Ah, New Year’s resolutions. Everybody’s got ‘em, but how often do we actually keep those promises we make to ourselves?

Fortunately, several stars have joined forces with eBay to help us follow through on our goals as well as help raise money for their charities of choice in the process.

So, if you’ve always wanted to, say, taste wine one-on-one with Fergie at her California winery or work out with Gwyneth Paltrow’s trainer, Tracy Anderson, then you’re in luck.

Fergie and shirtless Josh Duhamel wish fans a happy holiday

Starting Jan. 1, folks can check out six different “New Year, New You” auctions on eBay and bid until Jan. 11.

In addition to the two mentioned above, the other experiences up for grabs include a private pitching lesson with baseball all-star CC Sabathia, access to batting practice with San Francisco Giants pitcher Barry Zito and the team, a meet-and-greet with DJ Avicii, and a chance to play alongside Masters champ Bubba Watson at the Phoenix ProAm.

For more info, go to www.ebay.com/newyearnewyou.

Ryan O’Neil, a Connecticut government employee, was in the market to buy a digital weather station this month. His wife researched options on their iPad, but even though she found the lowest-price option there, Mr. O’Neil made the purchase on his laptop.

“I do use the iPad to browse sites,” Mr. O’Neil said, but when it comes time to close the deal, he finds it easier to do on a computer.

Many online retailers had visions of holiday shoppers lounging beneath the Christmas tree with their mobile devices in hand, making purchases. The size of the average order on tablets, particularly iPads, tends to be bigger than on PCs. So retailers poured money and marketing into mobile Web sites and apps with rich images and, they thought, easy checkout.

But while visits to e-commerce sites and apps on tablets and phones have nearly doubled since last year, consumers like Mr. O’Neil are more frequently using multiple devices to shop. In many cases, they are more comfortable making the final purchase on a computer, with its bigger screen and keyboard. So retailers are trying to figure out how to appeal to a shopper who may use a cellphone to research products, a tablet to browse the options and a computer to buy.

“I’ve been yelling at customers for two years, saying, ‘Mobile, mobile, mobile,’ ” said Jason Spero, director of mobile sales and strategy at Google. “But the funny thing is, now we’re going to say: ‘Don’t put mobile in a silo. It’s also about the desktop.’ ”

The challenges are daunting, though. It is technically difficult to track consumers as they hop from phone to computer to tablet and back again. This means customers who, say, fill shopping carts on their tablets have to do all the work again on their PCs or other devices. The biggest obstacle, retailers say, is that the tools used to track shoppers on computers — cookies, or bundles of data stored in Web browsers — don’t transfer across devices.

Instead, retailers are figuring out how to sync the experience in other ways, like prompting shoppers to log in on each device. And being able to track people across devices gives retailers more insight into how they shop.

The retailers’ efforts are backed by research. While one-quarter of the visits to e-commerce sites occur on mobile devices, only around 15 percent of purchases do, according to data from I.B.M. According to Google, 85 percent of online shoppers start searching on one device — most often a mobile phone — and make a purchase on another.

At eBags, customers are shopping on their tablets in the evening and returning on their work computers the next day. But eBags has not yet synced the shoppers across devices, so customers must build their shopping carts from scratch if they switch devices.

“That is a blind spot with a lot of sites,” said Peter Cobb, co-founder of eBags. “It is a requirement moving forward.”

At eBay, one-third of the purchases involve mobile devices at some point, even if the final purchase is made on a computer.

At eBay, once shoppers log in on a device, they do not need to log in again. Their information, like shipping and credit card details and saved items, syncs across all their devices. If an eBay shopper is interested in a certain handbag, and saves that search on a computer, eBay will send alerts to her cellphone when a new handbag arrives or an auction is about to end.

“They might discover an item on a phone or tablet, do a saved-search push alert later on some other screen and eventually close on the Web site,” said Steve Yankovich, who runs eBay Mobile. “People are buying and shopping and consuming potentially every waking moment of the day.”

ModCloth, an e-commerce site for women’s clothes, said that while a quarter of its visits come from mobile devices, people are not yet buying there in the same proportion, though they are becoming more comfortable with checking out on those devices.

“She’s visiting us more on the phone, but she’s actually transacting somewhere else,” said Sarah Rose, vice president of product at ModCloth.

For example, a shopper will skim through new arrivals on her phone while on the bus and add items to her wish list, then visit that evening on her tablet to make a purchase, Ms. Rose said.

