Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

When I first started selling physical product in my shopify story, I made a ton of mistakes that I could have avoided.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t done my research into the best practices and the best apps to use for my shopify store. My early failures had more to do with the fact that I was trying to work without having anything good to model my work off of.

Considering all the training that I had taken on how to sell physical products online, I was making decent sales of my personalized yoga balls after only a few months. The issue was that I hit a ceiling on my sales pretty quickly....

Women may always be a mystery to men, but that need not be the case for retailers. Here is a closer look at how female consumers are navigating the retail sector right now that can help you land more sales with women shoppers.

Who, what, when, where, why and how? These are the questions that every researcher seeks to answer. If your business needs to find success in its efforts at marketing to women, these are questions that can help provide insights about female consumers that you can use to shape your marketing strategies. Here are some research findings about women shoppers that made our list of things you should know....

You’re going to have to get used to it: data is everywhere, we contribute to it constantly, and it has a huge impact on the retail industry. In fact, 80-90 percent  of all the data in the world was created in just the last two years. Big data is generally portrayed as having all the solutions to many of the biggest issues in retail (as long as it is mined and utilized correctly), but it still has a lot of quirks to work out.

A big chunk of the problem with big data comes down to how it’s defined. There are dozens of different takes on it, but let’s discuss it as the rapid increase of the creation of diverse and quickly transforming data through multiple channels that must be processed in innovative and strategic ways.

Global retail sales should reach $3 trillion this year, and big data has the potential to unlock a larger slice of the market share pie for retailers. How? Well, that’s the interesting part....

Online sales in the U.S. are expected to hit another record this holiday season, but spending growth will be slower than in previous years, according to one researcher.

Forrester Research predicts that consumers will spent $89 billion shopping online during the holiday season this year, an increase of 13% from the same period a year earlier. That's down from 15% year-over-year growth in 2013....

It has to woo overlooked small retailers in the same way a disruptive technology needs to cater to developers.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has gotten lots of attention thanks to its pending multi-billion-dollar U.S. IPO. It seems to have no immediate plans to expand in the U.S.—but that's likely just a matter of time. And when it does, Amazon had better watch out, because Alibaba has a host of ready allies: the legions of mom-and-pop retailers that Amazon has left stranded in its wake.

Let's start with some background from Alibaba's perspective. The company controls 80% of the Chinese e-commerce market, which means it needs new markets in order to grow. Its current model—acting as an e-commerce middleman that connects buyers and sellers—might translate well to some big emerging markets, but Alibaba will need to take a more subtle approach in America for three reasons...