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Showing posts from 2015

The Two Sides of Jet.com--A Review by a Customer and a Seller's Agent

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2015's most notable e-commerce story is Jet.com. Two days ago, New York Times ran a decent story about the startup's strategy. The company made headlines for 1) growing fast--it now has about 900 employees; 2) crossing the one-million-customers milestone in early November, five months after its launch, and 3) receiving a fresh funding of $350 million right before this year's Black Friday shopping extravaganza. During the last month, I had an opportunity to be a Jet.com shopper, a nd at the same time, helped a client launch his store on jet.com. Seeing the both sides of the coin, I found the following: As a jet.com shopper, I was extremely happy. For my first order, I not only got a welcome credit of $20, but also experienced its fast delivery service.  The shopping experience on Jet.com was smooth and when I received my order, it was nicely handled and wrapped (it was a piece of children's furniture). Jet.com is good at affiliated marketing. Shopping on a

Cyber-Weekend Sales Broke Records

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Now that Black Friday through Cyber Monday are behind us, the tally has begun. As usual, e-commerce sales and growth data are all over the place, depending on what sources you trust. This year, many e-commerce metric publishers included the Thanksgiving day online sales as well. The Cyber Five sales, first coined by ChannelAdvisor, and reported by a variety of market trackers in part or in whole, have the following interesting insights: - ChannelAdvisor reported that the five-day online transaction value, as measured by same store sales (SSS), was up 20.9% year over year. Google Shopping and Amazon are big winners with SSS sales up 24.3% and 24.2%, respectively. within the five days, Cyber Monday still led with more than a third of total sales, followed by Black Friday, and then surprisingly the Thanksgiving day. - Adobe, on the other hand, leverages its online traffic data and data analytical model to predict  that Cyber Monday sales would top $3 billion this year, no doubt a new