To take advantage of this behavior, ModCloth urges shoppers to log in after just a few clicks on the Web site on a phone or computer, so information like credit card numbers and items saved in a shopping cart on another device are accessible. Then if a laptop shopper adds a skirt to her shopping cart and later, it is about to sell out, ModCloth can send her an e-mail, which she will often click on her phone to buy the skirt, Ms. Rose said. Logged-in users who visit the site using multiple devices are 2.5 times more likely to place an order than those on a single device, according to the company.

On Etsy, where 25 percent of the visits but 20 percent of the sales come from mobile devices, the site syncs items in the shopping cart, favorite items, purchasing history and conversations with sellers.

Many other e-commerce sites, however, still lack an easy way for shoppers to use different devices.

The New York Times logged in to the Web sites of some large retailers and added items to the shopping cart, then logged in to the mobile site or app to see if the cart was reflected there.

Amazon.com, Nordstrom, Target, Macy’s and Gap showed items across devices. Walmart did, too, though with some hiccups; it required logging out of and back into the mobile site to update the cart, and on the app, a shopper had to choose the “sync with online cart” option.

Others, though, did not sync across devices, including Newegg, Kohl’s, RadioShack and J. Crew, so shopping on a different device required filling the shopping cart from scratch.

Newegg is working on syncing the shopping carts, said Soren Mills, its chief marketing officer, because customers are asking for that. The information gleaned about customers that way is also critical for retailers, he said, so they can personalize sites and offers based on consumers’ browsing and purchase history.

“We have to recognize the customer, so we look to get a single view of the customer,” he said.

Retailers could use information like this to show different ads to shoppers with cellphones standing in a store at lunch hour than to those using a tablet at 9 p.m., Mr. Spero at Google said.

Despite the hesitance of shoppers like Mr. O’Neil to buy on mobile devices, some technology industry analysts say people just need time to grow comfortable with new technology.

“It’s just like in the old days, 15 years ago, the conversation was people are researching what they want on their PCs but still going to the store to buy,” said Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist. Mr. Andreessen is involved with e-commerce companies like eBay and Fab, both of which he said had strong mobile sales. “I think that’s a temporary phenomenon.”

EBay Inc., owner of the world’s largest Internet marketplace, is teaming up with Macy’s Inc. (M) and Toys ‘R’ Us Inc. as it goes after revenue from shoppers who are out and about, not just online, during the holidays.

EBay is building mobile technology for retailers that helps consumers find and navigate stores and use discounts. The Macy’s application, for example, senses when shoppers enter a store, sends a mobile coupon and gives directions to the right department to make a purchase.

“This is part of our playing in the commerce ocean, not just the e-commerce pond,” Steve Yankovich, EBay’s vice president of mobile, said in an interview. “We’re going from a several-billion-dollar market in e-commerce, and in connecting through mobile to the actual physical store, we then have EBay Inc. (EBAY) playing in the trillion-dollar ocean.”

By allying with real-world retailers, EBay stands to gain a larger share of the 95 percent of shopping that, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, still takes place in stores. The company has been adding tools for retailers as it pursues new ways to boost revenue (EBAY), which is estimated to rise to $14.1 billion this year. While that’s up 62 percent since 2009, it’s still just a fraction of Amazon.com Inc.’s projected $62 billion for 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Macy’s, Toys ‘R’ Us and EBay’s other partners, including Best Buy Co. and Target Corp., benefit from a company whose expertise lies in both building technology and getting people to shop online.

Yankovich declined to comment on how much revenue (EBAY) the partnerships are expected to generate for San Jose, California- based EBay, though he said “you’ll see a lot more” of them in coming months.
Shoppers Everywhere

“I’m not sure from an immediate monetization standpoint that it’s a huge opportunity, but from a brand-building and mobile-penetration standpoint, it’s probably a significant opportunity,” said Daniel Kurnos, an analyst at Benchmark Co. in Delray Beach, Florida. “EBay is becoming more and more of a technology play.”

Retailers across the board are trying to target shoppers wherever they are, taking heed of trends that show more people are making purchases on mobile devices. Customers who opt to go into stores want technology-driven perks in exchange for forgoing the convenience of shopping from a couch, Yankovich said. Retailers will pay for tools that can help consumers navigate crowds and find shortcuts to sales, he said.

