Data & Analytics

The Home Depot elevated 14-year veteran Ted Decker to the role of EVP of merchandising to oversee all aspects of merchandising strategy and operations.

Decker had previously served as SVP of retail finance, pricing analytics and assortment planning. He assumes his new role August 4 and will report to Craig Menear, Home Depot’s president of U.S. retail.

New York – L’Oreal cosmetics brand Urban Decay has partnered with Compare Metrics to launch its online product discovery solution. The Compare Metrics solution for Urban Decay includes content curation, adaptive navigation and shopping scenarios. 

Recent announcements that Apple will partner with IBM to release more than 100 mobile iOS applications tailored to work with IBM’s data analytics and cloud services, and that Microsoft will focus on digital work innovation in its smartphone segment, serve as reminders that mobile devices are continuing to evolve. Increasingly, mobile devices are offering features that make it easier for retailers to position advanced computational and analytical power at the point of customer contact. Here are three ways upcoming changes in the capabilities of mobile devices will affect retail.

New York -- British retailing giant Tesco Plc on Monday said CEO Philip Clarke would step down in October, to be replaced by 27-year Unilever executive Dave Lewis, with the change effective Oct. 1. Clarke, who has been with Tesco for 40 years, will remain with the retailer until January 2015.

Also on Monday, Tesco said recent sales had been more challenging than anticipated and its profit in the first half of its financial year would be below expectations. It was the second profit warning issued since Clarke took the reins of the company in March 2011.

Washington, D.C. - The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), the standards and technology division of the National Retail Federation (NRF), has released the Compliance Audit Interchange. The CAI is a specification that allows organizations to share compliance audit results securely with other companies who source from the same supplier location.

Melville, N.Y. – EconsumerServices, an online mediator between unsatisfied customers and e-commerce retailers, has signed JoTo PR as its public relations agency. JoTo PR will assist EConsumerServices in reaching its mass market of online consumers and making industry opinion leaders and government officials aware of the issue of fraud-related chargebacks.

Menlo Park, Calif. – Facebook is testing a new “buy” button designed to help businesses drive sales through Facebook in News Feed and on Pages. With this feature, people on desktop or mobile can click the “Buy” call-to-action button on ads and page posts to purchase a product directly from a business, without leaving Facebook.

Neuhausen, Switzerland -- Tyco Retail Solutions announced that fashion retailer Inditex Group, operator of Zara, has awarded Tyco a chain wide contract for RFID-based Inventory Intelligence. The Tyco solution is currently deployed in 700 Zara stores across 22 countries.

The solution has delivered timely, accurate visibility into merchandise styles, colors and sizes for Zara, enabling Inditex to create precise merchandise plans and tailored product assortments, and to deliver an exceptional customer experience across the Zara chain, Tyco said.

San Francisco - Only 1.7% of products are posted on social commerce properties. In addition, according to the Search and Social Commerce Index from predictive media optimization technology Kenshoo and semantic advertising company DataPop, even among products in their most popular product categories, retailers post only 7.2% of their products via social commerce.

Stamford, Conn. -- General Electric is spinning off its Synchrony Financial consumer credit business in an initial public offering (IPO) and seeking a market valuation as high as $22 billion. Synchrony offers store credit cards for retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and J.C. Penney Co.