eCommerce

Canadian retailer Jersey City unifies store and online operations

To describe the HSN of today as a TV shopping channel is both woefully dated and reductive. The company, a division of HSNi, has evolved into a multichannel leader, where digital commerce accounts for a whopping 50% of its $2.2 billion in annual sales.

HSN’s 24/7 shopping format, which bowed in 1981, now seems positively prescient amid the rise of e-commerce.

New York City has seen an influx of new retail this past year. Everyone has their favorites. Here are mine:

•  Alexander McQueen: The British fashion brand’s new Upper East Side flagship boasts a lavish design that is both strange and utterly romantic, with an attention to detail that mirrors McQueen’s signature stylings. Marble and ornate moldings, black marble floors, black lacquer and brass hanging racks are combined with a soft color palette. (747 Madison Ave.)

By Ike Boruchow, analyst, Sterne Agee, New York

This year, Black Friday gave us a taste of what to expect for the remainder of the holiday selling season: intense competition, deep discounts, and choppy mall traffic. Earlier store openings drove heavy traffic, which dissipated and then bounced through the day.

New York -- Overall online sales from Thanksgiving through Sunday were up 14.5% in 2013 over the same period last year, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. Mobile traffic accounted for 40.9% of all online traffic, up more than 35% percent compared to the same period last year. Mobile sales remained strong, reaching 23.2% of all online sales, up 43.7% year-over-year.

In other findings:

Seattle – Amazon.com hopes to someday deliver packages to its customers using unmanned drone aircraft.

According to numerous media reports, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said during an interview on the TV news program 60 Minutes aired Dec.1 that the company is currently testing the use of drones to pick up customer orders in buckets from fulfillment centers to enable delivery within 30 minutes of a customer executing an online transaction.

West Palm Beach, Fla. -- U.S. online retail sales will reach $508 billion by 2020, representing a market share of nearly 14% (or 17%, if food retailing is excluded), compared to expected online sales of $260 billion in 2013. According to a new report from FTI Consulting, this represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 11% from 2012 through 2020.

San Francisco – West Elm is scheduled to open the company's first U.K. store in London on Dec. 5. The 12,000-sq.-ft. store will feature furniture, textiles, accessories and gifts, as well as a West Elm Market shop-in-shop and coffee shop. The store will employ 30 full- and part-time sales associates.

The London store will include a Local Gallery Wall featuring art from U.K. artists sourced through Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade or vintage items. The wall is curated by Will Taylor of the blog Bright.Bazaar.

Guangzhou, China -- Vipshop Holdings Limited, a Chinese online discount retailer for brands, has appointed Lily Fan as the company's VP of human resources, effective Dec. 2.

Bitcoin, the nearly anonymous, peer-to-peer online currency, has been getting attention lately. The attention has not been necessarily positive, as bitcoin was the preferred currency of the recently closed down Silk Road “darknet” site that served as a virtual global marketplace for narcotics and other illegal goods.