ECOMMERCE: Drop shipping is one way that suppliers are helping retailers, because it reduces the cost and the risk of holding inventory. In some cases, retailers may stock only popular colors of a certain item, but make a broader array of colors available to customers via drop shipping. Some retailers may choose drop shipping rather than order large quantities of a new product, to reduce the risk they are left with unsold inventory if sales disappoint. “They’re shifting the risk of the inventory up the supply chain to their suppliers,” said Irv Grossman.

MEDIA: Sources say while Vine still has a small, dedicated user base, it is no longer growing. Vine was a top-100 free iPhone app in more than a dozen countries about a year ago. But it is currently only a top-100 app in one — Grenada — according to App Annie, which tracks app stores. In the U.S., it routinely ranks below No. 150 in the iOS App Store, and below No. 300 on Android. Another data point: Vine still reached 24 million people in the U.S. in May, down from about 30 million a year prior.

ECOMMERCE: In the run-up to Prime Day, Wal-Mart also is heavily promoting 30-day free trial memberships to ShippingPass, its two-day delivery program that costs $49 annually. Enrollment in the program is growing rapidly, with daily enrollments quadrupling compared with the week before, a Wal-Mart spokesman said last week. The retailer did not disclose the number of consumers who have signed up. Wal-Mart announced the ShippingPass free trial on June 29 in a blog post titled “Liberty and Low Prices for All,” by Fernando Madeira, Walmart.com’s president and CEO.

MEDIA: While a few publishers may cite a traffic loss due to the Facebook change, most say it’s way too early to recognize a pattern, especially given that its first week included the Fourth of July holiday. That said, they don’t underplay the big business of Facebook management. Bernard is one of the captains on the newer battleground of fighting for digital readers. They are the ones – at publishing companies across the country – doing the intel gathering, the number crunching and the platform divining so now central to publishers’ fortunes.

BRAND: Did you know that the media franchise we all call Pokemon is 21-years-old? To be honest, that is the best part of the phenomena that has been Pokemon GO. If you haven’t already seen, Pokemon GO is the new joint venture between The Pokemon Company, Nintendo and Niantic, Inc. that has reprised the original Pokemon game into a smartphone-only, augmented reality experience. The app already has more active users than Twitter, despite it only being officially released in Australia, New Zealand and USA. 

ECOMMERCE: Tuesday marks the second annual Amazon Prime Day, when all Amazon Prime members can get exclusive discounts on more than 100,000 products through the company. This year, more than 63 million people will be able to take advantage of those deals, according to data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners charted here by Statista. That's up by more than 20 million — or almost 50% — from a year ago. Prime is important for Amazon not only for the $99/year subscription fee, but because members spend more than 2x as much on Amazon every year as non-Prime members.

ECOMMERCE: The Demandware Commerce Cloud combines digital commerce, order management, point-of-sale operations and predictive intelligence in one platform. It is cloud-based with multitenant architecture, and it is scalable. It offers 99.99 percent global site availability, supported by dozens of data centers worldwide. Users can leverage data and service across the entire platform to obtain a single unified view of data representing customers, products, prices, orders, promotions, inventory, interactions and stores. All channels -- e-commerce, in-store and mobile.

BRAND: Here are the top ten web ads for the month of july. It leads with Ronaldo's spectacular ad for Nike. Just in time for the UEFA European Championship, Nike released a five-minute video called ‘The Switch’, featuring Cristiano Ronaldo and a young boy from the UK. In an unfortunate incident at a football game they wake up to find they have switched bodies, leading to Ronaldo having to ‘start all over again’. Judging by the impressive 51 million views it racked up, Nike’s short film captivated football fans the world over.

ECOMMERCE: With apparel sales surging online and sagging in stores, the web’s share of 2015 apparel sales rose to 17%, up from 14.8% in 2014. By comparison, e-commerce last year accounted for 10.6% of retail sales when factoring out items not normally bought online, such as fuel and automobiles, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Not since Amazon.com Inc. began cannibalizing bookstores in the 1990s and Apple Inc.’s iTunes did the same to music stores a decade later, have web-only merchants gobbled up such a significant share of a major retail market at the expense of stores.

DATA: People are spending so much time journeying around looking for Pokémon. Smart businesses have caught on too. As Pokémon Go users traverse their towns in search of Pokémon, local stores, restaurants, movie theaters, and other businesses are capitalizing on this massive opportunity, driving huge amounts of foot traffic and conversions both with simple in-app purchases and creative marketing campaigns. To start turning the ambulating gamers around you into your new best customers, all you need is to know how to play the game.