Predictive Analytics

Online home furnishings retailer Wayfair Inc. is having success with a proprietary feature that may have been inspired by one of the hottest emerging social platforms.

According to Wayfair, its Idea Boards feature is growing rapidly in popularity, especially among users of the retailer’s mobile app. Idea Boards is an online tool that enables customers to save and organize their favorite Wayfair products in one location.

Gordmans Stores plans to open a new store next month in its hometown of Omaha in April, the first of five new units apparel and home décor retailer has planned for the year.

Consumers have spoken, and there is a definite number of retailer emails that crosses the line.

According to a new survey of more than 1,000 U.S. shoppers from customer targeting technology provider First Insight, the average consumer subscribes to 2.3 retailer email lists and receives 13.1 emails a week from these lists.

Albertsons, the second largest grocery chain in the United States, has selected a new partner for point-of-sale data, consumer panel insights and strategic growth initiatives to support joint business collaboration.

The technology department at Nordstrom continues getting smaller.

According to Geekwire, Nordstrom has laid off 120 IT employees. The cuts follow 10 technology staff reductions the retailer made at the beginning of March. All the layoffs have been part of an organizational restructuring and leveling of IT spending.

Everyone knows detecting fraudulent e-commerce activity is crucial, but how do you know when something is up?

Fraud detection provider Simility aggregated patterns across 500,000 browser-based devices throughout January 2016. Analysts looked for patterns in the 10,000 (or 2%) of those devices that were in the hands of fraudsters and contrasted those with the other 98% of devices in the hands of good or “organic” users.

Simility discovered seven anomalies that were leading indicators of fraud:

Chain Store Age recently spoke with Daphne Carmeli, CEO of Deliv, to get her perspective on what’s going on in the rapidly growing online delivery space.

What is driving growing consumer interest in online delivery?
We’ve got a bunch of players in the industry who are aggregating inventory in a simple, flexible and cost-effective way for last-mile fulfillment. Companies like Amazon and Google are resetting customer expectations of what’s possible.

There is an endless variety of ways hackers can attempt to gain access to retailers’ networks, but a few are particularly common.

In a new study, “Data Breach Digest,” Verizon identifies 18 different data breach scenarios drawn from analyzing more than 1,200 global cases investigated by the Verizon Risk Team in the past three years.

“There is a lot more commonality than most people realize,” said Chris Novak, director of investigative response, Verizon Enterprise Solutions.