The new ecommerce customer is tech-savvy and sophisticated – they want a tailored shopping experience, hassle-free transactions, and prompt customer service. To deal with all their needs, retailers need to incorporate smart technology into their retail operations to create a great customer experience. But what does that mean exactly? Good customer service must move beyond [...]
Continue Reading...One of our favorite annual surveys, Retail Horizons: Benchmarks for 2011, Forecasts for 2012, was released a few weeks ago. Throughout the year, the Fifth Gear marketing team sifts through every piece of industry news we can find and have become avid readers of content such as this report from KPMG and the National Retail [...]
Continue Reading...More people are shopping online today than ever before. Statistics show that online sales are expected to hit close to $320 million by 2016. While the big boys like Amazon and eBay have been part of the race for a while now, smaller ecommerce players are lining up to leverage the power of the web. [...]
Continue Reading...If you run an ecommerce business, then you know that inventory takes up a large amount of space and money. As your business grows, so does you inventory – and everything else associated with it. If you want to scale up your operations and grow your business (and who doesn’t!), outsourced warehousing and fulfillment could [...]
Continue Reading...Quick response (QR) codes are becoming a major mobile marketing tool. This matrix barcode, which started out as a tracking device, is now used by marketing teams and catalogers to complement their static media campaigns with specific landing pages, video and audio clips, and more. Statistics show that the ‘scanable’ population is growing, too – [...]
Continue Reading...Online retailers have a lot to think about: merchandising, customer service, web design, ecommerce technology, digital marketing, vendor relations – and let’s not even get into all of the day-to-day tasks involved in the fulfillment of customer orders. Not only can operating your own warehouse be a time-consuming endeavor, but for many retailers it can [...]
Continue Reading...What are customers going to do in 2012? After a tremendous wave of shopping through the 2011 holiday season, this year’s Super Bowl, and Valentine’s Day, they’ll probably take a step back from shopping for a month or two until Easter rolls around. Unfortunately, online retailers cannot afford to do the same, no matter how [...]
Continue Reading...With Forrester Research forecasting online sales to reach $210 billion in 2012 and $249 billion by 2014, online retailers are at the cusp of tremendous growth and opportunity. So what should you do to grab a substantial piece of that $210 billion pie this year? Based on industry predictions and our own experiences at Fifth [...]
Continue Reading...When was the last time you took a good look at your operations? Most multichannel retailers treat their retail operations as the stepdaughters treated Cinderella – leave it to do the dirty work of the pick and packprocess while they focus on the more glamorous functions like site design, merchandising, and social marketing. But since [...]
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