A new entrant in the highly competitive luxury e-commerce sales game, Joyus, is being closely watched as it aims to make over the bad image that infomercials gained on late-night TV through the years.

The reason: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, the former Google executive who dreamed up Joyus after being named one of Fortune's 50 Most Powerful Women in Business (and one of its new "Valley Girls" shaking up Silicon Valley).

"If you think about the ways to sell online, video is underutilized," she observes to the New York Times' Bits blog. "It’s a new way for brands to merchandise their product."Continue reading...

It's not often thought of as a "brand," but the National Rifle Association has some of the highest brand recognition of any out there. Now, the NRA is making identifying with its brand easier with a whole new online shopping experience.Continue reading...

American Apparel may have been given only 18 months to live by Wall Street 24/7, but that’s not stopping the struggling brand from doing everything it can to survive.

Portfolio.com reports that the fashion retailer has partnered with eBay to “hopefully boost its Internet sales, which currently make up less than ten percent of the company's revenue.” The partnership kicks off Sept. 1.

The company is expecting it will generate several million dollars in sales in the first year, even though it will have to fork over a fee for each transaction performed on eBay, according to New York magazine.Continue reading...

Zazum is a small start-up with a big promise: making television shows and movies instantly shoppable via its mobile app.

It’s a new kind of affinity marketing that puts brands in the sweet spot of impulse buying in the moment, as viewers spot and want to buy what they see.

“Unlike television shopping channels that are a string of promotional spots for products—nothing more than long ads—Shoppable Shorts are entertainment in their own right. They are definitely not commercials,” says Zazum founder and CEO Susan Rits.Continue reading...

The customer comments on a Comic-Con post on the Borders bookstore chain's Facebook page, its last post in fact, say it all.

Following on its "don't worry, it's business as usual as we search for a buyer" notice on its website, Borders Group, a pioneer in big-box booksellers, posted a sad notice on another section of its website confirming an unhappy ending to its story.

A press release yesterday confirms that it will close all stores and be out of business by the end of September. Unable to attract a buyer willing to rescue it from bankruptcy, the nation's second-largest bookseller, with 10,700 employees and more than 1,200 stores, is ending its run.Continue reading...

In the video above, special agents codenamed k, g, and b, search for products and services with ‘deal appeal’ in a campaign for kgbdeals, an offshoot of New York-headquartered kgb, which has successfully worked its way to #3 in the UK's daily deals space.

In the past three months, Google searches for Groupon have increased by 78% compared to the first quarter of the year, according to Sky News, and 112% growth in the same period for Living Social.

But the largest increase came from kgbdeals, which reportedly saw a 443% rise in traffic to them via search engine marketing.Continue reading...

The e-reader may have failed to save the Borders bookstore chain, but that's not stopping Google from investing in one. The iriver Story HD, the first e-reader to integrated with the Google eBooks platform, launched Sunday at Target stores and Target.com for $139.99.

Google describes the device as "slim and lightweight with a high-resolution E Ink screen and a QWERTY keyboard for easy searching. It includes over-the-air access to hundreds of thousands of Google eBooks for sale and more than 3 million for free. With the Story HD you can now browse, buy and read Google eBooks with your e-reader through Wi-Fi, rather than downloading and transferring them from computer to e-reader with a cord as you can already do with more than 80 compatible devices."Continue reading...

Blockbuster is in full steam “carpe diem” mode, reaching out to Netflix customers who are up in arms about the price hike with Blockbuster Total Access, a time-limited nationwide promotion for Netflix customers who jump ship.

AT&T, meanwhile, has fired back at Netflix for blaming bandwidth capacity as a factor in its pricier plans. The saga is worth of a Hollywood movie; but not, if Netflix has its way, on DVD.

Blockbuster, the now Dish Network-owned DVD renter, is making hay on its Twitter and Facebook feeds of a quick-response free 30-day trial, followed by a choice of two access plans: continue to receive Total Access for $9.99 per month for “1 Disc” at a time, or $14.99 per month for “2 Discs” at a time.Continue reading...