News

Bed Bath & Beyond made another move to boost its online offerings by acquiring a home furnishings and home décor flash-sales site.

Westlake Ace Hardware has entered into a lease agreement and will be opening a new store in Overland Park, Kansas.   Lenexa, Kansas-based Westlake will take possession of the 15,500-sq.-ft. store on July 29. The store is the current location of Dobbels True Value Hardware. It will officially reopen as a Westlake Ace in fall 2016. Dobbels is currently having a going-out-of-business sale.    

Rural lifestyle retailer Tractor Supply Co. has been strengthening its IT infrastructure to support growth, and now is turning its attention to pricing.   Tractor Supply Co. plans to grow from 1,500 to 2,500 stores, and has been shifting to a Web-scale architecture and new ERP platform. Now the company is extending an existing partnership with merchandise optimization solutions provider Revionics Inc. through 2019.  

If it seems like more if your inventory is disappearing, you’re probably not imagining things.   According to the 2016 National Retail Federation (NRF) Retail Security Study, conducted in collaboration with the University of Florida, retailers’ inventory shrink averaged 1.38% of retail sales, or $45.2 billion in 2015, up by 3% from $44 billion the previous year.  

Internet shopping is extremely popular, but how much room for further growth is there?   According to a new study of more than 3,300 U.S. consumers age 15 and up from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the overall move to online shopping is expected to slow considerably during the next three years.  

Today’s consumers are more hurried than ever, and even traditional e-commerce apps may not move quickly enough to satisfy them.   New York-based specialty electronics retailer B&H Photo Video, which operates a single superstore as well as a global e-commerce site, is taking advantage of a new app-sharing feature from Google. Known as Android Instant Apps, it allows users to have a native app experience without actually download an Android app from the Play Store.  

The liberal return policies of many big retailers are having a negative impact on the paychecks of store associates who receive commissions, according to a report by the New York Times.   

Amazon currently accounts for one in three shopping transactions in North America, but few details about the e-tail giant’s product assortment have not been readily available. Until now.    

Solid. That’s how many industry analysts described retail sales in May.   Driven partly by rising gasoline prices, sales increased 0.5% in May, the Commerce Department said Tuesday, above the 0.3% gain economists expected. Excluding automobiles, gasoline stations and restaurants, retail sales rose 0.2% unadjusted over April, according to the National Retail Federation.   

For retailers that advertise on Facebook, determining the volume of store traffic and purchases generated by the ads can be tricky at best.