Consumer Analytics

Amsterdam, Netherlands – Staples Europe has launched a new Staples.es website aimed at helping small businesses locate and purchase products.

The site has a new look and feel and offers many new features to improve the overall shopping experience including personalized shopping with product recommendations based on customer preferences, an updated search engine and filtering tools, streamlined reordering for frequently used products, and quick checkout with a mini-cart that designed to ease inserting coupons, saving addresses and reviewing orders.

Redwood Shores, Calif. – Cross-channel experiences are vital to customer experience. Recent customer experience studies of retail executives — by Oracle Corp. and Tata Consultancy Services — show that to 50% and 47% of respondents, respectively, cross-channel experiences are vital to providing overall customer experience.

Walnut Creek, Calif. – While the percentage of retailers who think they know about their customers is rising, fewer retailers think they are proficient in using that knowledge for marketing purposes. According to a new study from RSR Research, “Retail Marketing 2013: Organizational Drift,” 36% of retail marketers said their customer loyalty program is a foundational element of their marketing strategy in 2013, compared to 32% last year.

Chico, Calif. – Online home improvement retailer Build.com is using Adobe Marketing Cloud as the cornerstone of its digital marketing strategies, diving deeper into visitor data to better understand what they are looking for, how they navigate online, where they are coming from, and what drives purchase decisions.

New York – Men are highly engaged shoppers, with 63% of men actively looking for in-store sales and 53% regularly using coupons, according to WSL’s “How America Shops: Men & Shopping Report.” The study also shows that 67% of Millennial men use mobile phones to shop, compared to 52% of Gen X men and 29% of Baby Boomer men.

By Jeff Wakefield, Verifone

Mobility. It is such a broad concept, meaning different things to merchants and consumers. Mobile acceptance, mobile payments, mobile POS, mobile shopping – each plays a distinct part in the overall mobile experience and each has different risks and rewards.

Within this larger mobile arena, the security of the mobile payment device offers the greatest risk for both merchants and consumers alike.

New York -- Retail is the No. 1 category utilizing location-powered advertising, with big box, consumer electronics and department store retailers being the most frequent users, according to a new report by location-based mobile advertising firm Verve Mobile.

The "State of the Market: Location Powered Mobile Advertising, Deep Dive on Retail" study reveals that geo-fencing, which includes geo-conquesting, is the most utilized location targeting strategy deployed by retailers.  I

In other findings:

New York -- For the second consecutive month, Jcrew.com ranked No. 1 overall in customer service performance in the Stella Monthly Benchmarks, a ranking of the best online customer service performance in the United States. Rounding out the top five, were the e-commerce sites of Ralph Lauren, L.L.Bean, Kate Spade and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Boulder, Col. -- Publix Pharmacy is North America’s favorite based on customer satisfaction, according to a new study of 3,600 consumers conducted by customer intelligence solutions provider Market Force Information. Target was a close second and Kroger ranked third. All three received high marks in operational attributes such as service, cleanliness, atmosphere and checkout times.

Walgreens and CVS/pharmacy ranked the highest when those consumers were asked to name their pharmacy chain, with 18% identifying Walgreens and 17% CVS.  

Roseville, Calif. – Revionics, Inc. and Nielsen Holdings, N.V., have signed a multi-year global strategic alliance agreement which will integrate Nielsen Pricing Insights with Revionics Life Cycle Price Optimization solutions. The alliance brings together Nielsen competitive market data with demand-based predictive analytics to help retailers quickly make data-driven pricing changes at enterprise scale to capitalize on competitive marketplace conditions.