Omnichannel

Armonk, N.Y. -- On Tuesday, IBM released its final Benchmark announcement for the 2011 holiday season, detailing a continued strong performance for mobile as well as an overall increase in online spending for December 2011.

According to the report, the U.S. online retail sector delivered 7.5% growth in December 2011 compared to the same period last year. This followed a strong November where both Black Friday 2011 and Cyber Monday 2011 delivered double-digit growth over 2010.

Other key findings of the IBM report included:

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. — American Apparel has chosen Oracle ATG Web Commerce and Oracle ATG Web Commerce Customer Service applications to help grow its global, multi-channel retail business. The apparel retailer will use Oracle's ATG Web Commerce to personalize the customer experience across all channels, including the web, contact center, mobile devices, social media and in stores.

Well, the holidays are finally over and the verdict is in: Retailers reported a 3.5% year-over-year sales increase in December — that’s better than I thought we would see — and a 3.3% increase overall for the season. While slightly more than some analysts anticipated (myself included!), it wasn’t the happiest holiday for everyone. Certain sectors (electronics) and brands (Macy’s, Nordstrom) did better than expected, while others (Target and J.C. Penney) did worse.

Seattle -- Nordstrom said Tuesday it has redesigned its Fashion Rewards loyalty program to include added benefits include complimentary services and other point incentives.

As part of an effort to build customer loyalty, the new program – which launched Jan. 1 – includes complimentary alterations up to $100 based on varying benefit levels, triple point days, and Nordstrom Rack point participation.

Cleveland -- Agilysys announced that beauty retailer Sephora Americas has successfully deployed NextPosition by Agilysys and RedIron's 2Mobile software to enhance customer service in a large number of its U.S.-based stores.

New York City -- PayPal, which allows consumers to pay for goods online, is running a trial of in-store payments with Home Depot, Reuters reported. PayPay is a division of eBay Inc.

A pilot program for PayPal's new POS, technologies is being run in five Home Depot stores and involves a "small number" of PayPal employees, according to the report.
 

Online sales increased 15% to $35.3 billion from Nov. 1 through Dec. 25 compared with the same time period the prior year, according to the online measurement firm comScore.

Hampshire, United Kingdom -- The global redemption rate of mobile coupons will average at over 8% by 2016, which represents an eightfold increase over the best paper coupons campaigns, according to a new report from Juniper Research. North American and Western European markets are now beginning to follow the same growth path as the Far East & China and by 2016 there will be over 600 million regular mobile coupon users worldwide.