Posts tagged Sales
As eCommerce and Online Sales Surge, Experts Expect Other Industries to … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
May 3rd
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As eCommerce and Online Sales Surge, Experts Expect Other Industries to …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Perth SEO Company Oracle Digital endorses Social Marketing as a highly successful online campaign tool that would boost up local businesses' competence, thereby helping them maximise on the social infrastructure and customer-relationship building … |
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Three Months of High-Octane SEO Through 3dcart Boost Sales 48 Percent for … – Albany Times Union
May 3rd
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Three Months of High-Octane SEO Through 3dcart Boost Sales 48 Percent for …
Albany Times Union Since he started using the popular shopping cart software provider's in-house SEO services, Corvette Mods has posted a 48 percent increase in sales, a 22 percent increase in store visitors and a 23 percent increase in page views. |
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Can Barnes & Noble Balance Physical and Online Sales Without Killing Itself?
May 3rd
In what has long been a nightmare scenario for booksellers, the physical bookstore is becoming a showroom for the online shopper. After casually browsing the tomes in comfort, people will use their smartphone or tablet to buy their choices online at a much lower price. While most booksellers can do little more than fume, Barnes & Noble is not just meeting the threat head on, it’s embracing the change.
William Lynch, chief executive of the New York-based company, told Fortune magazine Tuesday that he planned to have near-field communication installed in Nook e-readers as early as this year. The technology would make it possible for browsers to touch books in the store with Nooks to get more information, such as reviews, and then purchase titles in whatever format they want.
The company declined to discuss its strategy Wednesday. “We haven’t announced anything further,” a spokeswoman said in an email.
The success of Lynch’s idea depends on convincing publishers that it’s in their best interest to embed into their books information-storing chips that the Nook could read. If they agree, then Lynch would move a step closer to merging the physical and virtual words.
Barnes & Noble is in a unique position in having physical stores, an online store and an e-reader. “[The stores] remain a very important advantage for the company – the only retail player in the category with integrated three-channel distribution under one brand,” said Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market research and consulting company.
Even Amazon, which has about 60% of the U.S. e-book market to Barnes & Noble’s 30%, understands the importance of having physical stores. The online retailer has been selling its Kindle e-reader through retailers since at least 2010 and is currently in chains such as Target, Best Buy and Staples (although Target announced Wednesday that it plans to stop selling Kindles).
Balancing Physical, Online Sales is Key to Success
Getting the right combination of the physical and online sales channel is key to survival. For example, Borders sold e-readers from Sony and Rakuten, maker of the Kobo, and had Amazon run its online store. With no connection to the online customer, Borders didn’t have enough to survive. The bookseller went out of business last year.
Barnes & Noble has not made the same mistakes as its one-time rival, and its current strategy actually plays into the habits of book readers. Codex has found that people who own e-readers also buy physical books. “They’re not just pure-play e-readers; they are living in the print world, as well,” Hildick-Smith said.
In a February survey, Codex found that only 2% of book buyers bought only digital books. In general, people read nonfiction on e-readers and fiction in physical books, Hildick-Smith said.
Of course, Barnes & Noble still faces a number of hurdles in its online business. Nearly all Nook sales originate from the company’s 691 stores, which are only in the U.S. The company needs to reach the international markets, which is why Barnes & Noble partnered last month with Microsoft. The software maker agreed to invest $300 million in a new subsidiary comprising Barnes & Noble’s Nook and college bookstore businesses.
Under the deal, Microsoft will develop a Nook application for Windows 8, which is expected to ship this year, Lynch told the financial news agency Bloomberg. The app will take Barnes & Noble’s digital books to consumers in Europe, Asia and Latin America, according to Lynch. Along with selling e-books, Barnes & Noble will also have to sell Nooks, which it hopes to place on the shelves of retailers in other countries.
If successful, Barnes & Noble could become a stronger competitor to Amazon, which has a tremendous head start. The online retailer sells its Kindle e-reader in stores in the U.K., Germany, France, Canada and Australia, and through its website in 175 countries. Amazon also sells books in seven languages.
Despite being the underdog, Barnes & Noble seems committed to putting up a fight by proving that the physical and virtual can coexist and prosper.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Three Months of High-Octane SEO Through 3dcart Boost Sales 48 Percent for … – PR Web (press release)
May 3rd
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Three Months of High-Octane SEO Through 3dcart Boost Sales 48 Percent for …
PR Web (press release) Since he started using the popular shopping cart software provider's in-house SEO services, Corvette Mods has posted a 48 percent increase in sales, a 22 percent increase in store visitors and a 23 percent increase in page views. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
As Apple Dominates U.S. Sales, Smartphone Focus Shifts Overseas
Apr 26th
A
pple sold 35 million iPhones in the first quarter of 2012. Nine million of those were sold among the top three carriers in the United States; the U.S. market remains important to manufacturers because it is where the hype cycle for the world begins, and where the most marketing dollars are found. But when you do the math, the overseas market is where the true smartphone battle is now taking place.
