Data & Analytics

The National Retail Federation has made a major change to the format and content of its annual trade show and convention, known as the Big Show, which is held every January in New York.

Sales continued to decline at Office Depot in the third quarter, but CEO Roland Smith said excellent execution allowed operating profits to more than double.

Total company sales on a pro-forma basis to reflect the merger of Office Depot and OfficeMax declined 3% to $4.1 billion during the period ended Sept. 27. The top line decline was steeper at the company’s 1,851 unit North American retail division where sales declined 7% to $1.7 billion due to store closures and a 3% same store sales decline driven by a reduced transaction volume. 

New York --Forrester Research said Monday it expects U.S. online sales to reach $89 billion in November and December. That's up 13%, or about $10 billion, over a year ago. But Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru noted that the expected growth is not as high as it could be due to a few unique constraints, including fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and capacity constraints in the already constrained carrier networks.

Scottsdale, Ariz. -- 360pi and JDA Software are partnering to optimize local pricing recommendations for retailers. This partnership integrates 360pi’s zone-based pricing intelligence for national and private label brands with JDA’s rules-based Strategic Pricing solution, part of JDA’s larger Price and Promotion Management portfolio.   

By Paul Rauker, VP of systems and controls at Daikin Applied  

San Jose, Calif. -- Verifone and MasterCard are providing Las Vegas taxi cab passengers with card-linked offers in a pilot program running from from Nov. 2-6. Targeted offers from merchants, in this case The Hard Rock Café on the Las Vegas strip, the Bali Hai and Royal Links golf courses and Dream Racing at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, are displayed to taxi passengers on VNET–Taxi TV screens integrated with Verifone payment terminals.   

San Jose, Calif. -- Verifone is making its secure commerce architecture, designed to significantly reduce merchant exposure to large-scale data breaches, available globally. The new architecture is also designed to reduce the certification burden on U.S. merchants, acquirers and other payment providers looking to enable EMV acceptance.  

On Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2014, at 2 p.m. ET, Forever 21 and Oracle Retail offer a webinar about how technology can help retailers meet consumer demand with their assortments.   

Long Beach, Calif. –- To meet the growing demand for cost-effective, reliable peripheral connectivity in mobile and tablet POS environments, Epson offers two new OmniLink smart printers, the TM-T88V-i and the TM-T20II-i.  

By Jeremy Geiger, Retailigence   The headline is bold, but yes, 2014 is the year of hyperlocal mobile advertising, and there are three very important trends converging today to make this happen.   The first is smartphone proliferation; according to eMarketer, smartphone users worldwide will total nearly 2 billion in 2014.