News

Research: Food shoppers opt for brick-and-mortar over online
Chicago -- Although consumers are changing how they shop for food and beverages, most prefer to make perishable purchases in tradition brick-and-mortar locations.
Deeper Dive: Apple Pay vs. CurrentC
CurrentC, the mobile payment service under development from a retailer consortium known as Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX, has been getting a lot of attention in the past week. First MCX members CVS and Rite Aid disabled their NFC payment systems to block the rival ApplePay mobile payment service, and then hackers stole the emails of CurrentC users. And despite all this publicity, CurrentC is still in pilot mode.

Kurt Salmon: Retailers to speed up holiday online processing/shipping by two days

New York -- Amid a public fight for Thanksgiving weekend foot traffic, retailers are also battling behind the scenes to prepare for peak-season e-commerce orders. According to a new Kurt Salmon survey, retailers will reduce their processing and shipping time frames for multi-item orders by almost two days this holiday season.
Best Buy to open 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving, one hour earlier than last year

Minneapolis -- Best Buy has joined the ranks of retailers that have moved up the time their stores will open on Thanksgiving Day. The consumer electronics giant said Tuesday that some 1,000 of its stores will open at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, which is one hour earlier than last year. The stores will close at 1 a.m. Friday before reopening at 8 a.m. on November 28 (Black Friday) and close at 10 p.m. that day.
SAP and Samsung partner on mobile devices for business, including payments solution

New York -- Samsung Electronics and SAP SE are partnering to deliver enterprise mobility solutions for a number of industries, including an integrated payments solution.
Luxottica Group goes live with JDA solution

Bracknell, England -- JDA Software Group announced that eyewear manufacturer/marketer Luxottica Group SpA has gone live with its implementation of JDA Supply Chain Planner, from the JDA Manufacturing Planning.
Citizen commerce comes to retail

This past summer President Obama turned heads when the White House hosted a curious sounding event called a Maker Faire. The event was created to recognize people known as “Makers” and the global movement they are a part of that is upending traditional product development cycles, the consumer acceptance curve and the retail industry.
Best Buy opening earlier on Thanksgiving

The dishes from Thanksgiving dinner will barely be dry when Best Buy stores open at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 28, to treat shoppers to an early wave of doorbuster deals.
Santa sizzles in Belk’s digital effort

Department store retailer Belk has enlisted a hot male model to serve as a non-traditional Santa Claus at the center of a multifaceted digital initiative.
Big Lots creates new national holiday

Retailers employ all manner of promotional tactics to drive holiday sales and this year Big Lots has even created a new national occasion to serve as the basis of a promotion.

The leading closeout retailer has declared Nov. 16-22 as the nation’s first “Decorate Your Home for the Holidays Week,” to provide inspiration and motivation to shoppers to begin decking the halls this holiday season.
In era of app overload Shopfeed eyes simplicity

A new app from Shopfeed is designed to streamline the product discovery process in a world where new products are said to be mentioned 400 million times a day online.

Shopfeed launched its new app to offer the most updated trends from magazines, blogs, and celebrities, all in one place by creating lists from the best of the Web in areas such as style, home, technology and entertainment.
RetailNext names IBM exec to marketing role

Marc Dietz has joined big data analytics provider RetailNext as chief marketing officer.

Dietz joins RetailNext from IBM where he led worldwide marketing for the company's SaaS portfolio, including multiple acquisitions such as DemandTec, Coremetrics, and Silverpop. Prior to the $440 million acquisition of DemandTec by IBM, Dietz led all marketing efforts at the cloud-based analytics provider for retailers and consumer products companies. He helped grow DemandTec from an early stage through IPO in 2007, and the IBM transaction in 2012, according to RetailNext.