Data & Analytics

Plug and Play brings together retailers and start-ups that offer specific technology and expertise that can relieve merchants’ pain points. Chain Store Age’s Customer Disruption newsletter provides a Q&A with the CEO of one of those companies in each issue. This time, the spotlight is on Will Summerlin of Pinn.

What does your company do?

Membership buying club DirectBuy Inc. takes an unusual approach to retailing. It offers paid members the chance to directly purchase goods from manufacturers and wholesalers, without paying retail markup

So perhaps it is to be expected that 50-plus-store DirectBuy, which also offers online and in-home shopping options to its 250,000-plus members, approaches business intelligence (BI) a little differently, as well.

San Francisco - Petco is launching a new on-demand delivery service called PetcoNow, in partnership with Instacart. PetcoNow gives pet owners the ability order from  selection of approximately 13,000 Petco products, delivered directly to their door in as little as one hour.

Somerville, Mass. – Almost all (91%) of marketers either use or intend to use personalization for online customer interactions within the next year. According to a new survey from real-time personalization provider Evergage, nearly one in two marketers surveyed (49%) intends to increase their budgets for personalization in the year ahead, with 80% planning to increase them significantly (by more than 10%).

Montreal - Epicor Retail Solutions has officially launched as an independent company and new brand following its spin-off from Epicor Software Corp. The new company, called Aptos Inc., will focus on delivering a singular commerce platform for seamless customer experiences.

Texting and checking social media sites aren’t on any retailer’s job description for store level hourly positions, but those and other Internet-enabled activities are sapping the productivity of workers, according to a CareerBuilder study.

The study of 2,175 hiring and human resources managers didn’t look just at the retail industry, but who hasn’t been in a store and seen a smartphone obsessed employed distracted by their device to the detriment of customer service.

Foot Locker is teaming up with ASICS on a creative campaign that tells the life story of runners on film.

The "Real Lives. Real Runners." campaign will provide a platform for runners to capture and share their stories. Building on the successful 2014 "All Runners Welcome" campaign from Foot Locker and ASICS, "Real Lives. Real Runners." invites filmmakers to identify authentic runners and document in a short film why they run and how running impacts their lives.

Federal regulations governing unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, will be in place by this time next year.

Most retailers won’t be ready, but Amazon says it will be as soon as the feds are. Testifying at a congressional hearing on June 17, Paul Misener, Amazon.com’s vice president of global public policy told lawmakers it would be ready to deliver packages via its service branded as Prime Air as soon as federal rules are in place.

Pier 1 Imports reported same store sales growth for the first quarter, which the company’s CEO credited to the completion of an omnichannel transformation.

Armonk, N.Y. — Retailers looking ahead to meeting the needs of holiday shoppers should be aware of the continuing growth of mobile’s importance as a consumer channel. According to IBM’s Eighth Annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, mobile accounted for 23% of sales and 45% of traffic in November and December 2014, respectively.