Sales & Marketing

Starwood Retail Partners debuted Oh, So Simple, a first-of-its-kind rewards program that offers consumers a revolutionary way to earn credit for their purchases at stores across an entire mall. The program piloted at four properties in 2015 and will roll out to all 29 Starwood centers this year. The one-step process links an existing Visa, MasterCard, or personal American Express credit or debit card to an Oh, So Simple Rewards account. Members can connect as many of their cards to the account as they wish.

Good news for retailers: Banks are flush with money and eager to lend.

“Credit is more available than at any time since the great recession,” said Walter Simson, principal of Chatham, New Jersey, -based Ventor Consulting (ventorllc.com). “A more liberal lending environment has opened a window of opportunity for retailers to get more capital with less risk.”

Staples is continuing to build on its assortment of small business services with an expanded technology assistance offering.

Staples Tech Services now offers a next day guarantee. The suite of offerings includes PC services. Select Staples stores also offer small businesses mobile phone and tablet repairs. The new guarantee from Staples Tech Services includes PC set-up, data transfer, software upgrades, virus removal and more.

Female executives take leading roles in retail IT arena

If a “leader” is someone who knows how to take charge, achieve goals and inspire others along the way — even in the most trying of circumstances — then the women featured in this special section are leaders in every sense of the word. They have toiled and proved their mettle — and smarts — in a field that traditionally has not been all that female-friendly: technology.

Gasoline prices will remain low in 2016, but that doesn’t mean retailers can count on a big windfall from the extra cash left in shoppers’ wallets and there are three key reasons why.

The limited benefit of low gasoline prices to retailers — especially food and mass retailers — is the result of three key factors shaping household spending behavior:

For many years, retail IT was dominated by a traditional “enterprise” model. Using a large, centralized physical server or database, retailers would deploy core business solutions. POS terminals and customer engagement applications primarily served as data collection tools to assist back-end enterprise operations.

SPS Commerce Inc., a provider of cloud-based retail supply chain management solutions, is recognizing the need for back-end unification of supply chain and store.

SPS has acquired ToolBox Solutions, a Toronto-based provider of POS analytics and category management services to retailers and CPG suppliers in North America.

A lack of skilled trade labor is one of the biggest challenges confronting both retailers and suppliers in the store maintenance area, according to Boss Facility Services’ Keith Keingstein and Kerri Keingstein, who spoke with Chain Store Age about industry trends.