A new survey by Accenture shows that many more people are using tricks to save money, but that the young and wealthier are most likely to use daily deal sites such as GroupOn or Living Social to save money on purchases. 

Interestingly, in spite of the amount of attention that these sites receive, most Americans (56 percent) do not subscribe to a deal site, and a full 43 percent of Americans say they do not like "anything" about them.

That said, for those who use the sites, there are some interesting findings:

• Nearly four in 10 daily deal site subscribers say they are using the sites more often now than a year ago
• One in four (26 percent) say the deals entice them to purchase things they ordinarily wouldn’t
• Most members don’t redeem purchases right away with 25 percent redeeming in one to three months, and more than one third (36 percent) in one to four weeks
• The chief complaint with daily deal sites for respondents is the lack of items or services they want to use or try (37 percent) and lack of localized offers (24 percent).

Read more: As Consumers Balk at Higher Prices, Retailers Must Determine How to Retain Customers While Dealing with Rising Costs, Accenture Survey Shows

Who knew Cloud computing can combat Warehouse Theft.

How Amazon uses big data to prevent warehouse theft

According to Henry, Amazon has more than 1.5 billion items in its retail catalog and more than 200 fulfillment centers around the world. That’s a lot of objects in a lot of places for the online retailer to keep track of. Keeping the most valuable items protected isn’t as easy as just putting the highest-priced products under lock and key. As Henry said, sometimes, due to limited availability or other factors, a lower-priced product might actually be more highly sought-after by criminals. There’s also the question of how big the cage is, how big the item is, how many items can be fit in each cage, and so on.

To determine which items are most likely to be stolen, Amazon stores the product catalog data in S3, which ends up having more than 50 million updates a week. The team spins up Amazon compute clusters every 30 minutes, crunch the data, and the data is fed back to the warehouse and website. At the center of the service is the new Elastic Map Reduce, a new hosted Hadoop framework running on AWS that lets customers spin up the equivalent of a supercomputer for processing big data.

Alexander Interactive, a leading New York-based e-commerce consultancy has released  a new report on Tablet-commerce which provides best practices for tablet-based UX design and t-commerce review of the ten largest retailers on the web.

The report goes into depth on how the top-selling sites on the internet (including Amazon, Staples, Apple, Dell, Wall Mart and Sears, among others) are adapting to a tablet-based future.  The analysis found that all of the top e-retailers suffered from usability problems and offered limited tablet shopping experiences in comparison to those retailers with dedicated tablet site experiences, such as Nike. Accordingly, the authors suggest that retailers seriously evaluate their investments for T-commerce web infrastructure, due to the explosion of tablet computer usage forecast in the coming years.

You can download the comprehensive report here.

Keep an eye on Clare Rayner’s blog as she introduces the 10 steps to retail success over the next few weeks. The 10 steps are as below:

10-steps to retail success…

1. Your personal and business goals, your business mission
2. Your business positioning
3. Your ideal customer
4. Your product strategy and range planning
5. Your pricing and promotional strategy
6. Your channel and location strategy
7. Your customer engagement strategy
8. Your sourcing and supply chain strategy
9. How you plan and control your business
10. Your back office functions – taking care of HR, Legal, Finance and IT