Shoppers are asking, “How are you going to help me, guide me, connect to me while I’m here?” he said.
GSI Customers

Big-box retailers need to be a part of that. More than 18 percent of shoppers used a smartphone or tablet to access a retailer’s website on Cyber Monday, an increase of 70 percent over 2011, according to a Nov. 27 report from International Business Machines Corp. Mobile sales almost doubled, making up 13 percent of total Web-based purchases, IBM said.

EBay Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe is using GSI Commerce Inc., which he acquired (EBAY) for $1.9 billion last year, to target potential partners in mobile technology. GSI already provides many of these customers with point-of-sale systems, marketing and merchandising.

In July, EBay and Macy’s began building an app to make Black Friday crowds more bearable, which worked by creating a digital fence around 668 Macy’s stores, said Jennifer Kasper, vice president for digital media and multicultural marketing at Macy’s. The finished product could then recognize when a customer with the app entered a Macy’s store and target them accordingly.
Black Friday App

“I can’t say that we had EBay on our list of development partners until they came to us with this opportunity,” Kasper said in an interview. “As a consumer and as a marketer, that’s not where I had situated them in my mind.”

The new in-store features became available in an update to the already-existing Macy’s app 10 days before Black Friday. It garnered 200,000 new downloads in that period, and prompted a third of the installed base to upgrade to the newest version.

The transition into building software tools for physical retail partners has been under way since the company bought GSI last year. Yankovich, Donahoe and other EBay executives (EBAY) have been mentioning the prospect in meetings with CEOs and other top executives who run the physical stores for big brands.

Shoppers’ Choice

Another customer, Toys ‘R’ Us-owned FAO Schwarz, worked with EBay to craft the Gift Finder app, which asks users a series of questions — what age, gender and price range they’re shopping for. Then it searches the inventory of products FAO has listed on its store on EBay’s website and lets users buy the product — online, using EBay’s PayPal, or in the actual store. When customers choose to buy through EBay’s FAO partner site, the e-commerce company takes a commission on the sale, just like it does with all merchants it features.

While EBay is working mainly with GSI partners at first, the company eventually plans to move outside that group.

Still, the opportunity for EBay may be limited as some retailers hire developers of their own to craft mobile e- commerce tools without outside help. Sears Holdings Corp. (SHLD), for example, has hired former Amazon, EBay and PayPal employees to help it come up with useful ways to incorporate tablets and smartphones into stores.

Going Solo

“We’re putting a lot of investing into the online physical store presence,” said Andy Chu, vice president of mobile and community experiences at Sears.

Sears assumes some customers have done online research before they arrive, and it equips salespeople with Apple Inc. (AAPL) iPads so they can augment that knowledge when consumers ask questions. An in-store associate can e-mail shoppers a log of notes taken while helping them, so people have a record of products they looked at and can decide what to purchase later on.

Sears also has given consumers options beyond fast delivery. An online purchase can be picked up at a store, with a guarantee that the product will be ready within five minutes of a customer’s arrival. On the weekend of Black Friday, more than half of Sears shoppers chose that option.

EBay unveiled a similar option in November called EBay Now. The mobile app helps retailers deliver items from their stores to local online shoppers in under an hour. Macy’s, Toys ‘R’ Us, Target and Best Buy all use the program. From Dec. 17 to Dec. 22, the company is doing express shipping for the holidays, letting users in New York and San Francisco buy gifts until midnight on the last day and have them delivered for free.

“We would look to continue to leverage our initiative with EBay on multiple fronts,” said Milton Pappas, vice president of e-commerce customer experience at Toys ’R’ Us. (TOYS) “GSI, EBay Now, Gift Finder with FAO — they’ve been a great partner for us.”

Last-minute holiday shopping is always a chaotic time for customers and suppliers alike, and improving holiday delivery speeds is a massive logistical undertaking. GSI Commerce — an eBay-owned company that handles shipping for popular brands like Aéropostle, Ralph Lauren, and Godiva — has spent more than $25 million over the past year to extend its shipping cutoff by a single hour, The Wall Street Journal reports. Customers now have until 11PM EST on December 22nd to order presents and still get them in time for Christmas Eve, which is eight hours longer than Amazon offers.

