Read this:

Wal-Mart Stores, struggling to translate its brick-and-mortar success to the Web, is using free software named after a stuffed elephant to help it gain an edge on Amazon.com in the $165.4 billion U.S. e-commerce market.

With its online sales less than a fifth of Amazon’s last year, Wal-Mart executives have turned to software called Hadoop that helps businesses quickly and cheaply sift through terabytes or even petabytes of Twitter posts, Facebook updates, and other so-called unstructured data. Hadoop, which is customizable and available free online, was created to analyze raw information better than traditional databases like those from Oracle.

“When the amount of data in the world increases at an exponential rate, analyzing that data and producing intelligence from it becomes very important,” says Anand Rajaraman, senior vice-president of global e-commerce at Wal-Mart and head of @WalmartLabs, the retailer’s division charged with improving its use of the Web.

And then read this story from yesterday:

Wal-Mart Expects Flat U.S. Sales This Quarter

Delayed tax refunds in large part contributed to the slow start of the fiscal year, Wal-Mart U.S. Chief Executive Bill Simon said. At this time last year, Wal-Mart had cashed $3 billion in tax-refund and refund-anticipation checks, he said. It has cashed just $1.7 billion this year.

Some of that tax money is typically spent around Super Bowl time for television sets. Now, the retailer doesn't know how the money will be spent, Mr. Simon said.

Isn’t that a classic problem to be solved using Big Data. I would have thought that with as easy problem statements as “What did our customers do when their tax refunds were delayed?” or “what did they do when they did not buy TVs around Super Bowl”, and with history as old as Walmart’s, it would be easy to figure out customer behavior.

Apparently it’s not.

Or is there more than what meets the eye?

In a big move, the Indian government on Friday cleared the proposal to allow up to 51% Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail. The government has allowed the FDI on the condition that states will be allowed to decide whether they want to opt for it.

In another big move, Indian government also permitted FDI, up to 100%, in single brand product retail trading, subject to specified conditions primary one being for FDI proposals beyond 51% in single brand retail, 30% sourcing from 'Small Industries' has been made mandatory.

India Backs Foreign Investment in Retail Sector

After years of intense debate, India’s government agreed on Friday to open the country’s retail sector to global behemoths like Wal-Mart and Ikea, pushing for a profound shift in India’s economic and political direction.

India is still mostly a nation of small shopkeepers and farmers, and its economy is heavily controlled by the government, a legacy from decades of socialist policies. But a sharp slowdown in economic growth and a sense of impending political collapse prompted the government to finally act on long-pending proposals to loosen market restrictions in hopes of luring more foreign investment and expertise.

“The time for big-bang reforms has come,” the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said, “and if we go down, we will go down fighting.”

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of coverage on how Retailers are using Big Data. Wal-mart with its recent acquisition of Kosmix is one Retailer which  is in the forefront of this wave. Here is a collection of articles which discusses how Wal-mart is using Big Data.

How Walmart plans to use Big Data

Kosmix stands out for its ability to search and analyze connections in real-time data streams to deliver highly personalized insights to users. The platform powers TweetBeat, a real-time social media filter for live events. By using this intelligence, Kosmix is building a giant knowledge base called the‘Social Genome.’ This giant knowledge base captures information and relationships about entities such as people, events, topics, products, locations and organizations.

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By analyzing their social media activity, Social Genome can make recommendations about products, events or any other activity that the user is interested in. For example, by using publically available social media data, the Walmart product store can suggest product recommendations, based on recent tweets or Facebook wall posts.

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While the idea sounds great, doing this in reality is a huge problem — especially since there are thousands of data pieces flowing in a torrent from live data sources such as tweets, Facebook posts and blogs. The data flow was so fast that Kosmix could not rely on the traditional Map-Reduce or Hadoop framework that is typically used to solve Big Data problems.

“Social Media data is the fastest growing source of Big Data today. In addition to being Big Data, social media data such as Twitter also has a real-time nature — it’s not just Big Data, but also Fast Data. With mobile devices, location data is now a new source of both Big and Fast data,” explains Rajaraman, on the technical challenges faced by his firm while building the platform.

To address this Big Data and Fast Data problem, Kosmix developed its own in-house solution called Muppet, which processes streaming fast data in a lightening fashion, over large clusters of machines. Today, Muppet can manage and track data streams with billions of updates a day.

