Business Intelligence (BI)

The nation’s leading automotive retailer credited investments in inventory and favorable weather with helping it achieve its 33rd consecutive quarter of double digit earnings growth.

The company said sales for its first quarter ended Nov. 22 increased 8 percent to $2.3 billion while same store sales increased 4.5 percent. Profits for the period increased 9.3 percent to $238.3 million while earnings per share advanced 15.6 percent to $7.27 and were aided by the company’s repurchase of 571,000 shares.

San Bernardino, California - Stater Bros. will open a store in Covina, California on Wednesday, December 10, 2014.     The new “Blue Ribbon” supermarket is the 26th Stater Bros. location in Los Angeles County. It includes many environmentally friendly features, including:   • LED lighting throughout the entire store; • New lighting system that uses dimming ballasts, energy efficient lamps and occupancy sensors;

Toronto, Canada - Danier Leather is going for both form and function with a new POS rollout. The retailer's flagship store at the Toronto Eaton Centre, Toronto, has implemented Fujitsu TeamPOS 7000 All-In-One (AIO) hardware. The solution offers faster and sleeker point of sale technology and the capability to integrate with future omnichannel offerings to enhance usability, increase sales capacity and improve the consumer experience, according to Fujitsu.    

In-store mobility is transforming the way retailers engage customers. These new customer engagement programs are resulting in dramatic changes to the store network to ensure successful rollouts. Customers will seek out stores that easily enable them to use their mobile devices to research products, read reviews, and check prices to gain the confidence required to make the right purchase.

Easy access to an expanded offering of online inventory is the premise behind Staples Exchange, a marketplace-like concept that allows suppliers to leverage Staples’ online presence.

Staples doesn’t call its new Staples Exchange a marketplace – the term used by Amazon to describe the massive aggregation of third party sellers on its site – but rather and a world-class platform that makes it easy for suppliers to offer products to Staples customers.

Buenos Aires, Argentina — Specialty entertainment applicance retailer Musimundo, which operates more than 200 stores in Argentina, deployed its e-commerce platform on the  IBM Cloud to meet increased customer demand on Cyber Monday.

As it prepared for Cyber Monday 2014, Musimundo's greatest challenge was to address the number of entries of people to its website per second, and it needed to manage load balance and security levels in accordance with regulatory requirements.

Adam Kujawa, head of Malware Intelligence at Malwarebytes Labs, research arm of the anti-malware company: “It looks like the payment systems for (Bebe’s) U.S. stores were attacked, meaning that most likely they were all using the same software/hardware that had the same vulnerability. Unfortunately, without additional technical explanations, exactly what was vulnerable on those systems will remain a secret and we can only hope that the same vulnerability isn’t going to be used against another retailer.”

If you talk to retail industry stakeholders about their business priorities for 2015, you will likely hear about their continued focus on omnichannel. But the overall environment is starting to feel different than in years past. Words like “transformation” and “action” are being used to recap the 2014 business landscape. We’re moving past defining omnichannel and now focusing on implementation.

Newtown Square, Penn. – Omnichannel is increasing the reach retailers have to their customers, but also increasing customer expectations. According to a survey of marketing decision-makers in omnichannel consumer products organizations from SAP, 86% of respondents agree that omnichannel has meant that customer and consumer expectations of the organization have increased.  

Framingham, Mass. — Staples Inc. has long prided itself on making things for customers. Now the retailer is trying to do the same for suppliers with Staples Exchange, a unified platform that allows vendors to sell through all of Staples’ e-commerce channels, with multiple integration options. Staples does not require vendors to use a third party that charges integration fees, instead giving them a single portal to enroll with all of Staples’ sites.