eCommerce

Eleven brick-and-mortar stores — and counting. That’s where Amazon Books stands after the opening of its new outpost in New York.

Located on 34th Street across from the Empire State Building in Midtown Manhattan, the 5,200-sq.-ft. store is part bookstore, part high-tech electronics shop, with a cafe for shoppers to linger in.

Toys “R” Us is adding a new customer touch-point that it will use to get merchandise into shoppers hands faster.  

Brick-and-mortar retailers collectively have staked their claim online, accounting for at least half of U.S. e-commerce sales. The trouble is, most of them are losing money at it.  

We have a tendency to take things that have been with us forever, reinvent them, and give them new names. Mixed-use centers, for instance, are essentially the 21st century version of downtowns. But whereas America’s towns grew up organically alongside harbors, rivers, and transportation crossroads, mixed-use centers aren’t always able to be so logically placed.

To effectively service shoppers at store-level, managers need to evolve beyond their sales roles and become “problem solvers.”   This means store managers must learn to master the combination of order fulfillment, inventory visibility and staffing to keep up with customer demands, according to the “Voice of Store Manager Survey,” a study from JDA Software Group. The second annual study is based on responses from 252 US-based retail store managers compiled in August.  

The nation's leading salon operator has entered into a major transaction that will reshape its portfolio.    Regis Corporation announced it has sold substantially all of its mall-based salon businesses in North America and entered into an agreement to sell substantially all of its International segment to The Beautiful Group, an affiliate of Regent, who will operate them as the company’s largest franchisee.  

E-commerce holiday sales are expected to increase 18% to 21% this holiday season, reaching  $111 to $114 billion, according to the annual holiday sales forecast from Deloitte. With online growth eclipsing total holiday sales growth (expected to rise 4% to 4.5%), savvy retailers will be pulling out all the stops to step up their digital game.

Industry experts say retailers need to create an engagement strategy based on individual customer needs — along with the optimal solutions to support their efforts.

With more customer-specific information filtering into retail enterprises, brands are primed to deliver more personalized, seamless experiences. Such efforts not only drive repeat visits and purchases, but also “help retailers to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and get closer to the customer,” said Tom Moore, industry lead of retail and hospitality at Zebra Technologies.