Business Analytics

The timing of Easter this year left Costco with 27 days of sales in April, rather than last year’s 28. But despite the Easter holiday shift, Costco still came out on top with a 7% increase in net sales that reportedly beat analysts’ expectations.

Roundy's saw net sales increase by 1.9% to $1 billion, and reported a net loss of $4.5 million compared with net income of $8.6 million.

Sprouts Farmers Market’s president and CEO Doug Sanders credited the company’s focus on offering healthy food at affordable prices for 28 consecutive quarters of positive same-store sales growth as well as record first quarter results that outperformed its targets.

The timing of the Easter holiday, which was observed in last year’s first quarter but this year’s second, affected Weis Market’s first quarter results for the period ended March 29.

The company's sales for the quarter increased 0.6% to $687.1 million while its comparable store sales for the quarter decreased 1.3% compared to the same period a year ago.

360pi, the leader in retail price and product intelligence, today announced a collaborative effort with SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services. The goal is to allow retailers who combine 360pi's industry-leading competitive price intelligence with SAS' Revenue Optimization engine to gain full real-time visibility into competitive pricing to make more profitable pricing decisions.

Austin, Texas -- Whole Foods Market on Tuesday reported a profit for its fiscal second quarter that fell short of Wall Street expectations. The grocery store operator also cut its outlook for the year.

For the quarter ended April 13, Whole Foods earned $142 million, unchanged from last year, amid higher expenses.

Revenue rose to $3.32 billion, short of the $3.34 billion Wall Street expected. Same-store sales rose 4.5%, hurt by the shift of Easter to the third quarter this year.

New York -- Google has purchased analytics firm Adometry, which helps advertisers get a better return on digital advertising by providing better attribution on the data collected about ads, including whether an ad was viewed, and whether it led to a sale.

Here is the statement from the Google Analytics team:

Armonk, N.Y. -- IBM has introduced comprehensive new security software and services to help organizations protect their critical data in an environment where advanced persistent threats, zero day attacks, breaches, and the financial impact on an organization continue to rise.

According to two IBM-commission studies, the average cost of a data breach increased by 15%, reaching an average of $3.5 million. The majority of companies surveyed say targeted attacks are the greatest threat, costing them on average $9.4 million in brand equity alone.

ECRM compared retail circular advertising in April 2013 versus April 2014 and noted trends occurring across top retail chains. Toys “R” Us experienced a massive 350% increase in page count year-over-year due to its release of three circulars this April versus one last year. Only a short eight-page “Bike & Trike Trade-in” circular was run last year. This year, the bicycle circular ran in the last week of the month again, but the other two circulars appeared to be a response to the late Easter this year, with a focus on $5 or less basket-fillers.

Greensboro, N.C. -- Apex Analytix, a provider of services and software to safeguard disbursements, identify fraud and improve performance across the procure-to-pay cycle, announced it has been chosen to provide retail audit software to Publix Super Markets.

Publix will use Apex Analytix FirstStrike Retail, an application used to audit large volumes of data in high-transaction retail environments. Experience shows that internal recovery audit teams armed with FirstStrike are able to achieve far more recoveries in much less time, according to Apex.