Staples Advantage, the business-to-business division of office supplies retail and wholesale giant Staples Inc., has relaunched StaplesAdvantage.com to make it more accessible and useful to large and mid-sized businesses.
New data from Juniper Research has revealed that global e-retail sales are expected to reach $1.7tr this year, up by more than 17 percent on 2014's total. It argued that while recent growth had been buoyed by factors such as public Wi-Fi deployments and 4G rollout, in the medium term sales would receive a strong fillip from the trend of social media companies to act as direct sales platforms.
Could it be that the Internet of Things is actually under-hyped? Yes - it could have a total economic impact between $3.9tr and $11tr a year by 2025, including $410bn to $1.2tr per year in retail environments.
The consumer packaged goods sector is a giant with global sales exceeding $550bn. The markets that make up this global sector are diverse in character and research for Ti's latest report, Global CPG Logistics 2015, has identified the key differences between them.
Despite the well-publicized slowdown in economic growth, overall consumer sentiment in China can still be described as cautiously optimistic. More precisely, caution characterizes the lower end of the consumer market, while optimism envelops the high end. China, in other words, has become a two-speed consumer market. The optimistic, "high-speed" consumer market disproportionately consists of middle- to upper-middle-class and affluent households. These consumers also make up the bulk of the digital class of active online shoppers.
Cross-border e-commerce is expected to exceed 3 billion consumers and $300bn by 2018, but to seize this opportunity, retailers must formulate strategies that meet the needs of global shoppers.
Before he became a billionaire in e-commerce, Richard Liu was a failure. As a student, Liu started a restaurant in Beijing but went bankrupt. When he took a second stab at business by opening an electronics store in 1998, Liu insisted on honesty. After seeing other shops overcharge customers and pass off counterfeit goods, he says he sold only genuine merchandise.
European officials want to make it easier for companies to offer e-commerce across the continent, and are asking whether some firms are putting barriers in the way of that happening. Among the actions they announced is an antitrust inquiry to investigate "possible competition concerns" put in place by some Web companies.
Walmart and Amazon have launched cyber attacks in China with the purest of commercial motives. Walmart is unveiling a mobile shopping app while Amazon is increasing its imported item count from 80,000 to 1.6 million.