As the same-day delivery struggles of companies like WalMart, eBay, Amazon, and others demonstrate, even small improvements in shipping speed present a significant logistical challenge. In order to improve its order window, GSI has optimized warehouse operations by analyzing what people are buying and placing high-demand items closer to the ends of the aisles. GSI’s engineers also reduced the amount of ink used in label printing so cartridges don’t need to be replaced as often, and consolidated boxes by drilling holes in them to remain in line with fire codes. Ron Livengood, senior director of operations at GSI’s Walton, KY warehouse told The Wall Street Journal that all of these changes reduce employees’ walking time by 60%. It also means that you can put off holiday shopping just a little longer, and hopefully avoid the throngs of last-minute shoppers on Christmas Eve.

Even as retailers debate the efficacy of social-media marketing on Facebook and Twitter, they have no doubts about the power of a decades-old technology to drive sales. The killer app is called e-mail.

Retailers as disparate as Williams-Sonoma Inc. (WSM) and Home Depot Inc. (HD) have become much better at tailoring e-mails to specific customers rather than the one-size-fits-all blasts that once dominated this type of marketing. Measured by sales per dollar spent, e-mail outperforms social-media advertising three to one, according to the Direct Marketing Association, a trade group founded to provide accurate marketing data. That explains why retailers will send 19 percent more e-mails this year.

Compared with social-media, e-mail marketing will never be sexy, said Ted Wham, a vice president at Responsys Inc., a San Bruno, California firm that helps companies build digital relationships with customers.

“But it depends on what’s sexy to you,” he said. “In my opinion, making a high profit rate and bringing in a lot of incremental dollars is very sexy.”

Competition is fierce this holiday shopping season as the National Retail Federation predicts sales will rise 4.1 percent to about $586.1 billion in the period, compared with a 5.6 percent increase in 2011. Online sales may grow to a record $43.4 billion in the last two months of the year, a 17 percent increase from last year, according to ComScore Inc.

At the same time, the number of Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers making purchases after clicking through from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube declined by at least 26 percent this year from 2011, even as online sales soared, IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark said last month. So-called social sales contributed less than 0.5 percent of online revenue both days.

Smartphone Boom

Major retailers are on track to send subscribers an average of 211 promotional e-mails in 2012 compared with 177 last year, according to Responsys. The boom in smartphones means consumers check e-mail more often, at a time when data and web tracking are becoming more mainstream and easier to use.

The numbers drive a compelling case for that — e-mail provided $39.40 in sales per dollar of advertising this year, followed by $22.38 through Web search, $19.71 from Internet display ads and $12.90 from social networks, according to the Direct Marketing Association.

Home Depot has been honing its targeted marketing, sending e-mails that incorporate customer preferences and previous behavior, because it’s 10 times more effective than blasts to a general audience, Chief Marketing Officer Trish Mueller said in June.

Painting Electricians

For instance, if customer data shows electricians are no longer sub-contracting the painting portion of remodeling jobs and doing it themselves, an electrician that just bought copper wire may soon receive an e-mail for a discount on paint, she said. In the past, that person would just get an e-mail offer relevant to their known skills, she said.

Williams-Sonoma’s e-mail and browsing data is so expansive the company can use it to drive product recommendations by customer to specific stores, Patrick Connolly, the San Francisco-based company’s CMO said in October.

While stores still use old tricks including limited-time offers — a Bloomingdale’s e-mail on Dec. 12 read “FINAL HOURS! Mystery Savings” — they’re increasingly tailoring message content and timing to demographics, previously purchased or viewed products and items left in virtual shopping carts.

Williams-Sonoma’s West Elm urban furniture chain has sent e-mails to customers who have forgotten about items in their shopping carts with subject lines asking if they are still thinking about that particular merchandise. In the body of the e-mail, customers are warned: “Get it before it’s gone,” and “Don’t miss out on the things you love.”

Ad Portal

They’re also using e-mail as a “portal” to a flurry of ads across the Web, said Chris Saridakis, president of EBay Inc.’s GSI Commerce, which provides e-commerce services to hundreds of retailers.

Once a user clicks from an e-mail to a retailer’s website to see that forgotten organic cotton duvet at West Elm, say, or to browse the 30 percent-off shoes at Asos Plc, third-party trackers called cookies recall the activity. Later, while visiting a news website or Googling “clothes,” consumers may see banner or Google Inc. (GOOG) ads designed to lure them back to those retailers’ sites.

“It extends the life of an e-mail and we see that driving an incredible amount of return behavior back to the retailer’s site with a higher conversion rate,” Saridakis said in a telephone interview.

Retarget Customers

Williams-Sonoma may use as many as 200 different Internet advertisements per brand to retarget customers after they leave the company’s websites, which, while potentially surprising, is “very effective,” Connolly said in October.

