Business Analytics

Online pricing intelligence provider 360pi compared Amazon.com and Walmart.com prices earlier this year in a dynamic pricing study and discovered Walmart changed its prices more often than Amazon.

The company looked at Amazon.com and Walmart.com prices comparing a basket of grocery pantry/household items spanning a number of CPG brands with a non-grocery basket (such as toys, electronics and tools) shopped on Amazon.com and Walmart.com between April 9 and June 9, 2015.

Three key finding from the report were:

Armonk, N.Y. – IBM and Box are launching a global, cloud-based partnership that will integrate their existing products and services and develop new solutions targeted across industries including retail. The strategic alliance brings together Box’s cloud content collaboration platform with IBM Analytics and social solutions, IBM security technologies and the global IBM cloud.

Redwood Shores, Calif. – Amazon just obtained a new competitor for its Amazon Web Services cloud hosting and development platform. Oracle is going head-to-head with Amazon with a slew of more than 24 new additions to the Oracle Cloud Platform.

Oracle’s new integrated cloud services include infrastructure, platform and software delivered as a service. Specific cloud-based services include hosted Exadata-based production databases, archive storage, Big Data, enterprise mobility, and application integration.

Retailers are losing billions of dollars to shoplifting, employee/vendor theft and administrative error, according to the National Retail Federation.

Ann Arbor, Mich. - Customer satisfaction with goods and services purchased and consumed in the U.S. suffered a fifth consecutive quarterly decline, sending the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to its lowest point since 2006. According to the ACSI, the national level of customer satisfaction is down 0.7% to 74.7 on a 100-point scale in the first quarter of 2015 and is off 2.7% since peaking in the fourth quarter 2013.

Armonk, N.Y. – When consumers look for Father’s Day gifts, they increasingly are doing so on the go. According to new IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark data, mobile accounted for more than 48% of all online Father’s Day traffic in 2015.

This figure was just shy of desktop, which claimed 51.7%, a far slimmer gap than 2014. For sales however, desktop remains supreme, accounting for 74.3% of sales (compared to 25.7% for mobile) and driving average order values of $115.12, compared to mobile devices at $93.14.

San Francisco - Instacart, is giving some contract workers the opportunity to become part-time employees. After a successful pilot Boston, the company is now giving its personal shoppers in some cities the option to convert from contractor to employee status.

Chelmsford, Mass. -- There is a disconnect between IT and loss prevention departments when it comes to budgets, focus and staffing, according to a study by IHL Group and Axis Communications.

In a little over three years as a public company, Facebook may now be worth more than Walmart.

The question is, will the social network's surge last?

According to Quartz, over the last year, Facebook’s stock has jumped roughly 30% as the broader S&P 500 has barely managed to keep its head above water. The climb has added more than $65 billion to Facebook’s market value, bringing it to more than $236 billion, just above Walmart’s $235 billion.

Aeropostale is losing a key executive and handing over merchandising responsibilities to the company's CEO.