Consumers remain smitten by luxury. Their urge to splurge was revealed in a 2013 study by The Boston Consulting Group, which found that consumers spent an annual aggregate amount of more than $1.8tr worldwide on items the respondents defined as luxuries.
An integrated setting for managing demand, supply and inventory involves working with people as much as with technology and information, says Todd Gallant of VF Corp. He explains how the Timberland division of VF is improving collaboration and communication among its associates up and down the supply chain.
Overall, holiday sales were weak, but from a mobile perspective, the results were phenomenal, with mobile traffic reaching 48 percent of all online traffic while mobile sales grew 40 percent to reach 29 percent of online holiday sales, according to data from IBM.
Call it the Holiday Retailing Death Match: Team Black Friday versus Team Cyber Monday. Brick-and-mortar versus e-commerce sales. Physical stores pitted against the power of the internet.
Google Inc. is wading into the morass of same-day delivery pilots and programs rapidly collecting in the Southland, competing with e-commerce giants such as Amazon.com Inc.
EBay Enterprise, an eBay Inc. company, and provider of omni-channel solutions, has announced the availability of a Ship-from-Store SaaS solution: an initiative that retailers can deploy within 99 days to most effectively leverage their physical store inventories while gaining advantages in margin and shipping cost. The company says eBay Enterprise was first to market with its holistic, integrated back-end technology that provides retailers with one comprehensive inventory system delivered at an unparalleled rate.
During the just-wrapped Christmas shopping season, e-tailers were more aggressive than ever before in offering discounts and other kinds of come-ons to customers ordering over the internet. But they paid a high price for that strategy.
Supporting the many different channels through which today's consumers shop for, purchase and return products presents tremendous challenges and opportunities for retailers, says Annibal Sodero, assistant professor at the Sam Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas.