CI just announced it has acquired certain key assets of Vcommerce, a  provider of ecommerce software solutions located in Scottsdale, AZ. Through a new, wholly owned subsidiary, CI will provide storefront, order management and fulfillment services to retailers, manufacturers and publishers across several industry verticals.

The combination of the Vcommerce storefront and fulfillment services with Channel Intelligence’s industry leading performance based marketing solutions means CI will now offer the industry’s most complete set of services for manufacturers, publishers and retailers.

With its new capabilities, CI will be a leading provider of Commerce Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions, with over $2B annually in referred sales to leading manufacturers and retailers such as Best Buy, HP Home and Home Office, Kimberly-Clark, Neiman Marcus, Philips, Target, Garmin, OfficeMax,  Samsung, Charming Shoppes, Black & Decker and hundreds more. The acquisition will expand CI’s e-commerce platform services, increasing its overall customer base to 235, with more than 25% represented in the Internet Retailer Top 250.

CI will also maintain a west coast office in Phoenix, AZ, in addition to its headquarters located in Orlando, FL and its European offices.

Read more in the official press release here.

We've been collaborating with Forrester to produce research in the eCommerce space for several years, and now the latest report is out: “How the Best Manufacturer Web Sites Drive Sales (Hint: Through Other Stores)”.

Who says consumers aren’t buying? If you’re a retailer, it’s where they’re buying that matters right now.

Take jewelry. Not an item you’d expect to see a lot of growth during hard economic times. But CI clients in the jewelry category saw the number of orders from Q1 to Q2 this year increase by 20 percent on average as consumers make jewelry purchases via optimized product listings on shopping engines such as Google Product Search, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Nextag and others. That increase in orders brought a 28 percent increase in sales. The average return on ad spend (ROAS) for CI’s jewelry retailers advertising in this space increased 78 percent. Not too shabby.

Likewise, apparel and sporting goods retailers using CI’s SellCast® Solutions are faring exceptionally well in these channels. Apparel retailers received 31 percent more orders and sold 33 percent more items, giving way to a 32 percent average increase in sales in Q2. Sporting goods clients saw lower clicks costs but growth of 48 percent in the number of clicks. The number of orders jumped 29 percent on average from Q1 to Q2 and sales went up 18 percent.

Retailers are increasing their ad spends to take advantage of these trends on shopping engines, by as much as 39 percent in the apparel category. When you’ve got a good thing going, why not milk it for all it’s worth? Here’s one of the key components powering this group of retailers’ stellar performance in online sales.

View the press release for more details.

Looking back over the first few months of this year, the retail industry showed no signs of growth, according to ComScore's State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy in Q1 2009. Zero growth is quite a drop considering that online sales grew over 20% every year since 2003 before dipping to 8% in 2008.

While many retailers are having a tough time, we thought we'd look at how the CI Ad Network, our proprietary advertising network, is faring. If you're not familiar with the Ad Network, it's a where-to-buy solution that appears primarily on manufacturer web sites, linking product pages to retailers that have those products available.

Examining data from January through May this year, the following categories averaged positive month-over-month gains on the CI Ad Network:

• Appliances saw an 11% increase in traffic and a 25% increase in sales
• Health Aids and Medicine achieved a 23% increase in traffic and 34% increase in sales
• Baby and Safety Products increased traffic slightly by 1% and garnered 14% more in sales
• Lawn and Garden's seasonal traffic spike of 81% sustained a 92% increase in sales

For some time now we've been seeing that a large segment of customers prefer to buy via trusted channels like a manufacturer's web site. This preference explains why the CI Ad Network is seeing rising sales even while online sales as a whole remain flat. In a down economy, consumers are very selective in their product purchases, which benefits brand conscious manufacturers with a loyal customer base.