Consumer Analytics

Sacramento, Calif. - Raley’s Supermarkets is relaunching its e-commerce offering using technology from Unata. Raley’s will leverage Unata capabilities to deliver functionality including one-to-one experiences across all e-commerce elements from homepage to search.

In addition, product updates will enhance the click and collect functionality, which allows Raley’s customers to pick up items they ordered online in-store.  

Menlo Park, Calif. – Facebook is expanding the availability of its Place Tips in-store mobile promotion service, and also expanding Place Tips’ reach with free Bluetooth Low Energy beacons. Facebook initially launched a trial of Place Tips in January 2015 and is now rolling it out nationwide.

Brooklyn, N.Y. – Etsy Inc. reportedly employs Big Data and artificial intelligence systems to better target individual customers with personalized offers. According to the New York Times, Etsy uses tools including an open source machine learning framework called Conjecture, as well as an open source Apache solution called Kafka and in-house Hadoop, to monitor real-time data for fast processing and storage.

Retailers have a new way to drive sales thanks to a mobile-friendly upgrade to RetailMeNot’s popular app.

RetailMeNot, operator of the nation’s largest digital offers marketplace with more than 18 million unique monthly users, introduced the first version of a new “products” section on its app that features popular items.

The new product functionality offers a deep link to retailers’ mobile optimized sites, providing a way to help retailers market specific products in addition to the other promotional capabilities offered by RetailMeNot.

My latest retail IT-related travels took me to the Retail Experience Center at Microsoft headquarters (in Redmond, Washington), where I toured a simulated shopping mall environment that demonstrated a variety of innovative ways the company is using technology to enhance customer engagement for retailers.  Here are the three most interesting solutions from that visit:

A Beacon for Coffee Drinkers

American Signature is expanding an in-store tablet technology initiate running on the CloudTags platform after a pilot program yielded impressive results.

American Signature, operator of 124 stores, is using the CloudTags technology solution to allow customers to seamlessly shop online and in-store. Customers are offered a CloudTags-enabled tablet upon entering the store and tap on special product tags placed on each piece of furniture throughout the showroom.

While empty, decaying malls make for inspired photo shoots, most of America’s shopping malls are actually doing well. In fact, according to new data from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) and the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries, shopping center occupancy rates were 92.7% at the end of 2014 – the highest level in six years! Occupancy was even higher for malls (both super-regional and regional malls) at 94.2%, the highest since 1987.   

New York -- Brick-and-mortar stores are still relevant, with 87% of consumers planning to shop physical retail at least as often as they did in 2014, according to a study by TimeTrade Systems. What’s more, 65% of respondents report that if an item they want is available online or in a nearby store, they prefer to shop in the store.