Filed under: Press releases, Products and services, Consumer experience, Apple Inc (AAPL), Marketing and advertising

The CD single is dead. At least that is what British supermarket giant Woolworths Group plc (LSE: WLW) is predicting as the company drops the format due to declining sales and with hopes of creating a download store. The chain will remove CD singles from shelves starting in August, but will retain the format for one-off releases like the British Television show X Factor, similar to American Idol in the United States.

Billboard reports that this move could end the use of CD singles across Britain altogether, but figures for CD singles sold versus digital downloaded single tracks were not made available. Woolworths stores sold 25.5% of singles in 2006, while the format has dropped from 55 million units sold in 2000 to just eight million last year.

Playing on the sentiment that “Everyone remembers buying their first record at Woolworths,” the director’s of the company hope the new download store will create the same sense and feelings of nostalgia that CD singles offered customers. But the size of the store won’t compete well with other store’s like Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes Store, since Woolworths will offer only 1.2 million tracks. iTunes offers more than four million, but pricing might become the battleground where Woolworths competes ideal.

CD singles in the United Says are rare products, and are often primarily used by American Idol winners (since the one-off releases seem to be their only viable products). Stores such as Virgin Megastores and the former Tower Records regularly import British CD singles, but with Tower Records gone massive cache’s of available singles are no longer available outside of direct importing from British retailers. Unfortunately, Woolworths attempt at creating a new digital store seems very late in the competition, like Tower Records store was just over two years ago. With the growth of digital downloading in the last year alone, store’s like iTunes have gained a significant foothold in the market, despite criticisms and new competition from other major on the internet stores like Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN).

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Filed under: Internet, Marketing and advertising

In what looks to be a pretty desperate attempt to revive its failing business, Borders Group Inc. (NYSE: BGP) has officially cut its ties with Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) and launched its own e-commerce website. Under the previous arrangement, shoppers at Borders.com had their orders fulfilled by Amazon, with Borders taking a small commission.

Check out the site here. It offers some great incentives to switch over from Amazon — like free shipping on orders over $25! Oh wait. Amazon and Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) already offer the exact same deal. Never mind.

Borders invested a lot of money in developing a site with no particular competitive advantages. Most Amazon customers are pretty happy with the service they get, and I just don’t see any reason for anyone to switch. The duplication of effort probably makes Borders less attractive to potential strategic buyers like Barnes & Noble, which might have preferred that the company pay down debt instead of building another website.

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Filed under: Consumer experience, Marketing and advertising, Gap Inc (GPS)

In a move designed to make it easier and more appealing for consumers to shop at its websites, Gap (NYSE: GPS) is consolidating operations to allow for the purchase of clothing from Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Piperlime using one shopping cart, paying one shipping fee.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “By integrating the sites, the San Francisco-based company hopes to encourage shoppers to buy products from more than one of its brands. Gap states about a third of its online orders are placed by customers who shopped at more than one of its Web sites in the past year.”

Since this seems like an obvious way to spur sales growth, you have to wonder what took so long. One concern might be that keeping the sites separate kept the brands more distinct in the eyes of the consumer. Will having expensive Banana Republic merchandise in the same shopping cart as the more budget-oriented Old Navy detract from the value of that brand? It’s possible. It may be why a more successful retailer like Abercrombie & Fitch (NYSE: ANF) has chosen to keep Hollister and its namesake brand entirely separate.

But with recent cost cuts aimed at improving profitability, Gap’s recently-anointed CEO Glenn Murphy appears focused on improving performance now rather than building brands. With its shares trading at about half of where they were a decade ago, shareholders are probably ready for that.

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Filed under: Design, Productivity, Search

When it comes to tracking down some icons for a project — nothing real fancy, and preferably under some kind of open license — image searching on Google doesn’t always do the trick. ICONLook is a search site that you can try instead: it’s specifically for icons, and it has some useful features that make it worth a peek if you’re in a pinch. These are generally OS-type icons, for stuff like apps, documents and search buttons, so don’t get your hopes up for anything too fanciful. Heck, we couldn’t even find anything as wild and crazy as a cat icon on ICONLook.

Selection is not ICONLook’s strong point. Even within the categories it’s designed for, there’s not a lot of variety. On the plus side, many of the icons are available in a number of different sizes, and there are links to the source and the license for each one. This puts to rest any worries that this might be some kind of hack job, or the work of nefarious icon pirates. Instead, what you get is a legitimate, middle of the road selection of licensed icons that’ll hopefully expand to become more useful.

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