Is your online marketing campaign ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Now that Halloween has come and gone, retailers and consumers alike are gearing up to kick off the holiday shopping season.  In a down economy, sales expectations are modest and if you ask most companies, simply meeting last year’s sales levels would be [...]

This article by Hollis originally appeared in ClickZ on October 9, 2007. It’s hard to believe we’re now officially in the fourth quarter. For many companies, particularly merchants, it’s make-or-break time. Perhaps your local stores have already started displaying December holiday decorations and merchandise alongside Halloween selections. Craziness. Many online publishers have long been preparing [...]

This article by Hollis originally appeared in ClickZ on September 25, 2007. Something has shifted in online retail marketing since I last attended an industry event earlier this year. Perhaps it’s the impending, all-important holiday shopping season, but at the Shop.org Annual Summit last week in Las Vegas, the attitude toward multifaceted online marketing was [...]

We’ve compiled a bursting at the seams fact pack of some of the hot trends and highlights surrounding this year’s holiday online shopping period which officially kicked off on November 26, the day called “Cyber Monday.” The term “Cyber Monday” was coined by the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org division in 2005. Download Web Ad.vantage’s “Cyber [...]

With an unsteady stock market, loss of funding, and a general pessimistic air pervading the New Economy, what’s an e-tailer facing the holiday shopping season to do? Forge ahead, I say!! After all, in retailing the holiday season can make or break you, so you’ve at least got a 50% chance of success! In all [...]

This article by Hollis originally appeared in ClickZ on March 13, 2007. A few months ago, I planned a quickie vacation. As usual, I did the entire process online. I started researching on TripAdvisor. As I narrowed down my selection, I used the “Check Rates” feature to compare offers across various booking engines. I ended [...]

The National Retail Federation’s (NRF) “2007 Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey” conducted by BIGResearch shows that students and their parents will spend a combined average of $956.93 on back- to-college merchandise, up from last year’s $880.52. College students and parents combined will spend $47.3 billion on back-to-school purchases. “Because the college years are an important [...]

This article by Hollis was originally appeared in CLickZ on February 13, 2007. Attending Shop.org’s FirstLook conference recently (as I did in 2005), I’d hoped to hear encouraging news about e-tailers’ reinvigorated online advertising plans. After all, with the resurgence in online advertising, wouldn’t e-tailers follow suit? For the majority, however, it seems to be [...]

A few weeks ago I posted an article about the consumer generated content (CGC) on travel web sites. Well I’m back from vacation and in my inbox I came across this latest survey on CGC and online shopping.The results of an opinion poll survey released today** by Bazaarvoice, a company that provides social commerce applications [...]