Consumer Analytics

Vendor partners of Target and Walgreens will soon be receiving actionable insights and alerts aimed at improving assortments, product availability, new item retail launches and promotion effectiveness in the Midwest.

Carlin Group (part of Beacon United), a regional sales and marketing solutions company focused on the Midwestern market, is leveraging the retail analytics platform from Retail Solutions Inc. (RSI) to help clients including Target and Walgreens suppliers improve their overall customer experience in the region.

American Apparel is looking to make the final step in the path to in-store purchase safer, easier and more efficient.

The specialty apparel chain is deploying a cloud-based payments infrastructure from retail software provider Index. Leveraging the Index Hosted Gateway and Semi-Integrated Payments solutions, American Apparel will obtain the ability to secure card payments at the POS with both point-to-point encryption (P2PE) and EMV authentication. This will validate the cardholder at the moment of transaction and then protect their data as it is processed.

When it comes to fraudulent online transactions, one state in particular may warrant a little extra attention from retailers.

Analysis of millions of 2015 e-commerce transactions by Experian indicates Florida is the overall riskiest state for billing fraud, followed by Delaware; Washington, D.C.; Oregon and California. Billing fraud states are determined by where the consumer whose information was illegally used resides.

As consumers become more tech-savvy, they are becoming more independent in their approach to in-store shopping.

According to a new survey of 682 consumers from store technology provider InReality, shoppers are past the digital "cool factor" and looking for digital implementations in-store that offer the same type of self-directed shopping experiences they get online.

There’s still time to sign up for today’s Webinar, “Getting the Most Out of Your Traffic and Conversion Program.”

The presentation, on Tuesday, March 1, from 2 p. m. to 2:30 p.m. EST, will provide valuable insights for retailers who are already tracking traffic and conversion in their stores and those that are considering it. Click here to register.

Young girls are notoriously picky about what they wear, and now someone is doing something about it.

Kidpik, a new online shopping service aimed at girls age 3-12 (and their parents), offers curated, personalized fashion collections. Girls initially fill out an interactive quiz about their apparel preferences, and based on the results are assigned a look such as Girly Girl, Modest or Classic Chic.

Sales has come a long way. Gone are the days of door-to-door and the other tired sales methods. And salespeople? They’ve evolved, too.

Training a sales team can be hard — especially when it comes to building a new workforce. You know, those employees whose only door-to-door experience consists of trick-or-treating. Yep, we’re talking about Millennials.

Modern. Innovative. Interactive. Organized.

Those were among the words used most often by mystery shoppers to describe Amazon’s first ever retail storefront, Amazon Books. The report comes amid ongoing rumors that the Internet giant is planning to roll out additional stores.