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As if the advent of Net-A-Porter wasn’t boon enough to fashion lovers, its offshoot, The Outnet, has brought a whole other level of good cheer to online shoppers. Namely, you can get that same roster of well-edited designers from Net-A-Porter at steeply discounted prices on The Outnet. At the helm of The Outnet is Stephanie Phair, a Conde Nast and online retail veteran with an instinct for creating buzz online.
The Outnet’s roster of designers is impressive, discount or not. “Azzedine Alaia, Balmain and Marni are popular because they are so hard to find at a discount,” Phair told Nandini D’Souza, a regular contributor to The Inside Source, eBay’s digital style

The recent capitulation of Blockbuster video to Netflix has engendered a lot of ink. Most business writers seem to be getting no end of schadenfreude at the sight of the king of the late fees (Blockbuster collected half a billion dollars in late fees in its heyday) getting its comeuppance at the hands of an organization that seems to get the concept of customer service.
So the story we’re hearing is that Netflix’s ascendancy is the triumph of online retailing and technology over traditional retail stores and physical product. And sure, the facts are compelling. Netflix understood the revolution taking place in the global supply chain, particularly in the field of logistics which obviated the need to carry large inventories. While Blockbuster hung its hat on 5,000 stores nationally, Netflix operated 37 shipping centers located throughout the United States reaching nearly 92 percent of subscribers with generally one-day delivery. That’s one million DVDs each day. And, like Zappo’s, Netflix chased the good conduct medal, winning numerous customer satisfaction awards from places like ForeSee and Fast Company.
But the more interesting story, in my mind, is told through a socio-cultural lens. Some have described Netflix as a category killer but this seems wrong. It didn’t make its fortune on bargain prices and stocking commodity products. Netflix actually did the opposite — it gave the consumer more and better. A typical Blockbuster has 8,000 tapes covering 6,500 titles in its stores (a neighborhood video store generally has less than 3,000 titles); Netflix offers a collection of 100,000 titles on DVD. The mistake that business case-study scribes make is in thinking that films or music operate the way laundry detergent does. Netflix didn’t win because it had more titles at cheaper prices but because its catalog reflected the growing reach of the American and worldwide consumer.
The top rental at Netflix when I last checked was Crash, a searing Robert Altman-esque film from 5 years ago about race relations in California. This is a powerful indicator of what’s at play in the Netflix model. Clearly, Crash did not rise to the top of the charts because of advertising or the elephantine point-of-purchase displays one is accustomed to in a video store. Instead, the engine driving viewing tastes at places like Netflix is the Amazon-style customer-review model that has done more to break the stranglehold of advertising over buyer behavior than anything I can think of. Amazon, as we all know, sticks a cookie on your hard drive, so that you’re on the receiving end of all sorts of useful features like recommendations based on past purchases and lists of reviews and guides written by users who purchased the products you’re viewing. Netflix has now amassed more than 1 billion movie ratings from customers, and members select approximately 60 percent of their movies based on movie recommendations tailored to their individual tastes. For example, my recent browse of the description of the Werckmesiter Harmonies, an austerely beautiful black and white film by the Hungarian director, Bela Tarr led me via Netflix’s Cinematch recommendation system to the Devil’s Backbone by the Mexican filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro; a look at the terrifically exciting 60s thriller Blow Up led me to Nicholas Roeg’s 70s thriller Don’t Look Now. It’s hard to imagine this skein of sound recommendations happening in a storefront. And that’s what Netflix did — it led us away from the 50 copies of The Hangover or Transformers along an associative path informed by all of our past choices. It wrote a database for serendipity.
Perhaps the company that’s expanded on the customer-review idea in the most stunning way is the internet music service, Pandora. Started as a recommendation technology company, it was re-purposed in Fall 2005 as web radio service and today has more than 60 million registered users. Pandora’s model is the next iteration of Netflix and Amazon. Called the Music Genome Project, it offers listeners a prompt to enter an artist or song and then constructs a playlist based on the song’s distinguishing features. The difference is that Pandora has hired trained music analysts to categorize its entire inventory of music using up to 400 distinct musical characteristics, including melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics (the typical music analyst has a four-year degree in music theory, composition or performance). My recent trip to Pandora on my iPhone which began with the 90s grunge heroes, the Pixies, led me to the French super group Phoenix and the even more obscure Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, a buoyant California retro act which caught me by surprise. Again, I can’t imagine being able to deep dive into the indie music scene that way on terrestrial radio. Pandora took off when it began offering apps for smartphones and other mobile devices and turned its first profit in the first quarter of 2009. With half of all radio-listening occurring in the car, Ford, GM and Mercedes have all expressed plans to put Pandora into their dashboards.
