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Article by Lucy Koch From eMarketer Earlier this month, Philadelphia passed a bill rendering cashless stores like Amazon Go and Sweetgreen illegal and banning future establishments from completely abandoning cash. By July 2019, most retailers in the city will be required to offer consumers a cash payment option... “The number of completely cashless businesses are few and far between, and research has shown that cash is still a preferred payment method for many shoppers in the US,” said eMarketer forecasting analyst Cindy Liu. An October 2018 survey from Pew Research Center showed that 70% of US adults used cash last year for at least some of their purchases during a typical week. Separately, 60% of US internet users polled by Cardtronics said that cash was the most available payment method for everyone, and another 90% viewed cash as essential to those without checking or savings accounts.

Excerpt from an article by Krista Garcia To read more, visit eMarketer Despite persistent gloom and doom surrounding the retail industry, the first half of the year has been positive for most product categories. According to the newly released monthly retail sales report from the US Census Bureau, for H1 2018, retail sales (excluding auto parts and gasoline) totaled $2.06 billion, up 4.9% year over year. With the exception of sporting goods, which shrunk 1.7%, and department stores that stayed flat, all other segments experienced growth in H1 2018. Furniture and home goods (5.3%) and apparel (5.1%) saw the biggest gains. Now par for the course, ecommerce outperformed total retail with 10.0% gains during H1 2018 compared with the same time last year.

Excerpt from an article by Krista Garcia To read more, visit  eMarketer "Amazon Go got a lot of attention, but it could be downplayed since there was only one small store near the company’s headquarters in Seattle. Could it even scale? That looks like a tentative "yes" as Amazon appears to be expanding the convenience store concept to Chicago and San Francisco. Walmart's answer, Scan & Go, debuted in August 2017 and worked with in-store devices or an app on a shopper's smartphone. However, it was reported that the retailer had shelved this trial. According to CBC News, after rolling out this service to about 120 US locations over eight months ago, the adoption rates were still low. The goal was to provide convenience, but it appears customers didn’t like scanning and bagging their own items. There has always been a degree of skepticism about self-checkout, whether because it’s too complicated, shopper preference for human interaction or resistance to ...

From News From Me I have a New Concept for the Target Stores: Having salespeople who can actually sell you stuff…and this goes for Home Depot, as well. In the last month, I've had two instances, one at each chain, where I wanted to buy something, the store's computer system seemed to be doing everything possible to prevent that transaction from transacting and human beings were of little use to override it. I'll start with the Home Depot story…

From eMarketer According to a February 2018 Nanigans survey of retail marketers, a vast majority (83%) think they would’ve achieved the same sales results if they hadn’t used retargeting. And yet, just 28% said they had the ability to measure whether sales occurred, organically or not. Even so, 53% of these retail marketers planned to spend more on performance ads in the next 12 months—on average, 24% more. This theme held true when respondents were asked about their biggest digital advertising challenges. More than half (55%) cited measuring true business impact. That sentiment was felt more strongly by larger companies (63%) than smaller ones (43%). Visibility into how ad budgets are being spent (39%) and ad fraud and viewability concerns (39%) were also challenges for respondents overall.

From eMarketer.Retail According to a March 2018 survey of US B2C retail executives by 451 Research, commissioned by Adyen, 78% of respondents said they're considering cashless stores that only accept credit cards and other digital payment options. In contrast, 36% of operations managers, essentially those that are more involved with the customer journey day to day, were in agreement. And their differing views don't stop there. Retail executives were more likely (81%) to say they saw an increase in customers using their mobile devices while shopping in-store—either for coupons, payments or product information—than operations managers (53%). In theory, cashless stores may reduce friction at checkout, which is often caused by long lines

