IBM

Armonk, N.Y.  -- Online U.S. retail sales for August 2014 were up more than 11% as compared to the same period the prior year. According to new IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark data, mobile traffic accounted for 41.5% of all online traffic, up 34% compared to the same period the previous year.

By A.J. Clark, Thermopylae

While holiday forecasts are just starting to come out, most industry experts agree that retailers can expect mobile to command a bigger share of online shopping. Forrester projects $294 billion in e-commerce sales across 30 retail categories in 2014, with $87 billion of the total occurring on phones and tablets in 2014. A report by IBM forecasts that mobile will account for more than 20% of site sales and more than 43% of site traffic, by November 2014.

“Mobile should be a primary purchase channel within a few years,” said Bill Davis, director of MB&G Consulting.

Armonk, N.Y. - IBM’s research team in Brazil has created a new way for marketers to engage shoppers who cannot visually identify objects. The team created an image recognition technology which uses “identifying markers” placed around a display to recognize products between each marker by simply taking a picture.

Montvale, N.J. – The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) is using the IBM FlashSystem V840 to compress live data and speed access to Big Data. The FlashSystem now integrates into a new Control Enclosure with IBM’s SAN Volume Controller (SVC) data virtualization system, a key component of IBM’s Software Defined Storage solution.

Dedham, Mass. – Reflexis has selected SoftLayer, an IBM company, to provide the infrastructure for its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that will support retailers’ mobile and Web applications. Using Reflexis' PaaS, customers can implement mobile and web applications, which help retailers provide a seamless online-to-store shopping experience and provide a higher quality of customer engagement.

Retailers and suppliers who already operate in China or are looking to expand there may want to contact Kurt Salmon following several key hires by the consulting company.

The management consulting firm’s Retail and Consumer Products Group in China said it hired Hao Li and Ke Chen as partners.

By Bill Davis, Director, MB&G Consulting

For much of the last year, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers have been mired in a slump. Not only was last holiday season the toughest in several years, the consumer discretionary sector, which includes retail, was the only one of the 10 macro S&P sectors to be in the red for the first half of 2014. As a result, retail is widely perceived to be in a funk.