News

SuperSaturday raises IT awareness and funds for kids in need

Of the many reasons retail IT professionals attend the annual National Retail Federation (NRF) Convention & Expo each January in New York City, keeping current with all the latest industry topics and trends is surely at the top. Each year, RetailROI independently offers SuperSaturday, a one-day event held the Saturday before the official Sunday kickoff to the NRF Convention.

New York - Companies seeking to get closer to their customers simply need to remember and acknowledge their birthdays. A new online survey conducted by analytics and marketing technology provider Fulcrum finds that nearly three-out-of-four (74%) consumers who received birthday messages from a company they do business with thought more positively of the company afterward.

Change is constant, as they say, and we’ve all seen a lot of that, especially in the past few years. But as I look 10 years into the future, I think we’re actually in the early days of not just more change, but wholesale revolution, too. “Revolution” is a strong — and possibly overused — term. Why are the next 10 years different? Fundamentally, our customer has changed more in the past three years than in the past 30 and the pace of change is poised to accelerate in the coming decade.

Optimizing retail store portfolios and optimizing shopping center portfolios seem like two different things. In fact, the two tasks have similarities.

“To retailers, optimization is getting store deployment across the marketplace right,” explained Mike Makinen, COO with MPI, Mall Properties Inc., New York City. “We have a similar strategy. We have a mix of retailers within our shopping center portfolio, and we try to optimize the assortment of retailers, restaurants and service tenants within each center.”

New technology makes paying the bill easier than ever for customers

Logic dictates that the easier it is for customers to pay for goods, the more likely they are to purchase them. Long lines, fumbling for cash or a payment card, and even the simple act of waiting for an associate to ring up a sale at a traditional fixed POS terminal are all impediments to converting sales from busy and distracted consumers.

Seattle – Amazon.com hopes to someday deliver packages to its customers using unmanned drone aircraft.

According to numerous media reports, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said during an interview on the TV news program 60 Minutes aired Dec.1 that the company is currently testing the use of drones to pick up customer orders in buckets from fulfillment centers to enable delivery within 30 minutes of a customer executing an online transaction.

Leading cloud services provider Akamai Technologies strengthened its ability to protect the Internet with the acquisition of security solutions firm Prolexic.

New York -- Hispanic adults are more frequently visiting retailer websites than the average online population, according to Experian Marketing Services.

During a 24-week period, from June 2013 through November 2013, Hispanics' market share of visits to Experian Marketing Services' Hitwise Retail 500 Websites was 21% higher on average than the online population. Further, the analysis found that this market share widened in October 2013 and continued to increase through November.