Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs and ecommerce.
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Until now, package delivery services were seen as the winners of e-commerce, since they are being used to send products bought online to customers worldwide. But in the U.S. major retailers have now started to experiment with new package delivery strategies that threaten the business of the likes of UPS and FedEx. For Amazon for example, the solution to lower shipping costs is to build warehouses closer to the customers as well as to actually have own delivery trucks which compete with the established delivery services. Major retailers like Wal-Mart on the other hand increasingly ship products purchased by online customers from stores instead from warehouses, removing the need for long-distance delivery.
You can read the full story here.
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But shipping is not the only area where retailers try new things: The New York Times describes the ongoing movement by retailers to gather data about in-store shopper’s behaviour and moods, using video surveillance and signals from customer’s cell phone and apps. With those measures the stores learn how many minutes customers spend in specific sections of the store and how long they browse before they buy something.
It doesn’t come as a big surprise that this leads to a variety of privacy questions, and some customers are pretty irritated about the methods being used.
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Mobile is taking over the shopping experience, now that more than half of the customers own smartphones. Thanks to that trend, commerce is changing, making use of location-enabled smartphones that replace an outdated infrastructure with a digital foundation that finds its roots in e-commerce. Read why local is the future of commerce at streetfight.com.