Obtained From:  eMarketer After an unexpectedly strong holiday season closed the door on 12 months of "retail apocalypse" headlines, the retail industry is showing signs of confidence not seen in a year or more. But the confidence stems from something more than Christmas sales. Rather, the industry appears to have embraced the idea of consumer-centricity and moved on from the mindset of forcing a specific purchasing journey. “There is [a] building confidence that the industry is now pivoting” away from separate silos for in-store and digital sales, said Carrie Ask, executive vice president of global retail at  Levi Strauss & Co. , during a panel at Shoptalk in Las Vegas. “We don’t think of it as either/or anymore—it’s just shopping.” This was echoed by others at Shoptalk. Ken Worzel, president of  Nordstrom 's ecommerce site, said the department store is moving away from separating its ecommerce and brick-and-mortar business because the fragmented perspecti...

From eMarketer : Retailers have been racing to crack the personalization code for some time. For most, personalization is a key to success. In fact, more than nine in 10 US retailers surveyed by RIS News said personalization capabilities are at least somewhat important to their company's business goals. And 39% of respondents said personalization was extremely important. Many respondents employ personalization in hopes of increasing sales, improving overall loyalty, and of course, making sure customer engagement levels are high. Improving these capabilities, however, isn’t always an easy task for retailers. It’s important for retailers to get personalization right because the price of personalization failure is costly.

From eMarketing : Retailers are constantly looking to improve the shopping experience, but leveraging new technologies to do so can be costly. A spring 2017 study from Oracle and cloud-based marketing automation provider Bronto Software, which was released this past November, asked US retailers a hypothetical question: What ecommerce innovations they would focus on if money or time were not issues. A large share of respondents (44%) said they would focus on newer payment options, like one-click ordering, while a little over a third said they’d like to focus on social selling. Overall, many of the responses had a similar theme—enhancing the user experience.

From eMarketing : In retailers’ fight against Amazon, it looks like there will soon be a new weapon that could help level the playing field against the online retail giant. UPS said it will introduce UPS Returns Manager, a free online tool that allows e-commerce retailers, especially less well-resourced small- and medium-sized merchants, to not only customize their own shipment rules but also manage return shipments without having to integrate their own IT systems. For consumers, who in the past had to go to a retailer’s website to print a return label or use a label retailers include in package boxes, the feature allows them to now print a return shipping label directly from UPS.com’s tracking page both on desktop and mobile devices and through email alerts. Consumers can also print return labels at The UPS Store locations at no additional cost. The service will be available in the US Aug. 14 and 43 other countries from the UK to Brazil two weeks after that. Why is this rele...

From BizJournals : Subscription meal kit company Blue Apron, which has delivered more than 150 million meals since it was founded five years ago, is No. 1 on the Hot 100 Retailers list. The list appears in the August issue of the National Retail Federation's STORES magazine and was compiled by research firm Kantar Retail. It’s based on sales growth in 2016 over 2015, and ranks both public and privately-held retail companies by U.S. domestic sales, with a $300 million threshold for inclusion, according to NRF. Blue Apron saw annual sales grow 133 percent to $795.4 million in 2016, according to the list. STORES Hot 100 Retailers' annual list : There is a distinct lack of big-box general merchandise retailers on the chart this year, while there are plenty of businesses that exhibit differentiation in the marketplace, innovative merchandising and an appropriate value proposition for the intended customer base.

From eMarketer : Customer experience is a big retail buzzword these days, but when it comes to actually delivering a “wow” experience to consumers, retailers are generally falling short. A 25-country study by IBM found that on a scale of 0 to 100, retailers scored a subpar 33, and worse yet, they missed the mark on areas such as personalization, store and mobile experiences—key aspects of customer experience. In fact, the study ranked only 3% of brands as “leading edge,” compared with 39% of them it considered falling or lagging behind. The study, IBM’s fifth annual customer experience report, covered 507 retail and consumer products brands. Mystery shoppers rated their experience in seven ways: store experience, digital experience, physical/digital integration, mobile experience, omnichannel supply chain, personalization and social media. In an era when store experience is supposed to be a key weapon that brick-and-mortar retailers use to fend off competition from online rival...