News English — ecommerce

Made.com opened its first public showroom in 2015 and in the last few days NotOnTheHighstreet.com announced its intention to do more offline work, primarily in temporary pop-ups. In the US the concept of pop-ups or guide-shops is well known through fashion ecommerce retailers such as TrunkClub.com and Bonobos.com. Thus far no fashion-led ecommerce retailer in the UK has made any intention to open an offline shop public. We believe that with the increasing availability of suitable retail property on the market it is highly likely that at least one of Asos.com or Boohoo.com will trial the concept. If not as...

Our first reaction to Farfetch raising another $110million taking its total funding to $300million was - WHAAAAAT? The company is a retailer without stock and operate as an advanced affiliate network connecting buyers with stores & brands. It earns about 25-30% in commissions on the sales they generate which is much higher than standard affiliate schemes, where anything up to 10% is considered good, and would resemble more of a department store with concession shop-in-shops where up to 40% commission on sales is not unheard of. However, Racked (link below) reports that much of the $110million will be used to...

An EU funded project "Kidsize" has been launched to provide virtual fitting for childrens sizes which are based on age rather than actual size in many cases. http://cordis.europa.eu/news/rcn/125180_en.html

Consumers are becoming increasingly visual in their online activities. Visual Search technologies have advanced to a level where entering a visual conversation with consumers is now possible. We profiled 23 companies and interviewed C-level executives in 14 companies. In addition we also interviewed the ecommerce pioneer Eric Olson, Ex-Innovation Director Online at Nordstrom Inc to get the customer view on the technologies. Download a summary of the report here