Meet Retailing Together’s new best friend, at least for today: ecommr. Ecommr publishes images from ecommerce applications. It’s probably boring to most, but a fantastic resource for those of us obsessed with both web design and retail. 

The site is very spare, and most posts are simply an image taken from a web application, and most commentary on the interfaces is in the comment section. 

The primary instigator of the site is Tom Sullivan, the guy  behind the No Turn On Red retail blog. Thanks Tom! This is a really valuable website for web application designers.

Here are a few websites that offer opportunities for online and physical world networking for people in the fashion and apparel business: 

• Independent Fashion Bloggers.  An influential community of fashion bloggers.
• Fashion Retailers. A new social network for retailers. The website is similar to LinkedIn. 
• HauteNet. A general fashion social network, also similar to LinedIn. HauteNet has an impressive set of associations, including FIDM and FBI. 
• ThreadMe. A social network that aims to connect designers,  retailers and showrooms. Allows designers to upload lookbooks and control which other network members can view them. 
• LinkedIn. LinkedIn has many fashion, apparel and retail oriented groups. Click on the “Groups” link in the left hand menu of your profile and search for them. 
• Fashion-Incubator. Fashion-Incubator has an excellent blog for new designers, but an even better private  forum. 
• Fashion Business Inc. A educational trade organization with many resources for new apparel manufacturers. Their seminars and other events are good networking opportunities. 
• In San Diego, we also have FOCUS and Stiletto Evolution, both of which produce fashion events, sometimes jointly. 
• Update: Fashion Collaborative

Surviving Retail is a new webcomic , about, you guessed it, the travails of working in retail. It just launched on December 29, so start reading it now and you can impress your friends with yet another cultural touchpoint you scooped before it was popular, you hipster. 

We, of course, can’t really relate to the comic, since our job is to talk about retail, but from numerous interviews we’ve done,  we can report that the comic is both painfully poignant and funny. 

To be sure you catch everything, start with the archives. 

Here are a few other sites that have ASR coverage: 

• Boardistan.com
• Shop-Eat-Surf.com
• Silverfish Longboarding doesn’t have and ASR posting as time of publication, but should be posting soon. They do have postings from Surf Expo. 
• San Diego Union Tribune 

Naturally, while we are combing the net to find stories, we occasionally find other retail blogs. Here are a few of the notable ones:

• Retail Minded is the blog of a retail consultant in Chicago, Nicole Leinbach Reyhle.
• No Turn On Red covers retailing, technology and social media.
• Retail Dish lets vendors share feedback about retailers
• Retail Email Blog discusses how retailers are using email for marketing.
• Retail eCommerce Blog presents tips and news related to retail e-commerce.
• Label Scar has photos and reviews of large retail stores.

There is also a surprising number of defunct retail blogs:

• Retail Blog Marketing is the blog of a consultancy that promoted retail blogging.
• The Retail Blog, “Selling in the shadow of Wal*Mart”
• Retail Blog is a, well, retail blog.

There are also a few interesting blogs listed in DMOZ.

Updates, courtesy of Fashion-Incubator:

• Retail Anarchy
• Manufacturers Credit Collective, to identify unethical retailers.

Marketing Charts reports that while consumers prefer to use the Internet to find information about companies, only 44% of small business have a website.  Half of the consumers surveyed said search engines were the first place they turned to for information about local businesses and only 24% chose the Yellow Pages.

Furthermore, the trend of consumers moving to electronic sources for information is accelerating, as this chart from the Marketing Charts article reveals:

Our experience in the apparel, accessories and shoe markets is that far fewer than 44% of retailers have websites. Among stores that sell missy and plus sizes to older women, a rough estimate is less than 5% of retailers have websites. With consumers turning to the Internet for information about stores, an offline retailer can only attract new customers through random foot traffic and word of mouth.

See the article at Marketing Charts for all of the numbers.

TransactionTree is a new web service that offer paperless receipts. Their service connects to the retailer’s point of sale systems to give customers a choice of printing out a paper receipt, or submitting the receipt to TransactionTree’s online service. The customer gives the clerk an email address and the customer’s online receipts go into an online account attached to the email address.

There isn’t the slightest chance that you will ever use this service. From the company’s website and demo it is clear that the advantage the company is promoting is reducing the use of paper, not the convenience of being able to keep all of your receipts in one place. There is probably a good reason for that even in an optimistic case, so few retailers will use this service that the customers will likely only have a few receipts stored at the website. If the customer really wants to organize receipts, a much better solution is Shoeboxed.com.

But do customers really care enough about saving 1/8 of a sheet of a paper on the very few occasions they find a retailer who is using TransactionTree? In exchange for giving up their email addresses? Not likely. Customers would get much more environmental impact from having the phone company email out their bills. 

As the CEO of  TransactionTree is quoted in an article at LiveScience.com , ”people are looking for the little things they can do ” to save the environment. I suspect that TransactionTree is far too little for anyone to care.

In a September 2008 report, Marketing Sherpa reported that about 50% of companies surveyed expect to increase their budgets for email marketing and social media marketing. Additionally, 83% expect to decrease their radio and TV advertising, and 60% will decrease print advertising.  Here is the chart from the Marketing Sherpa Report:

This chart also indicates, for instance, that of the 382 marketing managers that Marketing Sherpa polled in September, 20% said they would be decreasing their spending on social networks, which they call “Web 2.0″,  and 48% of marketers would be increasing spending on social networks. Presumably, the remainder of the marketers ( 32% ) reported “no change”. ( We’ll ignore for a moment the erroneous conflation of social networks with Web 2.0. )

The research isn’t really surprising if you’ve been paying attention to online marketing for the last few years, but it does indicate that the shift from offline to online marketing is continuing.

For apparel vendors, this research has a few specific lessons: 

• If you don’t have plans for email marketing, start now. There is a simple reason for the planned increase in email marketing: it works. 
• Conference and trade shows – “Event Marketing” " has long been unpopular but  considered mandatory. That seems to be changing, and it may be that we’ll see a significant decline in conference attendance in the next year. Perhaps the decline already began when Quicksilver pulled out of the Action Sports Retailer trade show. 
• Social networks are getting more interesting. Social networks still don’t generate much traffic to corporate websites, but they are becoming much more popular for connecting with customers. Does your store have a Facebook page?

ExtactTarget turned us on to the chart in a post on January 12.  That post has additional analysis for what this data means specifically for email.

Swell.com is an online surf and skate retailer based in San Juan Capistrano. They primarily sell apparel but also have some hard goods. We’re interested in them because they have an excellent web presence.

Their home page is a familar surf website design, very similar to surf retailers like Ron Jon Surf Shop and other online retailers that cater to the same demographic. The design is comfortable, not challenging or edgy like skate shop Web design. The design doesn’t get in the way. 

What we really like is the content,  which not only has the traditional departments for “Guys,” “Girls,” and “Gear,” but also includes a Team section for their sponsored surfers, a blog, a side scrolling lookbook, and a digital catalog. 

The company also has a social media presence, including a Twitter account, @swelldotcom, and a Facebook page with nearly 1,500 fans. 

You can be certain that all of that content is not cheap, but would you expect a low-budget site to be able to buy the domain name “swell.com”? In March, the company, Swell Commerce, leased 34,000 square feet of office space for $1.6M over five years, so we can probably assume they aren’t a typical independent retailer.  Even so, Swell.com’s website is worth studying.