eCommerce

Surrey, Canada - Guildford Town Centre, a shopping center in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, is reaching out to customers across multiple channels and points of engagement. The center retained 3 Tier Logic, a wholly-owned subsidiary of 3TL Technologies, to use its Platform3 technologies to drive consumer foot traffic, gather in-depth data about shoppers, and increase social media engagement.  

Easy access to an expanded offering of online inventory is the premise behind Staples Exchange, a marketplace-like concept that allows suppliers to leverage Staples’ online presence.

Staples doesn’t call its new Staples Exchange a marketplace – the term used by Amazon to describe the massive aggregation of third party sellers on its site – but rather and a world-class platform that makes it easy for suppliers to offer products to Staples customers.

As holiday shoppers hunted for online deals Thanksgiving weekend the Overstock.com Web site provided fertile hunting grounds.

The retailer said its sales between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday increased 23 percent compared to the same period the prior year. In addition to new customers, the increase was driven by an 8 percent increase in average individual order size. Cyber Monday sales increased 24 percent while Thanksgiving day saw the largest gain, up 38 percent off of a smaller initial base than Cyber Monday.

New York — Swedish fashion giant H&M’s higher-end brand COS will make its New York debut on Friday, in the SoHo section of Manhattan. It’s the brand’s second U.S. store—the first, in Los Angles, opened in October. 
  COS,  known for its clean lines and minimalist look, targets a more sophisticated customer than the more value-priced H&M.  The SoHo store has a upmarket feel and gallery-like look, enhanced by the use of glass and white-washed wood.
 

San Francisco — Shopping activity increased slightly from October in November 2014, but slumped compared to November of the previous year. Monthly retail benchmarks from in-store analytics provider Euclid reveal that  traffic lagged significantly throughout the month, with Black Friday also failing to match the previous year as deals were more distributed across time and channels.   

A cruise industry executive is the newest member of the board of directors for Sears Holdings Corp.

"I am very pleased to welcome Kunal S. Kamlani to our board," said Sears Holdings Chairman and CEO Edward S. Lampert. "His broad-based financial services expertise coupled with leading a company with a strong focus on its customers make him a great fit for our board as we continue our transformation to a member-centric company that leverages Shop Your Way and Integrated Retail."

Buenos Aires, Argentina — Specialty entertainment applicance retailer Musimundo, which operates more than 200 stores in Argentina, deployed its e-commerce platform on the  IBM Cloud to meet increased customer demand on Cyber Monday.

As it prepared for Cyber Monday 2014, Musimundo's greatest challenge was to address the number of entries of people to its website per second, and it needed to manage load balance and security levels in accordance with regulatory requirements.

Struggling retailer Francesca's has named specialty retailing veteran Michael W. Barnes as president and CEO.

Greg Brenneman, chairman of the board since 2010, was named lead director.

Barnes had been CEO at Signet since 2011 and led Signet’s $1.46 billion acquisition of Zale Corp. Before that, he spent more than 25 years at the fashion company Gossip Group Inc., becoming president and chief operating officer in 2007.