When Wal-Mart announced plans to use its retail locations to fulfill online orders last week, the media and business community broke into a collective game of word association. Amazon. Prior to breaking the news, Wal-Mart was already one of the few companies that could compete with Amazon online. But after unveiling how it plans to do so—by fulfilling online orders in its own stores—Wal-Mart became Amazon’s first serious threat. The irony is that Wal-Mart will fulfill these orders using Amazon’s own in-store locker strategy. The word? MORE >>

Which means, as a sales channel, it will either supplement or replace other marketing platforms—namely, brick-and-mortar store locations, online stores like Amazon  and eBay , and/or standalone ecommerce sites. Ways B2B Can Learn from B2C Marketers Business and consumer brands have traditionally approached marketing from two. Customer Experience Mobile Amazon cross channel optimization ebay mobile optimizationPosted in Customer Experience Mobile. But determining where mobile will fit in is an exercise in correctly gathering and interpreting consumer data. MORE >>

57% of Facebook users “like” a business because they want to receive special offers and promotions, according to Mashable.com. But what do these trends mean for today’s businesses? And what do marketers and business owners need to know—and more importantly, do —to keep ahead of consumer demands? Now, having a mobile strategy is a must—no matter what size your business is. And don’t forget about the Amazon Kindle, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. With the enormous growth of mobile devices, mobile marketing strategies are a must for every business. MORE >>

However, retailers, in tandem with their marketing vendors, must first identify what personalization really means—and what it means to their business and target customers. With the right combination of technology, research and testing, e-commerce businesses can now deliver a personalized online experience that far exceeds anything that can be delivered in store—short of hiring a dedicated personal shopper. Amazon continues to set the gold standard for best practices in personalization. Posted in behavioral targeting Personalization. What does personalization really mean? MORE >>

QlikTech released version 9 of its QlikView business intelligence software today. More significant changes include: - availability through the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which lets companies order up a QlikView-equipped server in minutes. These are critical as QlikView moves from being a departmental solution run primarily by business analysts to a mission-critical system backed by corporate IT. On the other hand, maybe QlikView is really moving to compete with traditional business intelligence tools like Cognos , Business Objects and MicroStrategy. MORE >>