Data & Analytics

Retailers will engage new channels, “geek up” their stores, and use technology to refine inventory management and anticipate customer desires in 2017.   That’s according to Software AG, which released a list of six disruptive digital trends retailers must address in 2017. Here’s a recap:   

Costco Wholesale’s new co-branded Visa payment card is definitely resonating with shoppers.   Since launching its co-branded Citi Visa Anywhere credit card in June, the club retailer reports that 1 million members signed up for the payment card.    “Most of them have it in hand,” Costco’s CFO Richard Galanti said during the company’s earnings call on Dec. 7. “In terms of conversion, usage and new sign up for the card, all [is] good so far.”  

Retailers continue to launch digital deals this holiday season to snag new customers — but these efforts come at a price.    Retailers’ promotional offers are eclipsing 2015 efforts. Customer orders using a promotion are up 34% versus 2015, and up 52% over the holiday season (Nov. 1-Dec. 5) versus 2015 in North America.     

Amazon fired the first shots of a long-needed retail industry revolution recently with its announcement of Amazon Go. While most major retailers have been working on solutions to many of the point-of-sale issues that a checkout-less store solves; Amazon is simply going to eliminate these issue entirely — at least in its own stores.   

It would appear that news accounts of Amazon’s plans to opens thousands of grocery stores are greatly overblown — at least for the time being.     Amazon’s brick-and-mortar fledgling initiatives have been in the spotlight in recent weeks with the opening of its checkout-less convenience store, Amazon Go, in Seattle. Last week, some reports had the e-commerce giant planning to open 2,000 grocery stores.     

Fred’s acknowledged it had a tough fiscal third quarter, but the company is making many changes and looking forward to a brighter future.      The first action Fred’s will take will be closing 40 underperforming stores in the first half of 2017, which  provides an immediate benefit to earnings of more $4 million.  

Amazon knows Thanksgiving weekend shoppers are typically bargain hunters, yet the company became increasingly less price dynamic as the weekend wore on.    That’s according to an infographic from 360pi, which examined the promotional and pricing strategies of Amazon, Walmart and Target, among others, during Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.   

Retailers are doing a good job online when it comes to sales, but they are failing when it comes protecting sensitive shopper data.   All of the nation’s largest retailers had multiple issues with domain security, which increases the risk of hackers impersonating a retailer's site and falsifying a checkout form to obtain a user's credit card information, according to a report by security rating firm SecurityScoreboard that exposes cybersecurity vulnerabilities across 48 of the biggest U.S holiday retailers. 

The nation’s largest maternity clothing retailer failed to meet sales and earnings expectations in the third quarter amid changes designed to focus on its core operations.     Destination Maternity reported a net loss of $1.5 million in its fiscal third quarter.   On a per-share basis, the company said it had a loss of 11 cents. Losses, adjusted for non-recurring costs, were 9 cents per share.   

A Florida-based supermarket company tops J.D. Power’s 2016 U.S. Pharmacy Study.   Publix Pharmacy, the in-store pharmacy at Publix Super Markets, came out on top in the J.D. Power report, a customer satisfaction benchmark study that provides pharmacy-specific performance comparisons among brick-and-mortar pharmacies.