ECOMMERCE: It's no surprise shaving has become enticing for Target. Harry's biggest competitor, Dollar Shave Club, was just acquired by Unilever for a billion dollars. The entire men's grooming business in general is booming. It's projected by 2018, the grooming business will hit $21 billion that year alone. Since launching in 2013, Harry's has acquired over 2 million customers. The brand even purchased a 95-year old German factory to manufacture its razors for $100 million. "We found that it's quite a complicated process and takes precision and skill," said Raider. "You only get one chance to make that first impression so we needed to get the razor exactly right."
ECOMMERCE: The Facebook ‘Shops’ feature is rolling out to all pages in Southeast Asia along with other high growth, emerging markets. However, the ‘Services’ section is gradually rolling out to all the pages in a staged rollout as part of the wider worldwide launch. “The shops and services sections are a continuation of our efforts to make Facebook Pages the most valuable online presence for the more than 60 million businesses around the world that use Pages each month.” added Ryan Ebanks, Product Marketing Manager at Facebook on the rollout of the feature.
ECOMMERCE: For Walmart, pursuing Jet.com in what would be one of its biggest takeovers, a deal would help the retailer reproduce its off-line dominance in the online world. The Bentonville, Ark., company has pumped millions of dollars into efforts to expand its e-commerce business, such as offering more items online and expanding locations for its grocery pickup service. At the end of 2015, Walmart had about eight million items available at Walmart.com. That’s now up to 10 million. Four years ago, it was under two million.
ECOMMERCE: That entire experience now — including purchasing the ticket — can take place right inside of their chat, unfolding in record time without any annoying steps in between. Certainly, mobile commerce has been gaining ground quickly on traditional ecommerce. But now messaging and chat are looking to accelerate that trajectory even more. It’s all about ease, integration, and speed. Brands that enable consumers to make purchases inside messaging apps — such as Facebook Messenger — are making mobile purchases easier and faster than ever.
ECOMMERCE: If you’re wondering if you’re doing enough to get the most visitors to your store, I can tell you that the answer is “no.” Every online business owner wants more traffic and sales, and there are always tweaks, adjustments, and tactics you can execute to improve your revenue. Just like any marketing and business strategy, you need to develop a fluid plan for improving your revenue generation.
ECOMMERCE: Drizly operates in a very similar manner to Uber, providing the technology infrastructure that allows liquor retailers the opportunity to provide their own on-demand service, as well as an ecommerce platform through Drizly Connect. On the platform, Drizly users can browse a wide variety of beer, wine and spirits, as well as see various delivery windows and prices from Drizly’s retail partners.
BRAND: Tesla Motors Inc. may be bleeding money on production costs and struggling to turn a profit, but the brand’s loyal follower base should help to buoy its shares for now, analysts say. There were no major stock ratings or price target changes on the company Thursday morning after Tesla TSLA, -0.18% reported a worse-than-expected quarterly loss late Wednesday. Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s overwhelming optimism and claims that Tesla is not a “money-losing business,” despite the fact that it lost $293 million last quarter, seemed to keep the critics at bay.
BRAND: Nike's getting out of golf equipment. Adidas is trying to offload TaylorMade. That could mean big business for Callaway. Nike's golf business rang up $706 million last year. While that figure includes apparel and footwear sales, it presents a big opportunity for Callaway, a brand that's rooted in the sport. Golf balls and clubs are the brand's bread and butter, and accounted for some three-fourths of its $844 million in revenue last year.
ARCHIVES: So to make sure that online sales growth doesn’t slow again, Target is beefing up its tech spending even further. It plans to spend close to $1.8 billion this year on capital projects, with the bulk going to e-commerce and supply chain improvements, as well as in-store improvements, company executives said at Target’s annual meeting with Wall Street analysts. (Last year, the plan had been to spend about as much on tech as on things like new stores and remodeling.)
ECOMMERCE: Most people -- even in the retail world-- just don’t want a moral alternative enough to change their behavior and try something new, even if it has managed to match Amazon on breadth and cost. Yesterday, I read story after story saying this deal-- should it happen-- was a sign that Jet had “failed” in its bid to take on Amazon. I read it the opposite: This is exactly how Jet.com actually takes on Amazon. With Jet’s front end, Marc Lore’s ecommerce smarts, and Wal-Mart’s balance sheet, trove of customers, and ultra-efficient back end.
The first mistake most incumbents make when building new products in response to threatening new competitors is to attempt to win on features. To return to the phone example, Nokia and Microsoft tried to build something distinctly different from the iPhone, with a completely different user interface, features like Live Tiles, and various content hubs. The effort earned plenty of plaudits from the press and pundits eager for something new, but in practice made it far more difficult to secure the apps that actually mattered for becoming a viable platform.
A more pertinent example for this article is Google+. When Google launched their Facebook competitor in 2011 they touted features like Circles to organize your friends, Sparks to find content to share, and Hangouts to video chat. These made Google+ “better” and “differentiated”, which is another way of saying more complicated; meanwhile the most important feature — your friends — was nowhere to be found.
The problem with focusing on features as a means of differentiation is that nothing happens in a vacuum: category-defining products by definition get a lot of the user experience right from the beginning, and the parts that aren’t perfect — like Facebook’s sharing settings or the iPhone’s icon-based UI — become the standard anyways simply because everyone gets used to them.
So good for Instagram: Snapchat’s Stories is a great product that has already gone through years of iterations; why, but for pride, would you build something different?