Data & Analytics

Armonk, N.Y. – When consumers look for Father’s Day gifts, they increasingly are doing so on the go. According to new IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark data, mobile accounted for more than 48% of all online Father’s Day traffic in 2015.

This figure was just shy of desktop, which claimed 51.7%, a far slimmer gap than 2014. For sales however, desktop remains supreme, accounting for 74.3% of sales (compared to 25.7% for mobile) and driving average order values of $115.12, compared to mobile devices at $93.14.

A study of 10,000 U.S. consumers revealed H-E-B, Publix and Trader Joe's are tops when it comes to making customers feel delighted.

Seattle – Amazon.com is reportedly using a proprietary machine learning solution to analyze online customer reviews and present newer and more relevant reviews first. According to CNet, the system takes into account factors such as newness, whether the review was written by a verified Amazon purchaser and how many customers found the review helpful.

Hangzhou, China – Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Holding Group Inc. will reportedly pull the plug on its 11Main U.S. specialty e-commerce site. According to TechCrunch, Alibaba plans to fold 11Main into New York-based social shopping platform OpenSky.

All good things must come to end — including, after nearly four years, my contributions to this column. “Retail Rap” will soon be forging on without me. This is the first of two final columns I’ll be contributing, and I’ll beg your indulgence if I wax nostalgic at times in this, column number 99, and in my last submission two weeks from now, Retail Rap number 100.

Washington, D.C. – Back-to-school spending for both K-12 and college students is on the upswing this year. According to a study of more than 6,400 adults with children in K-12 and college conducted by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Prosper Insights, 29% of K-12 households plan to spend more in the current year than the previous year, as do almost 30% of college households.

Edison, N.J. - Consumers are turning to user-generated social media images and videos to help them make purchasing decisions. According to a new study of more than 500 online shoppers from Dotcom Distribution, more than half of respondents (54%) have used social media to find photos or videos of a product they were thinking of buying within the past year.

Cloud computing has become nearly ubiquitous, but are retailers making the best use of cloud services when it comes to managing sensitive customer data? Deciding what customer data should be stored in the cloud and what data should be stored on-premises behind a company’s firewall is a question every retail company has to grapple with.