DC360 Lowers Projected 2021 Online Holiday Sales Growth to 10.5%

After online spending over the five-day stretch from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday fell a little short of 2020’s total and November retail figures have come more into focus, Digital Commerce 360 tempered its forecast for the overall holiday season. Digital revenue for the all-important November-December period still is expected to surpass the $200-billion mark for the first time—reaching $212.28 billion in U.S. ecommerce sales, Digital Commerce 360 estimates. That’s up from $192.19 billion over the same two months in 2020. But the revised 10.5% year-over-year growth is lower than the previously projected—and already moderate—12.1% jump from the prior year’s Cyber 5.

How to Price Your Product: What You Need to Know About Pricing Before You Launch

Pricing your products is one of the cornerstone decisions you’ll make as a business owner. It impacts almost every aspect of your business. Your pricing is a deciding factor in everything from your cash flow to your profit margins to which expenses you can afford to cover. It also affects your customers. Price sensitivity is one of the key factors to companies’ pricing choices. Customers are well informed about their purchases now, and they are sensitive to price because they want the maximum benefits for their money and time.

Amazon Poised to Pass UPS and FedEx to Become Largest U.S. Delivery Service by Early 2022

Dave Clark, Amazon’s CEO of worldwide consumer, told CNBC on that the company is on track to become the nation’s largest delivery service by the end of 2021 or early 2022. Analysts have long predicted Amazon would overtake carriers like UPS, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service, thanks to its increasingly in-house network of planes, trucks, vans and ships. Amazon has been steadily building up vast logistics and fulfillment operations since a 2013 holiday fiasco left its packages stranded in the hands of outside carriers.

Digital Marketplaces Disrupt, Transform and Create Markets to Drive New Business

The digital transformation of business, work and lifestyle is one of the ongoing themes of the pandemic, but even amid all the stories of growth in e-commerce, corporate agility and working from home, the growth in scalable, cross-border B2B marketplaces driven by data science and state-of-the-art auction technology has stood out. Garry Jones, CEO of NovaFori shares his thoughts with Business Leader about how digital marketplaces are driving new business.

What to Consider Before Implementing a B2B Marketplace Strategy

Not all products and services are a good fit for a scalable marketplace strategy. For those that are, the advantages are new sources of revenue, reduced marketing costs and new trading partners. Even before the pandemic fueled the adoption of online business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces, it was becoming apparent that marketplaces would be a key aspect of B2B sales in the years to come. For CFOs looking to benefit from B2B marketplaces, it is important to have a sound strategy in place.

From Direct-to-Consumer to Direct-to-Community: How DTC Brands Can Build a Sustainable Model for Growth   

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands have a unique advantage in that they own the entire customer experience — and perhaps most important, all the data that is generated along with it. Many of these businesses, especially those born over the past decade, also are digital natives, which means they have the innate agility and savviness that legacy retailers are trying to adopt. But as many DTC darlings have gone public over the past year, the curtain has been pulled back and we’ve been able to see the unique challenges they’ve faced — and the possible pitfalls of the business model.