Getting a Handle on Big Data with Hadoop

Wal-Mart Stores, struggling to translate its brick-and-mortar success to the Web, is using free software named after a stuffed elephant to help it gain an edge on Amazon.com in the $165.4 billion U.S. e-commerce market.

As customers flock to social media, Wal-Mart expects sites such as Facebook and Twitter to play a bigger role in online shopping. By analyzing what social network users say about products on those sites, the world’s largest retailer aims to glean insights into what consumers want.

With its online sales less than a fifth of Amazon’s last year, Wal-Mart executives have turned to software called Hadoop that helps businesses quickly and cheaply sift through terabytes or even petabytes of Twitter posts, Facebook updates, and other so-called unstructured data. Hadoop, which is customizable and available free online, was created to analyze raw information better than traditional databases like those from Oracle.

“When the amount of data in the world increases at an exponential rate, analyzing that data and producing intelligence from it becomes very important,” says Anand Rajaraman, senior vice-president of global e-commerce at Wal-Mart and head of @WalmartLabs, the retailer’s division charged with improving its use of the Web.

Big data and the disruption curve

Big data projects are aimed at revenue growth, many efforts are being funded by business units and not the IT department and money is increasingly being diverted from large enterprise vendors.

Wal-Mart has opened two shops in California malls which will test the concept of showcasing online merchandize. When shoppers visit these stores, they can Shoppers sit down with a laptop and shop a vast array of products on the chain's website.

Walmart.com test stores hint at Web shopping fight

Two tiny Walmart.com stores are making Southern California malls their home for the holidays, launching the latest salvo in the war for online retail dominance.

The temporary stores are a first for Wal-Mart Stores Inc, which experiments with store concepts in various markets hoping they will drive shoppers to its website.

The world's biggest retailer already operates stores within miles of the temporary Walmart.com locations, where shoppers can purchase items from the shelves or sit down with a laptop and shop a vast array of products on the chain's website.

Change in E-Commerce Strategy for Wal-Mart??

Wal-Mart Loses Two Top Executives

Two top executives announced today that they are leaving Walmart (WMT).

Eduardo Castro-Wright, the CEO of Global E-Commerce and Global Sourcing and the former CEO of Walmart Mexico, said he is retiring on July 1, 2012. Wan Ling Martello, EVP of Global E-Commerce for Emerging Markets, he will also be leaving on April 1, 2012.

Amazon is now the most-valuable retail brand in the world, according to Millward Brown's 2011 BrandZ study of the most-valuable global brands. Amazon edged out Walmart to attain this feat.

Amazon edged out Walmart as the most-valuable retail brand by Millward Brown's accounting, with its brand value rising 37% to $37.6 billion as Walmart's fell 5% to $37.3 billion. Walmart parent Wal-Mart Stores still has more than 10 times the sales and more than five times the market capitalization of Amazon. But BrandZ's calculation subtracts tangible assets from market value to help estimate brand value. Amazon, with no physical stores, fares well in that process. The Walmart brand value also doesn't include Sam's Club or other overseas affiliates with different brand names owned by Wal-Mart Stores.

Even so, Amazon's rise, combined with declines in brand value not only for Walmart but also for other top global retailers Tesco and Carrefour last year, marks the shift toward e-commerce.

"Amazon benefits incredibly by having user reviews integrated into its site," said Eileen Campbell, global CEO of Millward Brown. "Everybody does that now, but Amazon was the first, so it's done an incredibly good job of building trust."

Stark Reality check for Indian Mom & Pop (called Kirana) stores.

Why Indian grocers' biggest worry isn't the Walmarts

The problem of traditional retail is not competition. The challenges lie at home, within their business model. Though footfalls and phone calls haven't lessened much, profitability of mom-and-pop stores is hit by rising operating costs. They pay higher rent and wages but profit margins on various products have either shrunk or remain stable.
Hoping for a surge in sales is unrealistic. Mom-and-pops target customers close to their location. This number is largely stable over five to ten years. Limited by capital, few can offer an exclusive deal or inventory that compels customers to drive long distances to shop at their store.

WSJ is reporting that Wal-Mart is planning to sell large appliances as a part of a pilot program in its stores in Texas this year. Long time ago, well in 2000, I was part of a program where we developed Interactive Kiosk based solution for GE appliances to be sold in Wal-Mart. This looks like exact same thing, maybe this time without a kiosk.

