Business Intelligence (BI)

By Jerome Malavoy, CEO and Founder, Trace One

San Francisco – Shopper traffic declined 6% in July 2014 compared to the same month in 2013, due to real wage pressure, favorable summer weather, and a shift towards big-ticket item purchases, according to monthly benchmarks from in-store analytics provider Euclid.

Office Depot softened the blow of weak second quarter sales by bumping up the pace of 400 store closings to drive greater than expected operating profit growth and expense savings related to the merger with OfficeMax.

Bentonville, Ark. -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is updating its website with new features and enhancements to provide shoppers with a more personalized, faster and improved shopping experience.
   

Seattle - Attribution analytics company Tune has acquired MobileDevHQ (MDHQ), provider of a SaaS solution for mobile marketers. The MDHQ solution includes app store visibility, search rankings, and competitive intelligence.

Combined with MobileDevHQ, Tune will provide more clarity into the impact and influence of app stores and other organic efforts on paid user acquisition and re-engagement. Existing MDHQ customers will continue to login as before, view their existing data, and otherwise continue using the current MDHQ product during the transition.

Epson, a leading supplier of value-added Point of Sale (POS) solutions, and Mobivity Holdings Corp., a provider of retail customer engagement and marketing technologies, have entered into a strategic partnership to transform receipts from transactional to actionable.

Redwood Shores, Calif. – Specialty supplements retailer PureFormulas recently migrated to Oracle Commerce to personalize the customer experience and open up new market segments without sacrificing ease of use.

Dedham, Mass. – Reflexis has selected SoftLayer, an IBM company, to provide the infrastructure for its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that will support retailers’ mobile and Web applications. Using Reflexis' PaaS, customers can implement mobile and web applications, which help retailers provide a seamless online-to-store shopping experience and provide a higher quality of customer engagement.

Publix Super Markets and Weis Markets reported respectable second quarter sales growth, but profits were harder to come by.

Publix, the nation’s fifth largest supermarket chain, said sales for its second quarter increased 6.6% to $7.5 billion, with 1.3% of the gain related to the timing of Easter. Same store sales increased 6.3%. Despite the top line improvement, Publix said profits increased slightly less than 1% to $404.1 million from $400.9 million while earnings per share increased by a penny to 52 cents.