Yahoo Will Acquire Polyvore to Gain Foothold in Fashion Retail

Internet dinosaur Yahoo.com continues to roam the internet. This time eating up San Francisco based fashion site Polyvore for a reported 230 million dollars. Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer has been on dealing with the unpleasant task of trying to stop the downward spiral of the company and has been making some progress. This acquisition comes as part of her plan to expand their reach across the essential product verticals.

If you're unfamiliar with Polyvore, they're site is outfit based and designed to suck you into scrolling for new styles and outfits. It's much like Pinterest, but has stronger ties to the brands that are featured. I was surprised to check Alexa and see that they're in close to breaking the top 500.

It's not entirely clear what Yahoo's strategy will be with the property. If you look at their acquisition track record they will often let a property mature before injecting too much of their own editorial on it. Tumblr is a prime example of a property that was left to be its own community, while Flickr is one of the platforms that Yahoo is mostly thought to have ruined with bureaucracy.

Target Increases Pressure Online with Back to School Online Push

Sticking to their 'Expect More, Pay Less' approach to retailing, American giant Target turned up the heat on competitors this week when they announced free shipping and free returns during the back to school season.

The company vowed to further expand their omni-channel offerings back in May, and this new push shows that they're willing to make moves to secure a bigger share of the online market. As noted in this Retail Dive article, the back to school 'season' is the biggest part of the buying season aside from the holidays. It makes perfect sense that the retailer would want to try and have customers form good online buying habits before Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

Target held on to their $50 minimum purchase threshold for free shipping significantly longer than other big chains, which some observers note could be the reason that Target is now racing to make up for lost time.

Despite being a bit slow out of the gate, the company managed to grow their eCommerce business by 30% during 2014. Given that they were coming from behind established retailers like Amazon and growing powerhouse Wal-mart, it will be interesting to see if they can maintain that kind of growth year over year without causing damage to their brick and mortar traffic.

Should you be targeting shoppers during their commute?

As the omni-channel marketplace continues to evolve, more data is becoming available as to when customers are browsing and shopping. I just came across this article, which estimates that UK shoppers spend £9.3 billion while commuting to and from their daily job.

With shopping malls on the decline and smartphone penetration estimated to be over 70% the time spent idle during the daily commute would naturally turn to shopping. It's unclear as to whether or not the study takes into account sales with mobile attribution - for example a purchase made on a home computer after researching on a mobile device - but the numbers are significant either way. The study was done in partnership with mobile payments company Zapp and their CEO was quick to point out that the checkout process could still be optimized.

“But fishing out your credit or debit card and then tapping in a long sequence of numbers does not represent the ideal checkout experience on a packed train. If commuter commerce is to continue to flourish we need faster, safer mobile payment methods.” 

How could an omni-channel ready company use this information? Maybe they could hold a flash sale during the hours of the average persons commute or make a specific offer to users on the wifi provided by public transit. The possibilities are limited only by the creativity of the marketing team and a companies ability to deliver on their promise.

Indian Companies Set sights on Omnichannel

With so much going on in North America we often overlook massive foreign markets like Brazil and India. To think that the savvy business people in these places aren't following the trends would be silly. Case and point is this article, which makes the point that omni-channel is the future for retailers in India.

The minister of commerce recently spoke at a Retail Summit and had this to say:

“Omnichannel retailing is the way to go in India. All retailers have a big market, nevertheless organised retailers will have to find local relevance,”

He makes an excellent point. Although there is a billion people in India there is also a wide range of cultural and local diversity. To succeed in omni-channel in India retailers will need to maintain strong ties within each area to find to success. In some ways the omni-channel model works to their benefit in that store to consumer shipping can be presented in the localized flavor of language and customs. The businesses that can grasp how to stay organized and go above and beyond the simple, pick and ship process stands to make huge gains over their competition.

Wal-mart Sets Course for Omni-channel Strategy

In a recent shareholders meeting, Wal-mart CEO Doug McMillon acknowledged the need for the retail giant to make a shift towards an omni-channel approach to business. As mentioned in this ZDnet article McMillon pointed out:

"One customer can shop with us in so many different ways - in stores, on their phones, at homes, a pick-up point," he said. "But they just think they're shopping at Walmart, at ASDA, at Sam's Club."

With a worldwide footprint of eleven thousand stores, making the shift will not be easy. However, Wal-mart has a strong background in adopting technology. Their early adoption and development of advanced supply chain management software helped them to grow to their current size. While it may not be a smooth transition, they have proven the ability to manage that kind of change in the past.

In the past year they've been exercising a strong push to get their piece of the ecommerce pie, which is essential in the omni-channel market. Their low-cost shipping and pick up in store options have been picking up steam. With affiliate partnerships in place, they've been getting significantly more love from the deal blog community and are primed to have a big 2015 online.

Although McMillon didn't reveal any specific plans, he did send a clear message to everyone in attendance.

"I want us to stop talking about digital and physical retail as if they're two separate things. The customer doesn't think of it that way, and we can't either,"

Can Amazon be Beaten With a Good Omnichannel Strategy?

I was just going through my newsfeed and I came across this article on Multichannel Merchant. The points all come from a talk by Jason Goldberger, president of Target. One point that stuck out to me was the speed in which data is becoming obsolete for retailers. Goldberger recounted the launch of their Lilly Pulitzer line, which overwhelmed their web properties and backed up their fulfillment centers. All because the projections were made off data that was 6 months old.

You can’t attend a tech conference without hearing one speaker talk about the glories of failure, and we failed very publically - Jason Goldberger

While your company might not be the size of Target, the lesson can still be adapted. Make your decision based on the latest data or, where possible, in real-time. The environment changes dramatically in 6 months. Also, test your website(s) to know how much traffic the infrastructure can handle and have a plan in place for how to manage it if something goes wrong.

Goldberger also outlined how Target was taking omni-channel to the next level with their free shipping. They've lowered the threshold from a $50 spend to $25 in a bid to make their competitively priced items more attractive than Amazon. This might now be an option for a lot of smaller brands, as they would most likely be taking a lost on low margin products as a way to instill customer loyalty.

Target also took an interesting approach to the showrooming issue that concerns so many stores. In their Denver area stores they set up patio furniture and allowed customers to see the sets that were only available for purchase online. To keep their stores happy, they received credit for sales made in their area. While this is still a crude way of accounting for sales, Goldberger noted that they sold 3x more furniture than prior seasons.

The main take away from this article, to me, was that retailers who are willing to take risks and try new approaches will eventually find their sweet spot in the shifting omni-channel market place. For brands with less cash or leverage to experiement, you can piggy back on the research being done by big retailers like Target.

What do you think?

JC Penny Brings Back the Catalog As Part of their Omnichannel Strategy

After cutting costs by axing its catalog a few years ago, the executives JC Penny have changed their tune. When the original decision was made, it was expected that customers would simply switch to browsing online on their desktop or mobile device.

According to this article over on Diginomica, now that the change has had time to sink in its starting to look like the print material played a bigger part in the sales cycle than expected. The numbers don't lie, and JC Penny has just published a small (by their standards) catalog for home items. While it isn't the 1000 page thick book they published traditionally, it is a concession based on what they think the customers want.

The man in charge of the catalog initiative is, oddly enough, the one who chose to take it away, Myron Ullman.

We’re not going back to the thousand page several times a year book. That’s frankly with paper and postage not a good proposition and frankly, that’s not the way the customer wants to shop.

It's true. With rising postage and printing costs, it could be hard to justify the investment in the full blown catalog that was once a JC Penny staple. If the move proves to be profitable, the brand could follow other big retailers like Target and customize their catalogs based on customer preferences.