Apple Dominating U.S. Through Top Carriers
For now, Apple still owns the U.S. market. Since the beginning of 2011, Apple has sold about 39.1 million iPhones through the top three U.S. carriers – a figure that runs close to 65% of the domestic market for that period. The majority of those were through AT&T (21.8 million). That makes sense, given that the iPhone was the carrier’s exclusive property for the first four years of its existence and has the most consumers on long-term contracts. Verizon released its first iPhone in March 2011 and has sold 14 million iPhones to date. Sprint has only been on the iPhone bandwagon since the fourth quarter of 2011, with the iPhone 4S, and has sold 3.3 million devices.
In the last two quarters alone, Apple sold nearly 72 million smartphones. Only 22.7 million of those were in the U.S. Where is all of this fantastic growth coming from?
Apple CEO Tim Cook said on the company’s latest earnings call that iPhone sales have grown 500% in China during the past quarter, a trend that extended throughout the region. “We experienced very strong iPhone sales in all of our segments, led by our Asian-Pacific and Japan segments, where sales more than doubled year-over-year,” Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said. “We continue to see tremendous momentum in greater China, where iPhone sales were five times the level of the year-ago quarter.”
So, that is one big chunk. Apple is moving horizontally through the world market with GSM-capable devices (which AT&T and T-Mobile run in the U.S.) at a variety of price points. As we predicted last fall, once Apple had multiple prices for consumers to choose from, growth would rise exponentially.
That is precisely what has happened. In the U.S. and many other destinations throughout the world, an iPhone can be acquired on the cheap. In the U.S., an iPhone 3GS is free on a two-year contract through AT&T. An iPhone 4 is $99, and the 4S is $199. This has certainly had an effect in Apple’s primary North American market; Apple sold 13.7 million iPhones during the holidays, which was almost as many as the 16.4 million it sold in the first three quarters of 2011.
However, while Apple remains the dominant smartphone maker in the U.S., there are still several other competitors that are churning along in international markets or trying to penetrate the U.S. ecosystem.
Samsung Primes Apple for Worldwide Battle
Samsung outsold Apple worldwide in the first quarter of this year by 44 million smartphones to 35 million. However, Apple has been winning the U.S. market in the last two quarters. Sprint did not divulge how many total smartphones it sold in this year’s first quarter, but a reasonable guess would be that 60% of its smartphone sales were iPhones. For the quarter, Verizon’s sales were 51% iPhones, while AT&T’s were 78%. If Sprint sold 1.5 million iPhones at 60% of smartphone volume, the carrier sold about 2.5 million smartphones altogether. That means that Apple took about 63.4% of smartphone sales for the first quarter – a number that correlates closely to Apple’s U.S. sales in the fourth quarter of 2011.
Research firm NPD noted that U.S. smartphone sales for the fourth quarter of 2011 were 48% Android and 43% iPhone. That gap may have closed in Q1, but Android still likely outperforms the iPhone on a global basis. If Android had 36.6% of sales from the top three U.S. carriers in Q1 and Samsung sold a majority of those devices, then the Korean smartphone maker likely sold between 4.5 million and 5.5 million smartphones in the U.S. in the first quarter (considering a 22.4 million Q1 smartphone market with Samsung taking 20%-25%).
That is a lot of numbers to get to a couple basic points. First, if Apple is dominating the U.S but Android still outperforms iOS globally, then the war for smartphone supremacy is no longer U.S-centric. Between Apple and Samsung, the two manufacturers sold about 80 million smartphones overseas. Key emerging smartphone markets where the battle is taking place are China, India, western Europe and Africa.
Second, the numbers also speak to the challenges faced by other manufacturers trying to gain a foothold in the U.S. market. Right now, about 90% of smartphone sales in the U.S. are either Android or iOS. That means a steep climb for Microsoft and Nokia, which are trying to gain traction with the Lumia 900 on AT&T and the Lumia 610 on T-Mobile. AT&T has a $150 million marketing budget for Windows Phone and will aggressively sell the device, but with the Samsung Galaxy S III and HTC One series coming to nearly every U.S. carrier, the amount of traction that Windows Phone can gain in its primary target market is questionable. Nokia, like the Android manufacturers, should continue to focus on high-growth locations outside of North America.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Amazon’s Sales Are Strong, But Its Spending Is Stronger
Apr 26th
Amazon has announced its Q1 earnings. It was a strong quarter, beating Wall Street expectations. As usual, there’s not much specific information about its most-watched products. Amazon is thrilled with its book business, Kindle sales are “strong,” and that’s all we get. But the overall numbers reveal some trends to watch closely at Amazon this year.