In the end Pandora and Netflix are winning because they reflect their customers in a way that old-line firms with their hegemonic ad campaigns and totalizing distribution channels never could. Time Magazine put it rather well: they “are attempting to second-guess a mysterious, perverse and profoundly human form of behavior: the personal response to a work of art.” Pandora and Netflix know that customers today are smarter. And that roving appetite even for the obscure and the interesting is a function of how we’ve changed. By 2050, the world’s urban population will be 6 billion, 300 million inside US cities. 2 billion people will enter the middle class by 2050 mostly in Africa and Asia. We’re better educated and more curious about the world than big business gives us credit. And that’s the lesson of Netflix. When given the choice of something interesting and exciting that sidesteps the mainstream, we will take it.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Studies show that our brains’ pleasure centers light up brighter when we give than when we receive. This holiday season, get your oxytocin fix by shopping these online destinations for altruistic eco-gifts.
For a global array of responsibly produced gifts, eBay’s World of Good delivers. The site’s “Goodprint” section showcases eco-positive pieces and tells the story behind each handcrafted offering. Choices include banana-fiber napkin rings from Kenya ($30) and a bamboo flute from Thailand ($23). There’s also a selection of efficient electronics, including a 12-watt solar-energy kit ($400).
This stocking stuffer should sate the youngsters in your life — but will also improve the lives of less lucky children. The tube of recycled-newspaper coloring pencils (about $8) is available on UNICEF Canada’s robust shopping site. The purchase supports UNICEF’s efforts to protect and educate the world’s most vulnerable children.
How do you gift-wrap random acts of kindness? By buying a themed deck of cards from Boom Boom! The green deck ($10) has 26 easy directives benefiting the environment, such as picking up the next piece of litter you see. Once you’ve completed a good deed, register the card’s unique ID code online, then hand it off to a friend. As others pass it along, you can map the card’s progress online.
We love Blurb. This for-the-people publishing outfit allows anyone with a dream of authoring a book to see it realized. You upload your text and design, then order copies ($5 to $187 each, depending on size). It’s not just another vanity press, however: The site’s philanthropic Blurb for Good section lets wordsmiths and photographers sell their art for a cause. Sales benefit a wide range of human- and animal-rights groups; one cookbook has collected more than $45,000 for Haiti. Love Pelicans ($39) raises money to rehabilitate the birds of the Gulf.
The idea of planting a tree in someone’s name isn’t new, but TreeNex makes it possible to track that tree’s growth online. Its cheery holiday cards ($5.50 each) are 100% recycled, let recipients know that a fir or oak has been planted for them, and provide an online tracking code so they can see the sapling’s planting date, its geographical coordinates, and photos of its nursery or forest.
Here’s a longer list of do-good websites.

Follow Avital Binshtock on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

It’s holiday time and we’re on the hunt for cool gifts for family and friends. Our parameters are: They must be good looking. They must be unique. They must be in our budget. We’re pretty picky. Ok. We’re really, really picky. Often so picky and particular we can end up in no- buy-mode rather than purchase a less than perfect present.
Etsy has saved us from gift FAIL. What is Etsy you ask? Etsy is an online marketplace that enables “people to earn a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers.” We love the idea of buying directly from and supporting a worldwide collection of artisans and collectors. So crunchy and cool. Not to mention, no crowds, no middleman, and best of all-for all us gals on a budget -no middleman mark-ups.

Hand Stamped Sterling Silver Tag Necklace by Tiny Token Designs $22
Handcrafted Grasshopper Pull Toy by Stump Pond Toy’s Shop $27.95
Grey Wool Felt iPad Sleeve with Leather Trim by Bryd and Belle $48
Santa’s Sleigh Place Cards by Cuddle Creature $9
Steampunk USB Drive for The Geek on Your List by Cerrius Design $46
The Guy Hat-Dueling Cables Black Wool Knit Hat by Trina Brielle $36
Read more from Rosalyn Hoffman at Bitches on a Budget
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Jaron Lanier (author of You Are Not A Gadget) wrote this past Sunday in the New York Times Magazine about technology and education, while touching briefly on the pains of letting algorithms choose your music, and even defining what your musical tastes might be.
