Results from the recently concluded holiday selling season give the nation’s merchants some reason to celebrate. Retail sales rose 4.9% from November 1 through Christmas Eve, the biggest yearly gain since 2011, according to “Mastercard SpendingPulse.” The report, which combines purchasing activity in the Mastercard network and survey-based estimates for other forms of payment, including
Editor’s Note: In this article, the second of our series on all things digital retail, the authors examine how food, drug, and mass (FDM) retailers can leverage technology to raise efficiency and improve the in-store experience. Our first article outlined the evolving competitive and consumer landscape driven by Walmart and Amazon. With this article, we
At the turn of the millennium, the extended retail business was aglow with technical and operational possibilities. The internet was seen as both a platform for selling things and for making the merchandising and fulfillment process more efficient. Data processing power and storage capacity was growing dramatically, so analysis that previously took weeks could be
As the mandate is increasingly on retailers to understand and serve their customer in more varied, broad and transparent ways, predictive analytics has emerged as a powerful, rapidly developing platform that offers strong value across the spectrum of work flows and operations for many different businesses. Analytics has long been a key fixture of effective
Many observers of the changes affecting the business of selling consumer packaged goods out of brick-and-mortar stores have been arguing about whether the industry is facing a kind of “retail apocalypse.” The idea is that e-commerce represents an existential threat to the kind of shopping that takes place in physical spaces. Once the remaining wrinkles