Supply Chain & Merchandising

Ikea Canada is building a 328,000-sq. ft. store Halifax, Nova Scotia, that will feature a special focus on energy efficiency and waste management.

The store will take roughly 14-16 months to build once ground has been broken in summer 2016. It will be built to operate as the retailer’s most sustainable store in Canada, and include a rooftop solar photovoltaic installation that provides electricity to the store and a geothermal energy generation system to support heating and cooling needs.

It may seem an unlikely location, but the future of retail may soon be invented in abandoned gift shop on the ground floor of a parking garage at the University of Arkansas thank

Retailers’ top priorities for POS and customer engagement reinforce the concept of the store as the foundation of an omnichannel enterprise.

According to the Boston Retail Partners (BRP) 2016 POS/Customer Engagement Survey, a leading 85% of respondents said having a unified commerce platform that seamlessly operates across all commerce channels is a top priority. Another 68% cited customer experience and engagement as a top priority.

Abandoned carts get plenty of attention. Retailers run reports on lost revenue from abandons. Email campaigns start hitting customers as soon as an hour after they abandon. A day later, another email comes.

Targeting cart abandoners is definitely effective. Statistics show that as much as 25% of lost revenue can be regained via abandoned cart emails. But what if you didn't lose that revenue in the first place?

We'll never live in a zero abandonment world. But we can definitely limit the chances of abandonment.

Count Macy’s among the retailers who realize a seamless customer experience starts in the back end.

Macy’s is supporting a new omnichannel order fulfillment program called “Pick to the Last Unit” (P2LU) with Tyco’s TrueVUE RFID inventory visibility platform,

A new approach to managing the store is taking flight at grocery chain Giant Eagle.

Mobile technology is helping shoppers at Scranton, Pennsylvania-based Gerrity’s Super Market Inc. check out much more conveniently.

Gerrity’s is beta testing a checkout app from mobile grocery solution provider Skip. The app, which Gerrity’s is the first retailer to test, lets customers scan items with their phone and place it in their cart or basket. For produce or other items that need to be weighed, shoppers place the goods on Skip scales that weight them and present a barcode for the price.

As always, it seems to have blurred by before it even started, but NRF 2016 is over. As the retail industry collectively unpacks it bags, sorts through business cards and decompresses, I’d like to offer a few key trends I observed during my own three days of Big Show immersion.