Predictive Analytics

A strengthening dollar hurt Tiffany & Co. a lot more than Wall Street was expecting in the fourth quarter, as the upscale jeweler reported a surprising sales decline.

New York – Multicultural consumers are growing in importance as the U.S. increasingly becomes a multicultural country. According to an upcoming study from Nielsen, “The Multicultural Edge: Rising Super Consumers,” multicultural consumers today are leaders in technology adoption.

Digital commerce continued its meteoric rise in the fourth quarter, according to the Shopping Index by Demandware.

The index, which measures digital commerce growth across two key attributes -- shopping attraction and shopper spend -- reveals that shopper attraction, which measures the number of shoppers, was up 25% in the fourth quarter 2014 over the fourth quarter last year and drove 81% of the digital commerce growth.

San Jose, Calif. - Customer experience optimization is becoming an increasingly critical discipline as organizations enter a new era of marketing. Ninety-six percent of companies deem customer experience optimization as "important," with more than two in five companies (41%) claiming that this is now a "high priority" for their organization, according to the study.

Chris Allan was a co-founder of Quantum Retail Technology and now he is the company’s CEO too.

Allan rejoined Quantum, a provider of merchandise optimization and inventory solutions, in late 2014 to lead the company’s retail development and delivery organizations. He will maintain that role in addition to serving as CEO.

By Chris Mike, Chirpify

These days, retailers spend a lot of time obsessing over letters, specifically CAC and CLV. Most know these terms as shorthand for customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value. Both are key concepts and incredibly important metrics if you operate a retail business.

Menlo Park, Calif. – Facebook has purchased personalized shopping engine TheFind.com, with the intent of making its ad more relevant to individual users. The social media giant will integrate TheFind’s functionality into its personalized ad-matching capability, rather than keep TheFind operating as a separate entity.

In a message on its homepage, TheFind said some employees will make the transition to Facebook.

Following a recent series of data breaches targeting both large and medium sized retailers, many retailers are investing in technology that will help encrypt credit card data at the point of sale. Although a meaningful way to reduce risk, endpoint encryption is not the silver bullet solution hoped for by many retailers.