Insights

By Steve Jones   What’s going to keep people coming back to physical store locations, as comfort levels with e-commerce rise every year? Savvy retailers are fighting technology with technology, refreshing the look and feel of their stores by integrating more gadgets, and using data in a more integrated way to inform strategy.  In-store tech helps retailers beat e-tailers at their own game  

By Alex Romanov, iSign Media   The holiday season is a time of family, food, and frenzied shopping. Consumers are bombarded by messages, promotions, discounts, and offers, and retailers have to be smart about how they reach out to their customers. Email blasts or paper coupons just won’t cut it. In this mobile-obsessed era, proximity marketing is a powerful way to break through the noise and bring shoppers into your store.   

By Kent Smith, Galleria RTS   Well-stocked shelves and falling sales is a dilemma faced by many retailers today. New technology advancements such as mobile discount apps are the latest threat to grocery retail sales. Many people simply complete their grocery shopping from the convenience of their own home.    

By Steven Pinder, Tom White and Kurt Kendall    Retailers are being squeezed by growing consumer individualism, globalization and evolving preferences. These pan-industry pressure points are causing a proliferation of SKUs that retailers must now nimbly administer. And with online competition eating into already-low margins, the challenge for brick-and-mortar retailers is clear: Find a better way to manage assortment practices.  

Cautious spending and a spending divide that has bifurcated the American holiday shopper into two distinct segments,  are two of the 10 big trends that are expected to drive the 2014 holiday shopping season, according to a new report from PwC US and Strategy&.

By David Dorf, senior director of technology strategy for Oracle Retail

By Howard W. Herndon, BlackLine Payments Advisors

While much of the attention at this week’s Apple press conference was on the iPhone 6 and the company’s new smartwatch, we believe — along with many industry analysts — that the most important news of the splashy event was Apple Pay, the company’s new mobile payments system.

By John Gessau, ACI Worldwide

With the news of the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch debuting with mobile wallet capabilities in the marketplace, Apple’s announcement has given the (mobile) payments industry a boost, no doubt about it. But in what direction, and what are the implications for retailers?