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If Google’s target is Amazon, watch out

Amazon Prime is like a club where you pay $79 a year, and all your qualifying Amazon purchases get free two-day shipping or one-day shipping for $3.99 per item. See related story on Wall Street Journal site .

This service is so convenient that many subscribers say they always check with Amazon before buying anything.

I could go into a longer exposition regarding the service and why it works for Amazon so well, but the idea itself has a checkered history. The overarching question: What’s up with Google doing this?

You have to wonder whether Google is planning to put up a branded online store. Investors can easily conclude this to be the case. The writing, in fact, has been on the wall for some time. Google GOOG -0.07% has long had a popular shopping engine originally branded as “Froogle.” That’s one clue. More...

12-04-2011 02:32

Retailers adapt as mobile holiday shopping booms

(Reuters) - When it comes to holiday shopping, more people are phoning it in, forcing retailers to embrace new ways to connect or else lose sales.

Lowe's Companies, Best Buy and Toys R Us are among retailers making big changes to prepare for a wave of holiday shoppers who will use smart phones to research products, check rivals' prices and make purchases.

"The shopping experience is in the consumer's hands and you can't fight where they're going," said Gihad Jawhar, vice president of Lowes.com, the website of the second-largest home-improvement company. "Retailers can either hop on the bus or get left behind. We are choosing the first option."

Lowe's is issuing more than 42,000 Apple iPhones to employees in more than 1,700 stores.

When shoppers are in Lowes stores scanning bar codes with their phones, reading product reviews and checking prices, employees can engage them better using iPhones to track down similar information.

Staff can also check quickly if products are in stock or if items are available on Lowes' website or another store nearby, and can often match or beat a price a consumer finds elsewhere via a smart phone.

Best Buy has 63 so-called connected stores in which employees have been given mobile devices and are encouraged to use their own smart phones to help shoppers research products and check inventory. More...

11-20-2011 19:55

Target Works to Fix Website Before Black Friday

Target Corp. (TGT) spent two years preparing to take control of its website from Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and on the day of the debut included a link on the home page titled “learn all about what’s new.” The link didn’t work.

The error, fixed later that day, proved to be a sign of problems to come. The new Target.com has crashed six times since it went live on Aug. 23, and accounted for more than half of the major outages this year at the top 100 sites in the U.S. by revenue, according to Web monitor AlertBot. The site’s president left the company. Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, is also less than three weeks away.

“They could lose customers for this,” Robin Lewis, chief executive officer of the Robin Report retail newsletter, said in an interview. “Target is so on top of everything else they do over there, and how they run their business. For this to be happening is surprising.”

Like many brick-and-mortar retailers, Target has been grappling for years with how to improve its Web operations as shoppers migrate online. In the early days of the Web, companies such as Target and Toys “R” Us Inc. found it easier and less expensive to outsource their online operations to Amazon. More...

11-13-2011 15:45

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