Business Intelligence (BI)

Membership buying club DirectBuy Inc. takes an unusual approach to retailing. It offers paid members the chance to directly purchase goods from manufacturers and wholesalers, without paying retail markup

So perhaps it is to be expected that 50-plus-store DirectBuy, which also offers online and in-home shopping options to its 250,000-plus members, approaches business intelligence (BI) a little differently, as well.

Somerville, Mass. – Almost all (91%) of marketers either use or intend to use personalization for online customer interactions within the next year. According to a new survey from real-time personalization provider Evergage, nearly one in two marketers surveyed (49%) intends to increase their budgets for personalization in the year ahead, with 80% planning to increase them significantly (by more than 10%).

Montreal - Epicor Retail Solutions has officially launched as an independent company and new brand following its spin-off from Epicor Software Corp. The new company, called Aptos Inc., will focus on delivering a singular commerce platform for seamless customer experiences.

Armonk, N.Y. — Retailers looking ahead to meeting the needs of holiday shoppers should be aware of the continuing growth of mobile’s importance as a consumer channel. According to IBM’s Eighth Annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, mobile accounted for 23% of sales and 45% of traffic in November and December 2014, respectively.

Philadelphia — Except for a momentary spike during the 2014 holiday season, conversion and add-to-cart rates have been dropping steadily year-over-year. However, according to the global Ecommerce Quarterly report from Monetate, personalized, relevant product recommendations help brands avoid this issue.

Los Angeles - Marketing services company Connexity Inc. has acquired the PriceGrabber retail lead generation platform and network. The company will provide shopping leads that result in more than $2 billion in annual sales for retailers and brands.

PriceGrabber's shopping-focused publisher network offers more than 2,000 retailers marketing access to tens of millions of shoppers each month from online shopping destinations such as Yahoo!, Ask.com and PriceGrabber.com. Retailers will manage a single lead channel.

Franklin, Tenn. — Retailers are interested in mobile POS (mPOS) technology, but a number of challenges exist to its widespread adoption. According to a new study from IHL Group, “mPOS: Houston, Do We Have A Problem,” 78% of retailers planning to make a new mobile POS decision by mid-2016.

In addition, 66% of enterprise retailers say they want their existing POS software vendor to provide their mPOS solution. However, it takes chain retailers an average of 9.7 months to deploy a mobile POS solution. 

London, U.K. — Honest Cafe, an automated coffee house chain in London, is using IBM Watson Analytics to unearth client insights to help determine everything from coffee products and pricing, to marketing and promotions. Honest Cafe is a new venture from Revive Vending where three cafes currently in operation, and four more planned, are all unmanned.

New York — If credit card issuers stopped offering rewards, a slight majority of American credit cardholders wouldn’t change their spending habits. According to a new Bankrate.com survey, 51% of U.S. credit card holders say they would keep using the card the same way they did previously.    Another 26% would use the card less often and 19% would stop using it entirely.  

Scottsdale, Ariz. – JDA Software Group will release its next generation of cloud-based omnichannel and supply chain solutions on the public Google Cloud Platform. Through this collaboration, Google will provide a scalable and flexible technology platform via the cloud to support JDA’s future application development and delivery.