Sears is testing local, personalized e-commerce with the launch of SearsLocalAd.com, which debuts today in Pittsburgh and a handful of other U.S. test markets. The details:Continue reading...

More and more, big bricks-and-mortar retailers have their backs to the wall. In the case of Best Buy, the shakeup has rattled the executive suite. But in the case of Target, the seachange has prompted retaliation.

Target has announced that it no longer will be selling Amazon's Kindle e-readers as a retaliatory measure for Amazon's encouragement of American shoppers to "showroom" products at retailers and then buy them less expensively online. Given that Target was the first brick-and-mortar retailer to sell the popular e-reader, the move is particularly galling for Amazon.Continue reading...

The insatiable Chinese consumer is one of the big reasons luxury brand marketers like the French conglomerate LVMH took the recent economic downturn in stride. 

LVMH, owner of iconic brand names including De Beers, Fendi, Givenchy and Louis Vuitton, recognized years ago that China represented a burgeoning luxury market. Along with European competitors like Hermes and Burberry, LVMH aggressively sought out Chinese retail channels for its products.

Even though luxury products continue to enjoy popularity, there are signs that store sales may be leveling off in China. That's why LVMH is looking to the Internet as a new way of engaging upscale Chinese consumers, as evidenced by the launch of a Chinese-language version of its Nowness.com portal.Continue reading...

Traditional retail brands are increasingly looking to e-commerce start-ups for innovation, wedding their physical distribution and resource abundance with nimble, digital sales. Walgreen’s acquisition of Drugstore.com and Walmart's purchase of Kosmix are two high-profile examples. “These guys are usually slow and lumbering giants,” said Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru to the New York Times. “But they need to make proactive investments. Because, left to their own devices, they could never emulate these businesses.” 

Add Nordstrom to the list of startup-hungry retailers. The Seattle-based upmarket store brand made few acquisitions in its 111-year-old history before last year, when it acquired ‘flash sales’ site HauteLook and became a lead investor in shoe subscription service Sole Society, a spin-off of HauteLook. This month Nordstrom acquired a stake in socially savvy e-tailer Bonobos in a deal that gives the latter $16.4 million in cash and access to more than 100 Nordstrom stores, while the latter can tap into the Bonobos team's expertise on branding and digital marketing with humor and savvy.

Just how deft is the Bonobos brand when it comes to tapping the zeitgeist? For Earth Day, the menswear e-tailer has created a line of denim made from beer bottles. That's right. Recycled. Beer. Bottles.Continue reading...

Above, watch Ingrid Vanderveldt's interview with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh at the recent SXSWi confab in Austin, which Dell just released on its YouTube channel. Watch the video and read Ingrid's takeaways below.Continue reading...

Cheeky start-up Dollar Shave Club has the $13 billion shaving industry on edge as its commercial featuring founder, CEO and improv actor Michael Dubin has gone viral— it's at 4.2 million views and counting—thanks in part to the brand’s cheeky motto, “Our Blades Are F***ing Great.”

The Santa Monica, CA-based e-commerce start-up, just a few weeks old, had 12,000 people sign-up in the first 48 hours for its razors and blades sold in an arrestingly simple way: select one of three razors, pay one low monthly fee, and have them delivered to your door. Continue reading...

“Alohomora!” J.K. Rowling's Pottermore website to keep the world of Harry Potter alive on digital has finally opened its e-bookstore.

While Rowling's books have sold an estimated 450 million physical copies and been translated into more than 70 languages, the author had retained the digital rights as part of her book publishing contracts, so the e-book editions weren't immediately available — until the Pottermore (think "Potter" plus "ever more") digital brand extension plan was announced last June. Already, Slate is calling it a game-changer for publishing.Continue reading...

From "Everyday low prices" to "Anytime, anywhere."

That appears to be what's in store for the evolution of Walmart's brand-defining slogan. Soon, the latter motto will be the marketing tagline for Walmart.com, unit President Joel Anderson told Bloomberg. And so maybe, given the rising importance of e-commerce to the giant of bricks and mortar, it could stand for the whole brand someday.

The mega-retailer is plumb in the middle of a huge transition in e-tailing, just as it has spent the last few years tacking back and forth between its traditional everyday-low-prices positioning and the attraction of providing less clutter and more "sophistication" for upscale consumers. In the case of Walmart.com, the spur — of course — is Amazon.com.Continue reading...