What is Boring Retail? And How to Avoid It in Your Stores
Retail is in a state of flux right now. Stores are shuttered and long-established brands like Toys R Us are disappearing. Nine West, Bon Ton, and Claire’s are among the newest retailers filing for bankruptcy in 2018, and they may not be the last. Consumers think that retail is dying because of the threat posed […]
Tracking Promotions Across Your Retail Chain
Promotions are one of the biggest drivers of sales and traffic in the retail world. While it can be easy to measure success rate and track your promotions’ effectiveness for one store, it can be more complicated to do the same for multiple stores in a chain. There are multiple variables that may affect a […]
How to Improve Same-Store Sales Using Promotions
Same-store sales are a significant part of retail data as they let a business know how their stores are performing. Each year, businesses are able to look at their historical sales data and measure performance over time (whether this figure is the end-all-be-all is another discussion). Having such a benchmark enables retailers to understand trends, […]
Why Do Retail Customers Prefer an In-Store Experience?
The retail industry has been in a constant stage of evolution, especially as technology offers more ways to improve the in-store experience. Store owners may be wondering how to compete with online shopping in this fast-paced climate. Compared to what was available in the retail industry 50 years ago, today’s consumer has their choice of […]
Novelty Detection: Finding New Classes of Anomalies in Complex Processes
Detecting new classes of anomalies when monitoring a high-dimensional data space is known as novelty detection. This is a special case of anomaly detection that can be extremely important in many real-world applications. Some examples for novelties are: a new class of customers that behave differently from others yet share common properties; a new manufacturing […]
Kohl’s Geek Day 2018, The Future of Retail Technology
If you’re interested in the future of retail technology and innovation, Kohl’s 2018 Geek Day event was the place to be. Geek Day is an annual Kohl’s-sponsored showcase for internal employees and select strategic vendors focused on new retail technology. This year’s expo showcased a myriad of future-thinking vendors supporting Kohl’s “Tech in 2020” initiatives, […]
Know This: Demand Patterns vs. Purchasing Patterns in Retail
There’s a lot of jargon swirling around the retail technology industry, and differentiating terms for the uninitiated can be more than a little confusing, especially when you’re deciding on a solution to keep your business competitive. In this short article, we’ll be focusing on the two most popular terms that refer to wildly different services–‘consumer […]
The Challenges of Time-Series Forecasting in Retail
While demand forecasts are never perfect, they are an absolute necessity for most retailers. Good forecasting helps to ensure that retailers can supply the right product at the right time and location, maintain adequate inventory levels while avoiding stock-outs, reduce the chance of obsolete inventory, and improve price and promotion management. Many of the traditional […]
The Challenge of Solving Operational Issues in C-Stores
We’ve all had this experience: we’ve walked into a store intending to buy something, and walked out empty-handed. For simplicity, I’ll call this the empty-handed-exit experience. The reasons for the experience are many. Perhaps we change our mind in the store, because the product just didn’t meet our expectations once we saw it, or we […]
Aggregated Market Basket Analysis and Tricky Analytics
In one of my previous blogs, I addressed the question on how granular the analyzed data in retail analytics should be. There is a tangible cost resulting from..
