Data & Analytics

Shoppers still love Apple products, as evidenced by record unit sales for the iPhone and iPad.
Apple sales increased 5.7% to $57.6 billion from $54.5 billion during the company’s first quarter ended December 28 thanks to record sales of its flagship products.

The company sold a record 51 million iPhones compared to 47.8 million last year and iPad sales increased to 26 million units from 22.9 million last year. The biggest percentage gain came from the Mac business where units sold increased to 4.8 million from 4.1 million.

As senior editor of Chain Store Age it is my pleasure to welcome you to the first edition of our new Customer Disruption e-newsletter. Every other Thursday, I will be presenting you with content from the Chain Store Age website and magazine highlighting how retailers are using technology to provide customers with the type of seamless, personalized shopping experience they have come to expect.

New York – Eighty percent of U.S. consumers use the Internet when they shop. And the fourth annual research study of shopper behavior by Cisco Consulting Services revealed the percentage of “Über-Digitals” shoppers, who regularly use their smartphones for their shopping decision-making, nearly doubled to 18% of the sampled population.

Atlanta – The Home Depot has acquired Houston-based window coverings retailer Blinds.com. As The Home Depot continues to implement its interconnected retail strategy, the company will work with Blinds.com to expand its technology into Homedepot.com and the company's stores with the goal of improving the entire end-to-end buying process for window coverings.

The Blinds.com management team and staff will remain intact at its headquarters in Houston. The acquisition closed Jan. 23 and terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Atlanta -- Global Payments Inc. will acquire Payment Processing, Inc. (PayPros). PayPros, based in California, is a provider of fully-integrated payment solutions for 58,000 small-to-medium sized retailers in the U.S.  

Chattanooga, Tenn. -- To increase control of its digital activities, SmartFurniture.com chose to implement a stable of proprietary and third-party analytics, campaign management, and optimization tools. However, the solutions lacked the functionality and flexibility necessary to capture, analyze, and transform data into actionable insights, so SmartFurniture.com expanded adoption of Adobe Marketing Cloud.

New York -- The Deloitte Consumer Spending Index, which tracks consumer cash flow as an indicator of future consumer spending, rose in December 2013. The Index, which comprises four components, tax burden, initial unemployment claims, real wages and real home prices, increased to 4.3 in December from 3.9 the prior month.

Washington, D.C. – The FBI has reportedly issued a confidential report to U.S. retailers warning that more cyber attacks like the ones recently suffered by Target and Neiman Marcus will occur. According to Reuters, the three-page report was distributed Jan. 17 and informs retailers that the FBI has discovered in the past year there have been at least 20 attacks using the same type of malware used against Target.

Seattle – Starbucks Corporation’s profit in the first quarter rose 25% to $540.7 million from $432 million in the year-ago period, better than analysts expected.

Revenue for the quarter ended Dec. 29, 2013 rose 12% to $4.24 billion from $3.79 billion. Same-store sales rose 5%, beneath Wall Street expectations of 5.9%.

Same-store sales in the Americas region also rose 5%, while analysts had expected a 6.4% increase.

Lawrenceville, N.J. -- A new online tool from supply chain information standards organization GS1 US, called the GS1 US Data Hub, will make it possible for retailers, e-tailers, data pools, solution providers and a variety of application developers to access the detailed information associated with GS1 company prefixes, the specific combination of numbers embedded in GS1 identifiers and barcodes to identify a company.