Wal-Mart Explores Selling Large Appliances

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. may begin adding large appliances such as stoves and dishwashers to stores in Texas this year as part of a pilot program that could lead to a nationwide launch.

The retailer is looking at a program selling appliances from General Electric Co. and could roll out to more than 100 stores initially, according to analysts and consultants familiar with the retailer's plans.

Last month, Wal-Mart's U.S. chief Bill Simon, speaking at an industry conference, said the company is "looking at everything including appliances right now." Mr. Simon didn't provide specifics about the scope other than saying: "If it's something that we believe there is customer demand for and an opportunity to make some money, we're going to get into it in a big way."

A Wal-Mart spokesperson declined to provide details. A GE spokesman didn't respond to a request for comment.

Wal-Mart, Target, Sears et al are lobbying legislators to change sales-tax laws in more than a dozen states including Texas and California that will force Internet Retailers to collect Sales Taxes from companies like Amazon. 

Retailers Push Amazon on Taxes

The big-box stores are backing a coalition called the Alliance for Main Street Fairness, which is leading efforts to change sales-tax laws in more than a dozen states including Texas and California.

Until now, the group has been largely associated with mom-and-pop stores, spotlighting stories of small toy shops and booksellers who argue Internet merchants that aren't legally required to collect sales taxes enjoy an unfair advantage with shoppers.

Amazon has feverishly fought efforts to compel it to collect sales taxes. The Seattle-based online retailer says it complies with the law. Under a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, only merchants who have a physical presence, such as stores, in a state have to collect sales taxes. Amazon currently gathers those taxes in just five states: Kansas, Kentucky, North Dakota, its home base of Washington, and New York.

But retailers pushed for passage of a new law in Illinois last week that forces Amazon to collect sales taxes if it employs marketing affiliates in the state—a measure similar to a New York law that retailers want to replicate nationally—and their drumbeat may soon spur federal action.

Wal-Mart does make the cut in Nice lists sometime. Just in time for the holidays, Consumer Reports has released a list of 10 companies that it believes have been naughty to shoppers, and 10 that have been nice. The list is not derived from any exhaustive Consumer Reports study or survey. Rather, it’s based on input from Consumer Reports in-house reporters and editors, who cover shopping, travel, hospitality, telecommunications, and other franchise areas.

Consumer Reports notes that the Naughty & Nice Holiday List is not an exhaustive list and that just because the list mention a particular policy doesn’t mean Consumer Reports endorse—or dislike—everything else about that company or the way it does business.

Retailers in the Nice List:

2 L.L.Bean. 100 percent product satisfaction guarantee. Return anything at any time for any reason.

3 Zappos.com. Free shipping and free returns, including prepaid return label.

4 Costco. Open-ended return policy for virtually everything the warehouse retailer sells minus some home electronics, which come with a still-generous 90-day return period.

6 Orvis. For customer service the old-fashioned way, shoppers can call a toll-free number and speak to a human being without wading through an arcane automated menu system. Alternatively, Orvis offers live-chat with support staff, e-mail queries, and a guaranteed response time of two hours or less.

8 J&R. The electronics superstore and e-retailer has a straightforward price-match policy without the many caveats and fine-print exclusions of some other merchants: Find it at a lower price at an authorized seller (the exception being a warehouse membership club) and “we will do everything possible to meet or beat that price” via a special telephone hotline. J&R also gives customers 30 days to ask for a price adjustment on existing orders if they unearth a lower price.

9 Walmart. No receipt, no problem. Customers can return most items to a Walmart store for a cash refund (for purchases under $25), a gift card (for purchases over $25), or even exchange. There’s one catch: More than three such returns within 45 days requires a manager’s approval.

10 Publix. It’s no fun being sick, but if you need an antibiotic, the Florida-based supermarket chain will have its pharmacies dispense up to a 14-day supply for some of the most common generic ones free. All you need is a proper prescription.

Retailers in the Naughty List:

1 Buy.com. No returns for “oversize” TV sets, defined as any model 27 inches or larger. If you fail to inspect set upon delivery and sign shipper’s release, Buy.com says it’s your problem and go deal with the manufacturer. Its website also lacks a phone number for customer contact.

2 CompUSA. For imposing unusually punitive restocking fees of “up to 25 percent” of the purchase price on any product the retailer decides doesn’t meet its return criteria. Nowhere is it spelled out which specific products are subject to such a fee.