It can take a lot of e-mails to hit the mark. A successful e-mail campaign may result in a 20 percent open rate with 5 percent of people clicking through and 1 percent making a purchase, though figures vary around targeted messages and holiday specials, Chad White, research director at Responsys, said in a telephone interview. On the other hand, about half of consumers will read postcards, the most effective form of direct mail, which is pricier, according to a report from the Direct Marketing Association.

Facebook Inc. (FB) has signed on retailers including Brookstone Inc. and Dean & DeLuca Inc. to a new gifting service this year as the company looks beyond advertising to monetize its more than 1 billion users.

Facebook Returns

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in an October earnings call that a third-party analysis showed that more than 70 percent of 60-plus marketing campaigns on its website generated a return on ad spending of three times or better. Separately, data from Nielsen show that click-through rates are not correlated to returns on marketing investments, Elisabeth Diana, a spokeswoman for the Menlo Park, California- based company, said in an e-mail.

While the social network’s power as a sales driver remains unclear, letting customers use their Facebook accounts to sign onto a retailer’s website is an effective way to harvest e-mail addresses, according to Matt Kritzer, vice president of e- commerce for underwear maker Tommy John.

Facebook and Twitter “are more awareness activities,” Kritzer, the former director of e-commerce for L’Occitane, said in a telephone interview. “That’s why you need this glue of e- mail that ties it all together.”

That means retailers are keen to gather as many e-mail addresses as they can, a task made easier by mobile checkouts and e-mailed receipts. They’re also running sweepstakes and offering discounts to get shoppers to cough them up.

Acquiring Addresses

J.C. Penney Co. (JCP), which generated less than 10 percent of sales in its latest fiscal year from the Web, is aggressively acquiring e-mail addresses by shifting to mobile checkout and through its holiday sweepstakes. The department-store chain is giving away more than 80 million buttons with codes on them for a holiday sweepstakes, and customers are asked to enter their e- mail address or log in with Facebook to find out if they won.

This holiday season, some retailers are also taking advantage of shipping confirmations or order receipts, with higher open rates, to offer recommended items or additional discounts, GSI’s Saridakis said.

Retailers are more aggressively trying to persuade shoppers to keep accepting their e-mails than in the past, said Charlie Graham, the founder and chief executive officer of Shop it To Me Inc., which partners with retailers to send tailored discount alerts to more than 4 million members who have signed up for the service.

Hitting Unsubscribe

Instead of hitting “unsubscribe” and being done with it, customers are asked if they want the e-mails less frequently, or even if they want to take a three- to six-month break and reconsider, said Graham, who started his business in 2005 as part of a summer internship at Harvard Business School. At some retailers, such as J.C. Penney, customers are told that unsubscribe requests can take as many as 10 days to process.

The growth in mobile phones and tablets bodes well for e- mail. This holiday season, 45 percent of e-mails are being opened on mobile devices, according to Experian Hitwise, an Internet-tracking firm in New York. Shoppers are 29 percent more likely to open personalized promotional e-mails than untailored messages and are even more likely to click on them and go to a retailer’s website, the firm said.

E-mail has “gotten this bad reputation in the past of being spammy and people misusing it,” Kritzer said, explaining why more companies aren’t talking about it as a marketing tactic. “But it’s also because it’s the secret sauce that works so well. So people might not want to talk about it because it’s kind of like the golden goose. They don’t want to ruin the golden goose.”

]]> http://ebayholidaymedia.ebay.com/2012/12/19/stores-seeking-shoppers-find-e-mail-outdraws-facebook/feed/ 0 http://ebayholidaymedia.ebay.com/2012/12/19/web-retailers-scrap-for-last-hour-sales/ http://ebayholidaymedia.ebay.com/2012/12/19/web-retailers-scrap-for-last-hour-sales/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:10:29 +0000 Josh http://ebayholidaymedia.ebay.com/?p=898 Editor’s Note: The following story was originally published in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 18, 2012.

Time is money. And in the fierce holiday-season battle between online and offline sales, a single hour can be worth millions of dollars.

GSI Commerce Inc., a unit of eBay Inc. EBAY +1.16% that handles online shipping for 70 brands including Godiva, Aéropostale Inc. ARO +1.45% and Estée Lauder, EL +0.13% has been building new warehouses, counting workers’ steps and even tweaking the way it prints labels with a single goal: Push back the cutoff time for Christmas delivery by 60 minutes.

