Remember the news last week that May’s retail sales were up
3.5 per cent from the previous May’s? Retailers are saying that
those figures are misleading, largely because they didn’t take
steep discounting in effect. And so, according to The Times, “desperate retailers are
offering discounts of up to 70% on furniture and clothes as the
sales season kicks off in earnest”. Among the companies
featured in the article: affiliate discount website
OfferoftheDay.co.uk, comparison websites
Pricerunner.co.uk and
Kelkoo.co.uk–the latter of which just
launched a mobile version of its site-coupon websites
MyVoucherCodes.co.uk and
SendMeDiscounts.co.uk, as well as merchants
including BrandAlley.com, Dixons, John Lewis, Laura
Ashely, Marks and Spencer, The Pier and
Play.com.
Meanwhile, ThisIsMoney.co.uk notes that some
merchants–Debenhams, M&S, Next and WH
Smith among them-are opting for what it calls
“stealth sales”.
Nursery products cataloguer/retailer Mamas &
Papas has opened its eighth overseas store and its first
in Bahrain, reports AME Info. The company has also selected
partners for potential stores in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Russia
and Singapore and is investigating expanding into Greece, South
Korea, Taiwan and Turkey.
Anthropologie, a US womenswear and home
accessories cataloguer/retailer (and sister brand to
Urban Outfitters) has launched a UK
transactional website, according to the Daily Mail.
Ouch! In a survey from StongMail and the Ponemon Institute,
“61 per cent of marketing staff surveyed admit to having
lost, or had stolen, confidential customer data over the past 24
months,” according to The Independent. “In 90 per cent of
these cases the customer is never informed that their data has
been lost or stolen.”
Share