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Expect More. Pay Less

Expect more of everything: More great design, more choices, more convenience, more service and more clothes, house wares and designer-created items that you’ll never find anywhere else. And pay less. It’s as simple as that.

We team up with world-class designers in home, fashion, accessories, beauty, furniture and outdoor living and create exclusive products to decorate and delight—people like Michael Graves, Amy Coe, Sonia Kashuk, Liz Lange and Isaac Mizrahi. And since it’s at Target, you know you’ll always find it at a reasonable—or even surprising—price that lets you add high-quality design to your life, in every room, every day.

Visit Target's online store to shop, view the weekly advertisements, catalogs, and promotions. You can also shop for great Target products

The breakup, which is amicable, means that Target will no longer sell its products on Amazon.Com. More importantly, it leaves the big box retailer responsible for integration, fulfillment, customer service and all the other down and dirty functions that come with running a leading online shopping business.

Target's decision to go its own way was prompted by a need to have more intimate control of the online customer buying experience and because the company sees online as a growth opportunity. Target.Com is the 22nd largest Internet retailer in the U.S., with $1.33 billion in 2010 sales. In contrast, Wal-Mart.Com ranks as the sixth largest Internet retailer with an estimated $4.4 billion in sales while Amazon is number one with nearly $13 billion in sales last year.

Going it alone means investing in its own e-commerce system and the retailer developed and tested its new system in 8 months time. The lead vendor chosen to develop the new Target.Com is SapientNitro who leaned on IBM, Sterling Commerce and Infosys to meet the technical, business process and marketing challenges of the implementation effort. The team was rounded out to include Oracle, Endeca, Autonomy, and Huge, which designed the site.

A key challenge of the e-commerce platform is to ensure integration of real-time inventory status (which includes a few million inventory transactions) flowing each day from direct ship vendors, fulfillment centers and corresponding order transactions. The team also had to make sure that the system is flexible enough to handle "buy online-pick up in store" orders, social media integration and mobile commerce. In a recent conference call target announced that more than 10% of total visits (some 30 million unique visitors) to Target.Com are from mobile devices and that mobile traffic is running more than double 2010 levels. Further, they expect visits on mobile devices to exceed traditional online traffic by 2015.

Target hopes that by controlling its own site they will be able to sell a bigger assortment of products such as baby furniture and patio sets than it can carry in-store. The company said that more than 800,000 products on the new site will have free shipping. It's chief competitor, Wal-Mart stores recently announced that it is reorganizing its e-commerce operations in an effort to better integrate retailing in stores and online.

According to Gregg Steinhafel, Target's CEO, "the new site will present clean, compelling visual and will be easier to navigate and provide clear and consistent product information with an efficient checkout". The new Target.Com is expected to launch by the end of August to give the retailer a chance to compete for a higher share of the 2011 Holiday shopping season.

Published: August 2011
at: http://www.retailindustry.com/retail-tech/articles/2011/the-new-target-dot-com.html

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