Chris and Tope Folayan, two brothers who grew up in Nigeria and attended college in the United States, founded MallforAfrica in 2013. Tope earned an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. After graduating, he returned to Lagos, while Chris remained in the United States. Their company makes it easier for Nigerians to place online orders for American and British products that are difficult to find in Nigerian stores and that online retailers don't offer directly to most African consumers because of troublesome customs duties and paperwork, shipping costs and the fear of fraud.
Analyst Insight: Consumer products companies are making far greater use of alternative sales channels than ever before. They are proactively reaching out to customers, whether in B2B or B2C environments, to gain share of mind and increase sales. Consumer products companies have also become much more active using their own websites and utilizing marketplaces as a means to increase their product's visibility and availability to potential customers. – Bruce Tompkins, Executive Director, Tompkins Supply Chain Consortium
Long a laggard in online sales, the Swedish retailer Ikea, which is privately held, has finally recognized the need for a more robust e-commerce presence.
Shoppost, a platform for social commerce, is now available for retailers selling on the Amazon Webstore. Created by Zantler, Shoppost allows retailers to sell their products in-stream on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and blogs in a post that looks like an e-commerce storefront and will connect customers directly to the checkout process.
With expectations higher than ever for a merry omnichannel holiday season, retailers are assertively preparing their shipping operations to avoid delivery and service hiccups.
Inventory management and predictive analytics software, in-store mobile device integration and e-commerce solutions are the biggest technology priorities for independent brick-and-mortar retailers, according to LightSpeed's first annual Retail Tech Forecast.
Overall, holiday sales were weak, but from a mobile perspective, the results were phenomenal, with mobile traffic reaching 48 percent of all online traffic while mobile sales grew 40 percent to reach 29 percent of online holiday sales, according to data from IBM.
Despite the shortest shopping season since 2002, Adobe Systems predicts record growth for online sales on Thanksgiving with $1.1bn and Black Friday with $1.6bn, increases of 21 and 17 percent, respectively.
Brick-and-mortar retailers are sweating online competition this holiday season, perhaps more than ever. But it's all upside to UPS. The shipping giant is cashing in both on internet shopping and old-school retailers trying to mimic Amazon.com - shipping inventory around the country in an incessant supply-chain shuffling.
Dick Boer, the chief executive officer of Ahold, which has 3,000 stores, mostly supermarkets, across Europe and the United States, says the internet has vastly changed retail and the grocery business.