Insights

The big news for retailers this holiday season has been the strong surge in online shopping. It’s not that high online volumes weren’t expected; estimates placed online purchases to be as high as 20% of total holiday sales this year.

It seems we’ve hit a tipping point, however, where online promotions are of equal or greater importance to Black Friday retail success than in-store promotions, and where Cyber Monday has morphed into Cyber Week.

Seamless commerce is constantly evolving, and SAP is attempting to stay at the front of the curve with its new SAP Jam Communities with Commerce solution. The cloud-based customer engagement tool is natively built on the SAP Jam enterprise social collaboration platform, and also integrates with the SAP hybris commerce management platform.

At a recent event in Boston, SAP explained how the new solution enables retailers to build community pages that support and drive seamless commerce. Here are three of the most innovative community page features.

With 2016 upon us, most everyone is thinking about the New Year’s resolutions they have in place for the upcoming year. The perennially popular resolutions range from losing weight to getting out of debt.

If you look closely, the resolutions could mirror goals that retailers may want to consider in 2016, especially as it relates to loss prevention (LP).

Photo: left: Adam Zimel; right: Micah Kagan

Getting Dense

The “digital revolution” has turned the traditional retail marketplace upside down. Consumer expectations continue to rise and the Internet has broken down borders and created a global marketplace, dramatically increasing competition.

Even with a slight decline this past year, Thanksgiving weekend has upheld its reputation as the most popular shopping weekend of the year. Last year, over 130 million people shopped or planned to shop over the holiday weekend, according to the National Retail Federation. More specifically, a whopping 80 million of those shoppers participated in Black Friday shopping.

At one point or another, anyone discussing the future of personalization in offline retail has quoted the film Minority Report, where virtual billboards scan Tom Cruise, and immediately customize their message. The virtual assistant in Gap refers to the last time he entered the store, and inquires about his recent purchase.

Now, 13 years later, some of these technologies are becoming mainstream. For example, large retailers like Target and venues like the new Levi’s Stadium are equipped with beacons to customize your experience.

Online retail sales continue to increase – both in absolute terms and as a percentage of total retail sales. The fact remains, however, that online commerce takes place in what is essentially a one-dimensional transactional venue.

Excess energy consumption in retail can exceed 30%, which means there is a huge opportunity for savings that many retailers s have not yet fully explored.

Retailers spend nearly $20 billion annually on energy expenses, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. By saving just 15% from optimizing operations and eliminating waste, we can save $3 billion as an industry.

For a variety of retailers – from supermarkets, to restaurants, to department and convenience stores – the holiday shopping season represents the peak time of year for staffing up on temporary workers to help meet all of the increase in consumer demand. However, the need to staff up may be even greater this year as some companies have already been operating with limited capacity given the nation-wide labor shortage.