It struck me that his key point could also be used in how we think about book browsing — online searching and shopping vs. the somewhat aimless yet frequently serendipitous browsing discoveries in a “real” brick’n'mortar bookstore.
Lanier wrote:
Online book shopping shows up the flaws as well as the virtues of our increasingly digital, connected world: we have instant access to any book we might think of. If we already know of the book we’re looking for, then finding it online is the work of seconds and buying a physical copy can be accomplished in a few more seconds, thanks to “One Click.” If we wish to have an ebook, a minute more and it’s on our device.
But what if we don’t already know what book we’re looking for? A great read? Something that we once heard about on NPR, but have forgotten the title, author, air date? What if we’re just looking for something new but need some guidance?
Online search & shop can only take us so far. A savvy Googler will likely be able to solve the mystery of that lost book from NPR. But I think that the book suggestion algorithms in online stores can only go so far to replicate the human interactions between wandering customer and experienced bookseller. And please remember that those “If You Bought This, You’ll Probably Like This” links are usually paid-for promotions by one publisher or another. They may seem like magic, but it’s not that different from seeing a promotional poster of a book in a store and saying, “Yep, that’s the book for me because I saw the poster near a book I once liked.”
And the “browsing” experience in every online store I’ve ever tried just doesn’t serve any customer well for serendipity. Your options are essentially limited to keyword searches, or browsing lists of books, sorted by title, author, release date or “popularity.” This is great if the book was just published, or if you’re looking for something that’s currently a best-seller.
But what if you want something off the beaten track? Or by an author whose name starts with “M”? Or a book published six years ago? Or all three of those criteria? I’m thinking of a book I spotted over on my bookshelf, Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned, published six years ago by Akashic Books, one of the publishers I represent.
If you already knew you wanted that particular book, or even a book by Joe Meno, your online searching would be easy. You’d have a link to click in seconds.
But if you didn’t know that you wanted that book, but were merely clicking through the fiction pages at Amazon.com or Borders.com or the iBookstore, looking for something interesting, how many pages would you have to click through until you got to Joe Meno? Hundreds? Thousands?
In fact, you might end up taking a chance on some other book long before you got to Joe. And that, I guess, would also be some kind of serendipity. But not one that answers your need for Joe Meno’s particular brand of edgy all-American fiction.
Indie bricks and mortar bookstores may not always be able to satisfy that desire for “search-find-click-done” instantaneity, but they do have an edge in browseability. And I would give a physical bookstore the edge in what I might describe in parallel terms as “wander-browse-sample-done”.
Algorithms and Google’s almost magical ability to deliver search results may be a fast route to finding a specific book, and that must satisfy many of our modern tastes for speed and efficiency.
But our human nature must also sometimes treasure what Lanier calls “longitudinal intelligence” — which I imagine might include a bookselling equivalent to his stories in the linked article about his father’s intuitive teaching skills.
Instead of trying to provide exactly a copy of every single, specific book you might want out of the universe of all available books (which doesn’t really scale well for bookstores that have a physical limit to their store’s square footage), actual bookstores focus on teaching their bookselling staff some key skills in locating books that do exist in the store, learning how to match customer’s requests with books that might be on hand, how to recommend books that will satisfy a customer’s desires, and how to locate books that might be orderable.
It’s this duality that gets to the heart of what I think Jaron Lanier is writing about: Some days, you feel like getting exactly the right book right now. And some days, you feel like wandering through a real store with your real body and interacting with other humans to see what life might put in your path.
It’s perfectly fine to be ambidextrous. But as with all skills, you need to keep working both sides of the duality. If all your book-buying is done online, you might find that your local physical bookstore is no longer there when you have one of those “I wonder what life will put in my path” sort of days. And that would be a shame.
