Neiman Marcus

The strong dollar’s influence on tourism and store traffic led the Neiman Marcus Group to report a decline in same-store sales for the first time in six years.

Looking back on the 2015 edition of Cyber Week, we can reminisce on big traffic, big sales … and big fails?

Several high-profile site outages hit major retailers during a period of historically heavy online shopping. While nobody would call these positive events, they do offer retailers a few valuable lessons about the need to stay one step ahead of digital customer demand.

Not Too Big to Fail

Roosevelt Field in Garden City, New York, is offering shoppers an up-close look at some unusual and pricey holiday gift suggestions.

The center, owned by Simon, has teamed up with Neiman Marcus for the first ever Neiman Marcus' 2015 Fantasy Gifts public installation.

Despite a few hiccups with site availability, Cyber Week 2015 on the whole was a huge success for the retail industry and bodes well for the remainder of the holiday season.

According to data from Adobe, from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday, consumers spent $11 billion online. This marked a 15% increase from Cyber Week in 2014 and represented 30% of a total $39.5 billion in November online sales. Adobe predicts consumers will spend $1 billion a day online every day from Dec. 1- Dec. 18.

Nordstrom Rack, the off-price division of Nordstrom, continues its expansion, announcing two new upcoming locations.

The retailer plans to open a 28,000-sq.-ft. store at Fashion Outlets of Chicago in Rosemont, Ill., in fall 2016. The property is owned by Macerich.

Three leading retailers suffered varying degrees of difficulty with their e-commerce sites during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

For the second time this year, Target’s e-commerce site crashed due to exceptionally high levels of activity related to a major sales promotion.

The Target site went down the morning of Cyber Monday, Nov. 30. According to reports, the crash was actually a controlled restriction of the site by Target in response to extremely heavy volumes of visitors looking for holiday bargains.

Several retailers, including Neiman Marcus, had site issues this past Black Friday weekend. Here is some advice from the folks at Dynatrace, an application performance management software company, on the top three things retailers can do when things go bad online.