No matter how efficient online retailers become, the need for shipping means there is a certain point at which they can no longer compete with brick- and-mortar rivals for last-minute shoppers. Wringing efficiencies out of the shipping process, therefore, is essential.

This year, GSI’s customers will let shoppers order as late as 11 p.m. Eastern time on Dec. 22 and still get their orders by Christmas Eve. That’s eight more hours than shoppers get on Amazon.com Inc., AMZN +2.58% which cuts off Christmas sales at 3 p.m., and an hour later than GSI’s deadline last year.

That extra hour will account for about 10% of all sales handled by GSI on Dec. 22, said Tobias Hartmann, chief executive of global operations.

Last year, online apparel retailer Karmaloop got 131 orders a minute during the final hours before the Christmas delivery cutoff. The seller of Timberland boots, Paul Frank pajamas and SkullcandySKUL -0.73% headphones switched to GSI in June, drawn by the promise of a later order deadline.

“It’s beyond critical,” said Chris Mastrangelo, Karmaloop’s chief operating officer. “Having a few hours over a competitor could be a seven-figure event.”

Amazon, whose $33.6 billion in sales in the first nine months of the year dwarfed GSI’s $684 million, declined to comment on shipping deadlines.

This year, the Web is expected to account for $96 billion in sales during November and December, 16% of the $586 billion holiday haul forecast by the National Retail Federation, an industry group.

The bar for speed is getting higher, with big chains like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT +0.43% and Nordstrom Inc. JWN +0.29% experimenting with same-day delivery in some markets.

As soon as last Christmas ended, GSI’s executives began huddling with engineers, data scientists, customers and shipper United Parcel Services Inc. UPS +2.30% to figure out how to speed up the time it takes for an order to be processed by the time the next holiday season rolled around.

“Logistically, that extra hour is extremely complicated,” said Mr. Hartmann, the GSI operations chief.

GSI has opened two new distribution centers and spent more than $25 million to improve its operations and speed in the past year, according to a person familiar with the matter. But the key changes are in more prosaic details—like saving steps for employees who can walk nine miles a day at peak times.

GSI’s 543,000 square-foot Walton, Ky., distribution center holds 14 million items during peak season and is one of seven used by the company. The warehouse buzzes with conveyer belts snaking across and between floors, huge carts rolling down long aisles of shelves filled with products, and wrapping paper being cut from large rolls.

During the holiday season, GSI’s warehouse staffing more than triples to 5,500. Employees fill orders from shelves that stretch across four floors, each piled high with small boxes holding items like sweaters, boots, perfume and pet toys.

Pickers grab goods from the shelves and send them to scanners, who place them on individual pads on conveyor belts, which take them to boxes for shipping. Employees are monitored closely for behavior that might slow down order fulfillment.

GSI generally organizes its warehouses by retailer, with companies like Aéropostale and Nautica taking up large sections of shelf space. But during peak times like holidays, a different logic rules. After experimenting with the idea last year, GSI now loads hot sellers into boxes the size of big closets and stacks them two high near the ends of the aisles.

The idea is to put the most popular goods closest to the people who pick them out for processing, saving them trips into the depths of the warehouse. The system cuts employees’ walking time by 60%, said Ron Livengood, senior director of operations at the Walton site.

This year, the company is using all 7,000 of the big boxes for Aéropostale alone, each one holding a specific size and color of a garment, Mr. Livengood said. To figure out what to put in the boxes, GSI’s data scientists track order patterns and work with retailers to know what is being promoted heavily, like pink Aéropostale hoodies or slipper boots. Those calculations are rerun every hour.

To further cut down walking time, GSI looked for ways to move the smaller cardboard boxes on their shelves closer together. Fire insurers required the warehouses to maintain a few inches of space between the boxes so that water from overhead sprinklers can drain down between them and get to lower floors. Across miles of shelves, those gaps add up.

GSI’s engineers decided to try drilling holes into the boxes, figuring that could accomplish the same firefighting goal as the spaces. In a test, the boxes drained a gallon of water in 17 seconds, allowing GSI to use the closer-spaced boxes in March.

GSI’s engineers found a way to use less ink when printing labels, meaning cartridges had to be replaced less frequently. The change sped up the label-printing process by 11% from a year ago. The Walton warehouse also added a third lane to get boxed and addressed orders out the door more quickly.