Cross-posted at www.my3books.com.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Twice a year, buyers, editors and everyone else worth their salt in the industry convene at the major fashion weeks to preview next season’s collections. After the collections are shown, during market, buyers place their orders, acting as curators, boiling down the season to the pieces and stories that would speak to their customers. This selection is then ordered, produced and delivered to the shop floor in time for the customers to buy their new pieces for the season. These retailers attract and retain their loyal customers through a judicious mix of store experience, location, and, of course, selection of clothing. This is more or less how the fashion cycle works for brick & mortar retailing. Retailers edit the collections for consumers who don’t have the time or inclination to scour the marketplace. They present the cream of the crop.
The rise of online fashion retailing raises the question of whether this formula can be directly translated to the online world. This is a world of information, where runway shows are streamed live as they are shown, and anybody, anywhere, can have access to the entire online marketplace with just a few clicks. This is a world where customers know that that blue Marc Jacobs jacket on Barneys.com comes in grey on Net-a-Porter, and might that not go better with the combat boots she bought at Shopbop? The time cost of searching the marketplace has diminished to an almost negligible amount, the environment is nearly always the same (you, wherever you are, staring at a screen), and the relationship that is so well cultivated in department stores between sales associate and customer, is absent. All in all, this world raises the question, why should a customer be loyal to your e-store?
As I write, there are still relatively few major online retailers of high-end fashion, so the problem of competition and differentiation is not as serious as it is likely to become. But as the online marketplace grows, and more brands feel comfortable selling their wares online, the nature of the beast may change. The factors that make customers so loyal to brick & mortar stores are much more difficult to maintain online. As just one example, each major city has its own few department stores that inhabitants of the city rely on, simply because of the fact they are in the same city. It is just not practical to visit Harvey Nichols if you live in New York. But HarveyNichols.com ships internationally. This in and of itself is enough to open up the competition. In addition to an increasingly open marketplace, customers are aware of what is out there from the moment it hits the runway. Buyers are going to have to work harder to justify their selection of the season to well-informed fashionistas. If the retailer did not buy into a particular runway look, they will have a lot more explaining to do to the customer who has been coveting it for six months, the same customer who previously would not have been aware that the option existed.
The fact that loyal customers are already more difficult to cultivate online is only compounded by online off-price sale sites like Gilt Groupe and Yoox.com. Now not only are customers aware of everything that’s out there, they also have last season’s looks easily available at a fraction of the retail price. Buyers are going to need to give customers compelling reasons to buy their current season looks.
All in all, online retailers have a tough job ahead of them to convince customers to be loyal to their online store. They are going to have to get creative, in terms of customer service, site experience and their product selection. Speedy delivery, generous return policies and attentive customer service are all going to become obvious key differentiators. Net-a-Porter has quite rightly taken the personalization and customer service to a new level. Their top clients get to preview new arrivals a day before anyone else, and their tip-top clients get personal shoppers who style them over the phone. Retailers are going to have to think hard to find ways to compete with each other in terms of loyalty programs and customer service. These can offer effective enticements for a customer to remain loyal to a single retailer.
Site experience, editorial features and personalized accounts will all also become important assets. The good stores will provide reasons for customers to visit their site beyond just selling clothing. Blogs, editorial shoots and features all provide a way to speak to a consumer and get her to return to the site even if she isn’t interested in purchasing. Maybe she’ll come across a bag she didn’t know she wanted, and the desire sets in. Content also provides an effective way for a retailer to develop authority in the market. The site aesthetics, along with the quality of the content can go a long way to gaining the trust of the consumer. When Net-a-Porter says sequins are in, their customers listen.
After all of this, however, perhaps the most important factor of all will be the obvious one: the product. Retailers will no longer be able to half-heartedly serve up the broad trends of the season, attempting to appeal to everyone. Online shoppers need a reason to visit one site rather than another, and retailers can provide this through a focused selection. Whether this focus is a very specific “look” or a defined category of apparel and accessories, retailers will have to prove that they are the best at what they do. Whether you are the go-to store for soft bohemian looks at an easy price point, or whether you do shoes better than anyone else, online stores will need to develop a strong association in the shopper’s mind. Ultimately you’re selling product, not visits, and you need to turn interest into dollars.
All in all, online retailers will have a tougher time than brick & mortar stores. Good news for the consumer, bad news for the stores. Ultimately though, the progression that must inevitably be made will benefit the industry as a whole, as the market opens up and competition becomes fiercer. The key point is that online retailers will have to adapt creatively, and try harder to speak to their consumers. Or run the risk of being lost forever in the faded relevance of second page Google results.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com