Sales & Marketing

By Mike Gregory, Kurt Salmon

As consumers busy themselves with spring gardening and plans for summer travel, their favorite retailers are already planning for back-to-school and the 2014 holiday season. And after delivery delays during holiday 2013 left many customers fuming, a core issue for retailers is how to optimize their peak-season order fulfillment and related customer service.

Austin, Texas - Online prescription eyewear retailer Eyebuydirect.com (EBD) has launched a new website featuring with more than 1,200 customizable frames. EBD has streamlined the online shopping experience for prescription glasses with the Eye Try tool, which allows customers to upload a photo of themselves in order to virtually try on any pair of frames available on the site.  
Each pair of glasses is adjusted according to the individual’s pupillary distance (PD) and eye alignment.

Washington, D.C. -- Driven by stronger same-store sales and customer traffic and a more optimistic outlook among restaurant operators, the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Performance Index 's rose to a 10-month high in March. The RPI – a monthly composite index that tracks the health of and outlook for the U.S. restaurant industry – stood at 101.4 in March, up 0.9 percent from February's level of 100.5.  

Seattle - Tommy Bahama has selected customer experience management (CEM) software from Medallia to help better understand and improve customer experience. Using Medallia¹s real-time CEM software, Tommy Bahama will build the vendor’s “Voice of the Customer (VoC)” customer feedback and reporting program into its operations to improve customer experience and drive loyalty.

Minneapolis – Tile Shop Holdings Inc. reported net income of $3.7 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2014, a substantial improvement from a net loss of $44.7 million in the same quarter a year earlier. The retailer plans to open 20 new stores during fiscal 2014.

Barely a week after leaving RadioShack, Troy Risch has landed on his feet at rival electronics retailer H.H. Gregg where he will serve as chief operating officer.

Risch will assume his new COO duties at H.H. Gregg May 5. He most recently served as EVP of store operations at RadioShack for 16 months, but left the company April 22. Assuming a leadership role at H.H. Gregg might seem like a potential violation of a non-compete agreement, closer inspection shows that H.H. Gregg and RadioShack don’t have that much in common from a product assortment standpoint.

San Jose, Calif. – A $3 billion tax charge on foreign profits resulted in EBay Inc. reporting a net loss of $2.33 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2013, compared to net earnings of $677 million in the first quarter of the previous fiscal year. Analysts had expected EBay to report net earnings for the quarter, although EBay paid the tax charge in the process of making about $6 billion in offshore cash available.