Data & Analytics

Close to nine in 10 consumers will take a look at one specific retailer before making a holiday gift purchase.

According to a survey of 3,000 U.S. consumers by marketing platform provider BloomReach, 87% of respondents will comparison shop at Amazon.com before buying a gift. This frequency of product searches is paying off for Amazon, as 73% of respondents said they will buy from Amazon and 71% will spend more than a quarter of their holiday budgets on Amazon.

Return fraud during the holidays is a growing problem for retailers—and also an extremely expensive one.

A new technology platform has been launched with a very specific goal: to help retailers convert their online browsers into shoppers at their brick-and-mortar stores.

The solution, a scalable SaaS platform from Brickwork, is designed to elevate the customer experience from site to store. It seeks to revolutionize the online “store locator” function by enriching the data and content around physical locations for brands with hundreds, and even thousands, of locations.

Delivery performance in the first half of December may land many providers on the naughty list.

According to analysis of what more than 130,000 shoppers said in surveys about on-time deliveries of their full orders between Dec. 1 - Dec. 15 by Bizrate Insights, a division of Connexity, time is not on their side.

Bizrate Insights data indicated on-time delivery rate went from 93.3% on Tuesday, Dec. 1 to 89.9% on Tuesday, Dec. 15. There were small day-over-day spikes in on-time delivery rate on Saturday, Dec. 5, Tuesday, Dec 8 and Friday Dec. 11.

2015 has been a good year for e-commerce. Alibaba shattered records on Singles Day with $14.3 billion in sales. India witnessed a boom in e-commerce investment from companies looking to win the millions of new smartphone users. Even the Girl Scouts joined the digital mix, rolling out version 2.0 of their Digital Cookie program to boost their online cookie sales.

Pier 1 Imports says it is still confident in its omnichannel strategy despite a mostly flat third quarter in which the company struggled with the same soft store traffic impacting many other retailers.

For the third quarter ended Nov. 28, the specialty retailer said same store sales decreased 0.7%. Total sales decreased 2.5% (a 1.4% decrease on a constant currency basis) to $472.5 million, compared to $484.5 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2015. Net income $10.92 million, or 13 cents a share, vs. a profit of $17.86 million, or 20 cents a share, a year ago.

The demise of The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. elevated the retail vacancy rate along central New Jersey’s major shopping corridors to 8.8% from 7.5% in 2014.

That’s according to the latest study by R.J. Brunelli & Co. Despite the uptick, the region’s 2015 vacancy factor remained a healthy distance from the 10.2% recorded in 2013 and the eight-year high of 10.5% set in 2011, but was well above the period’s low point of 4.8% posted in 2008.

Life could be so much simpler for retailers and suppliers – and better for most consumers too – if federal lawmakers could find a way to grant the industry this one, not-so-simple, holiday wish.