eCommerce

New Albany, Ohio – Abercrombie & Fitch Co. reportedly plans to shift its marketing and merchandising focus from teens to college students. According to Bloomberg, Abercrombie executives said they will shift marketing, assortments and pricing to appeal to the collegiate market.

According to reports, eBay is urging shareholders to reject a slate of board members nominated by activist investor Carl Icahn and instead support nominees picked by the company.

Reuters has reported that eBay is asking shareholders to re-elect existing directors CEO John Donahoe, company co-founder and managing director Fred Anderson, Intuit co-founder Scott Cook and former Agilent Technologies CEO Edward Barnholt.

Nashville, Tenn. — Pottery Barn has leased 12,684 sq. ft. in Hill Center Green Hills, a 220,000-sq.-ft. mixed-use open-air lifestyle center in Nashville, Tenn. The lease is with Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn’s parent company.

Owner and developer H.G. Hill Realty Co. www.hghill.com, plans to begin redeveloping Hill Center Green Hills early in 2015. Pottery Bar expects to begin its build-out in the fall of 2015.

Ebates has enlisted Epsilon, an Alliance Data (ADS) company, to help the leading online cash back shopping platform enhance its global email marketing services.

Per the multiyear agreement, Epsilon will provide robust, targeted email marketing services focused on driving sales and creating a more personalized experience for customers across Ebates' suite of websites and rewards programs including Ebates.com, Ebates.ca, Ebates Korea, FatWallet.com and Pushpins.

Dallas — Crunch Fitness is coming to Texas. Dallas entrepreneur, author and founder of Planet Tan, Tony Hartl plans to roll out eight to 10 Crunch Fitness locations in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area by 2016.

Chicago - Mobile and online sales will continue to drive growth for retailers in 2014. However, according to a recent BDO USA survey, a majority (64%) of retail CFOs expect that online sales will grow in 2014, representing a modest decline from the number of CFOs expressing similar sentiments in 2013 (74%).

Phoenix — An eight-screen Cinemark Movie Bistro will open at Rayzor Ranch Town Center, a new open-air retail and entertainment destination set to break ground later this year in Denton, Texas.

The state-of-the-art cinema will join a 126,000-sq.-ft. Dillard’s in anchoring Rayzor Ranch. Both are planning grand openings for summer 2015.

With Amazon’s customer retention rate hovering north of 90%, customer loyalty initiatives are understandably at the top of every retail CMO’s to-do list. Of course, it’s harder these days to find room in consumers’ wallets for another membership card, what with American households belonging to an average of 22 loyalty programs, according to the loyalty research unit Colloquy. But Colloquy also found that each household’s activity was concentrated on fewer than half that number of programs.