Razor-Thin Margins
While sales and revenue are up in all the important segments, Amazon’s margins are still very narrow, and profits are down. The worldwide operating margin held steady at 1.5% this quarter, down from 3.3% a year ago. Apple’s margin for the same quarter was an incredible 44.7%. This is an apples-and-oranges comparison (and forgive the pun), but it demonstrates just how different the structures of these two tech companies are.
Apple’s business makes extraordinary profits selling hardware. Amazon doesn’t even try to do that. Kindle hardware is sold at a loss as a way to extend the rest of Amazon’s retail business into people’s hand-held devices. Physical retail, too, has very thin margins. It involves lots of organizing and shipping of materials all over the world.
Amazon has to sell everything, everywhere to keep its profits healthy. But all-digital sales don’t have the costs of physical goods, so the Kindle family will help Amazon expand its margins.
There are signs that this strategy is working, getting the pieces into place for when it kicks in. Today, comScore released a study showing that the Kindle Fire comprises more than half of Android tablets sold. That’s a good foothold for Amazon’s all-digital media business, and digital sales.
Big Investments
Amazon’s return on invested capital is down to 12%. That’s because it’s spending its capital to get into a favorable position.
The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s star product, should actually be thought of as an investment. It doesn’t make money on sales of the devices. Those are priced as low as possible – those thin margins again – in order to get them into more hands. That effort is working. People with Kindle Fires buy more media, and that’s how Amazon makes its money.
But in a more traditional sense, Amazon spent some major dough this quarter, acquiring Kiva Systems for $775 million. Kiva manufactured the robots Amazon uses to keep its warehouses organized. Once this merger is completed, Amazon will make those itself. This is a big expense, but if it makes Amazon’s inventory more efficient, it will open up some headroom in those margins.
Plus, there’s lots of money to be made selling warehouse droids to other companies.
But Amazon made a third kind of investment this quarter. It hired lots of people.
Staffing Up
The one big surprise from Amazon’s first quarter is that the droids aren’t replacing its human workers. On the contrary, this was Amazon’s biggest hiring quarter ever. It hired 9,400 people, bringing its total headcount up to 65,000. According to CFO Tom Szkutak, the “vast majority” of that growth was in operations and customer service, and many of the new hires were formerly temporary workers.
But the biggest hiring quarter ever? In a quarter in which Amazon bought a company to automate its warehouses? That’s a strong signal. Amazon doesn’t break down its employment by region, but this is a worldwide number. If Amazon truly does want to sell everything, everywhere at razor-thin margins, it’s still going to take a huge force of people to make it happen.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Facebook Ad Sales Hit $872 Million in Q1
Apr 23rd
Facebook’s ad revenue totaled $872 million during Q1 2012, up 37 percent from the $637 million it took in during the same period the year before, according to its amended S-1 filing released yesterday. Total revenue reached $1.058 billion
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Sales Index Shows Steady Growth of Online Sales in Australia – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Apr 16th
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Sales Index Shows Steady Growth of Online Sales in Australia
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Perth Online Marketing Company Oracle Digital proudly markets its power-packed SEO products and services to help businesses take advantage of customers' increasing interest in online retailing. Perth, Western Australia (PRWEB) April 17, … |
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Younger Online Shoppers Contribute Significantly In the Increase of Online Sales – Virtual-Strategy Magazine
Apr 12th
 PR Web |
Younger Online Shoppers Contribute Significantly In the Increase of Online Sales
Virtual-Strategy Magazine Perth SEO Company Oracle Digital markets its top-of-the-line digital marketing strategies to further support the fast-paced growth rate of online retailing. Oracle Digital, the leading Internet Marketing Company in Western Australia, has unveiled its … Online Selling Considered by Experts to Be Indispensable in Multi-Channelling Survey Shows Online Shopping Behaviour of Online Shoppers in Australia |
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Younger Online Shoppers Contribute Significantly In the Increase of Online Sales – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Apr 11th
 PR Web |
Younger Online Shoppers Contribute Significantly In the Increase of Online Sales
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Perth SEO Company Oracle Digital markets its top-of-the-line digital marketing strategies to further support the fast-paced growth rate of online retailing. Perth, Western Australia (PRWEB) April 12, 2012 Oracle Digital, the leading Internet Marketing … Domestic Online Companies Lead Online Sales Growth in Australia |
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