Data & Analytics

“Now Trending” is an exclusive online series to chainstoreage.com, featuring trending topics that impact the retail real estate landscape.

New market entries, a newly developed small format and ambitious omnichannel efforts have family footwear retailer Shoe Carnival on a trajectory to surpass $1 billion in annual sales.

Retailers’ quest to offer shoppers a personalized experience just took a step forward thanks to a newly issue patent designed to detect and eliminate non-human Web traffic.

Greensboro, N.C. -- The Fresh Market named a veteran food retailer who once led Food Lion as its new president and CEO. The hiring follows the abrupt termination of the chain's former CEO and comes as the once high-flying chain has seen its sales stagnate.

Evansville, Ind. -- Shoe Carnival Inc. kicked up its heels about its profit in the second quarter, but missed on sales.

Aided by higher merchandise margins and lower advertising expenses, Shoe Carnival reported net earnings of $4.8 million, up 84% from $2.6 million a year earlier. Its results easily beat estimates.

Net sales rose 2% $227.8 million, less than expected, from $222.1 million. Same-store sales rose 0.5%.

Shoe Carnival plans to open 21 new stores and close 15 stores by the end of fiscal 2015.

Washington, D.C. -- Retailers will reveal their 2015 holiday strategies in the weeks ahead and as they do so the National Retail Federation is offering a powerful new resource filled with industry best practices to benchmark against for this year and beyond.

The newly released report, called the 2015 Holiday Planning Playbook, was compiled by top retailers over the course of the past year who served on various NRF councils focused on retail industry disciplines.

San Jose, Calif. – PayPal Holdings Inc. is combining the management structure for its product and engineering departments.

Hill Ferguson, who served as senior VP of PayPal’s consumer business, has resigned his position.

Ferguson’s role will not be directly replaced. Instead, Bill Ready, senior VP and global head of merchant and next-generation commerce, is also assuming control of the consumer side of operations. This means he will oversee all product and engineering activities.

Los Angeles – Millennial consumers choose retailers based on different criteria than their elders. A survey of more than 13,000 e-commerce shoppers by Bizrate Insights found that millennials are by far the most price-sensitive with low pricing driving their choice of retailer.

Dallas – 7-Eleven Inc. bases its value proposition on being a convenient way of purchasing food and CPG staples. But for consumers who are too time-strapped to even make a quick visit to their nearest 7-Eleven store, the retailer is offering a new omnichannel delivery service.

7-Eleven and omnichannel delivery provider DoorDash are partnering to provide on-demand delivery from participating 7-Eleven stores in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, with delivery service following in Washington, D.C. and Boston in the coming months.

Denver – Another company has joined the constantly expanding ranks of retailers who operate proprietary innovation labs.

Demonstrating that the appeal of innovation labs is moving beyond major chains, specialty online retailer eBags is teaming with Iterate Studio to jointly create a two-part innovation lab.