping the retail real estate industry.

Guess Inc. swung from profit to net loss in the first quarter of fiscal 2017, missing analyst estimates for both net earnings and revenues.

The apparel retailer reported a net loss of $25.2 million, compared to net earnings of $3.3 million the same quarter a year earlier. Restructuring charges, a negative tax impact, and currency fluctuations helped push the retailer into the red.

For anyone looking at the current state of retail in the Midwest, one of the most fascinating things to track is how some of the macro trends we see in the marketplace today are the end result of years (sometimes decades) of evolutionary change.
 

Amazon.com Inc. is supporting continued growth in California with fulfillment centers launching in the cities of Tracy and Eastvale.