Consumer Analytics

New York - The Brits are no slouches when it comes to holiday advertisements.

The competition between British retail giants to come up with the most compelling TV ad grows more intense every holiday season.

This year, the biggest initial buzz was created by Sainsbury, with its depiction of the famous Christmas truce on the battlefields of World War I.

Montreal, Canada – Specialty childrenswear retailer Souris Mini has selected Raymark's omni-channel customer relationship management (CRM) solution to support strategic initiatives in streamlining marketing activities and improving customer communications. The retailer, with more than 30 locations on two continents, is modernizing the way it engages with customers across all channels, with the project currently underway.   

Beijing – Baidu, China’s leading search engine, is investing an unspecified amount of money in U.S. online transportation service Uber. Under the terms of the agreement, Baidu will invest in Uber and enable users of Baidu Map and Mobile Baidu, Baidu’s flagship mobile search app, to connect easily with Uber driver-partners.  

Piccing, a “social-shopping” platform, has raised $3.62 million from undisclosed investors, the company announced.

The company’s web and iOS app lets users upload or bookmark images — the latter, Pinterest-style — wherein they can add up to five hotspots tied to items found in each image, thereby helping to make those images “shoppable.”

Users browsing or searching via the platform can click on any image’s hotspots — dubbed “piccs” — to buy the product or see similar items.

Consumers are doing even more holiday shopping from their desktop computers this year, according to a new report from comScore.

The Internet analytics company reports that U.S. consumer spending from desktop computers for the first 44 days of the November-December 2014 holiday shopping season is up 15% from last year, to $42.5 billion.

By Bruce Ernst, Monetate   Consumers weren’t the only ones who were busy browsing gifts during Cyber Week 2014. In fact, the kickoff to this year’s holiday shopping season saw many retailers staying up late to unwrap key customer insights based on the valuable data being generated by online shoppers.  

Los Angeles – Three out of four (76%) online buyers are dissatisfied with the strength of credit card and personal information security among retailers. According to a new survey of 6,200 online consumers aross all generations and both genders from Bizrate Insights, a shopper’s own bank is trusted the most with credit card data and personally identifiable information (72%).  

Ann Arbor, Mich. - Domino's Pizza has selected and implemented AMTdirect to manage its corporate real estate portfolio. The cloud platform has allowed Domino's to centralize real estate information and track revenue, sales and expenses across locations.   

London, U.K. – Phone calls may seem obsolete in this text- and online-based age, but U.S. consumers are still making the call when they purchase items. According to a new study from call-based marketing automation company ResponseTap, consumers in the U.S. are more than twice as likely to make a phone call when making a purchase, as opposed to purely transacting online.   

Buying and selling on Etsy.com is going to get a lot more social thanks to a new partnership between the Internet retailer and a social commerce platform called Shoppost.

Shoppost, owned by Zantler, is now officially available to Etsy users and gives sellers the ability to sell their products in-stream on such top social networks as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.