Data & Analytics

Milwaukee, W.I. - Most shoppers believe that the best time to shop online for Black Friday deals is on Black Friday itself. However after examining data from the past two years, the staff of Black Friday site GottaDeal.com has determined that the best time to shop online is actually late Wednesday night into early Thursday morning.

The fourth quarter is off to a very strong start at TJX Companies, according to CEO Carol Meyrowitz, who expects an exciting mix of initiatives to yield a low single digit fourth quarter comp increase and profit growth.

Austin, Texas - Deals2Buy, a U.S. product offers website, is launching a new site design that streamlines navigation. New features include responsive design, expiration countdown for deals, “hottest” and “newest” deal categories, improved navigation, and sharing of deals on social media.

Framingham, Mass. – The TJX Companies Inc. met Wall Street expectations with net income of $594.96 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2014, down 4% from $622.65 million in the same quarter the prior year. Net sales rose 5% to $7.37 billion from $6.98 billion, short of Wall Street expectations.

San Luis Obispo, Calif.– Shopatron, a provider of cloud-based distributed order management solutions, is integrating its Perfect Sync technology with Demandware Link, a best-of-breed community committed to accelerating the adoption of innovative commerce technologies that complement the Demandware Commerce suite. The integration represents the first rollout of Shopatron’s Perfect Sync technology, which provides real-time insight into front-end and order management.

Pittsburgh, P.A. – Although weakening golf and hunting sales contributed to a small decline in net income at Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. in the third quarter of fiscal 2014, the retailer still beat Wall Street profit expectations. Dick’s reported net income of $49.2 million, about a 2% drop from $50 million the same quarter a year earlier.
Net sales rose 9% to $1.53 billion from $1.4 billion, and same-store sales increased 1.1%. E-commerce penetration was 7.3% of total sales, compared to 6.5% in the third quarter of the previous year.

San Jose, Calif. – Black Friday (Nov. 28) is expected to be the busiest shopping day of 2014. According to data from in-store analytics provider RetailNext, it will be followed in order by four days in December: Dec. 20, 21, 13 and 19.
For the broader holiday period spanning November and December 2014, RetailNext predicts store traffic will be down 4% from the 2013 holiday period, while sales will be flat to 1% lower, conversions will be up 0.5% and average transaction value will rise 3.5%.

Aston, Penn. - Action Services Group, a national lighting maintenance, sign maintenance and electrical services company, has formed a strategic LED Lighting Business Group dedicated to meeting the growing demands of LED lighting retrofits and installations across retail markets. The newly formed LED Lighting SBU will provide an extensive range of services related to LED lighting.