3 Best Buy. Offers a 14-day grace period to return computers, monitors, camcorders, and digital cameras.

8 Macy’s. Proving that high shipping fees are not necessarily a thing of the past, the department store chain calculates its freight charges on the dollar amount of the order, not the size and weight of the package. The base fee is $5.95 for orders under $25, to as much as $23.95 for those $300 or more. And that’s standard delivery.

What do you think of these practices?

Wal-Mart is offering free shipping with no minimum purchase this holiday season.

For years, Wal-Mart has used its clout as the nation’s largest retailer to squeeze competitors with rock-bottom prices in its stores. Now it is trying to throw a holiday knockout punch online.

Starting Thursday, Wal-Mart Stores plans to offer free shipping on its Web site, with no minimum purchase, on almost 60,000 gift items, including many toys and electronics. The offer will run through Dec. 20, when Wal-Mart said it might consider other free-shipping deals.

The move will definitely impact small retailers who with small number of warehouses will not be able to reduce transport costs and will take a hit on their margins if they were to match Wal-Mart’s move.

But given Wal-Mart’s scale and influence in the marketplace, its free pass for shipping sets a new high — or low — in e-commerce. And it may create an expectation among consumers — free shipping, no minimum, always — that would make it harder for smaller e-commerce sites to survive.

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For smaller retailers and Web sites, which pay regular mail rates and may ship from only one location, free shipping is not nearly as affordable and often must be added into prices.

“You’re trying to compete with the Amazons and the Zappos, who have so many different warehouses that they can significantly reduce transport costs,” said Gary Schwake, director of business development at the Distribution Management Group, a consulting firm that advises retailers like Eddie Bauer.

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Retailers say that shoppers have already started to revolt against shipping fees. While consumers are sensitive to what an item costs online, shipping costs can have even more influence, according to market research.

Silly name, silly company, silly product?

The trickiest situation comes when companies cannot themselves decide what they are called. The retailer which used to be called J. Sainsbury now seems to have dropped the full-stop and calls itself J Sainsbury in many parts of its corporate website. But not on its supermarkets: they now have “Sainsbury’s” written over the door. Even some press releases talk as if Sainsbury’s were the company’s official name. Likewise, America’s biggest retailer regularly calls itself both Walmart and Wal-Mart in the space of the same press release. The company seems to have been in some sort of transition from one spelling to the other for ages now. Meanwhile, the name over its stores is WAL*MART.

Keynote Competitive Research, the global leader in solutions for continuously improving the Internet and mobile experience, has announced the first ever smartphone mobile commerce index. Walmart's mobile site led the Index for the week of September 13 with a perfect score of 1,000 points, an average load time of 3.18 seconds and an availability of 99.37 percent. Internet Retailer, the leading e-retailing magazine, is featuring the new weekly Index on its site under an exclusive arrangement with Keynote. Click here and select Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index to see complete results for all 15 merchants.

From the Press Release:

The Keynote Mobile Commerce Index is a weekly performance ranking of leading and up-and-coming US retail mobile Web sites being accessed using popular wireless device profiles, including the Apple iPhone.

Internet Retailer, the leading e-retailing magazine, is featuring the new weekly Index on its site under an exclusive arrangement with Keynote. The new mobile commerce Index is important as it underscores the critical issue of mobile site performance and establishes, for the first time, and in a very public way, performance benchmarks across a representative sampling of large -- and some not-so-large, but growing in popularity -- mobile Web sites. Walmart's mobile site led the Index for the week of September 13 with a perfect score of 1,000 points, an average load time of 3.18 seconds and an availability of 99.37 percent.

The Index shows the average response times and success rates for downloading the homepage of selected mobile commerce sites on popular smartphones using Keynote's commercially available mobile performance monitoring solution, Mobile Application Perspective. The response times and success rates are then combined to provide an overall score. The m-commerce sites that appear in the Index were selected to provide a benchmark for companies to compare their mobile site performance against a representative sampling of e-retailers.

Wow, this really is Hi-Tech. Analysts are using Satellite photographs of Parking lots and derive market moving data using that. UBS Analysts have used this method for the retailer, Wal-Mart.

As part of a growing trend among hedge funds and Wall Street firms, Cold War-style satellite surveillance is being used to gather market-moving information.

As an example of how Wall Street getting in on this techhology, the UBS Investment Research issued its earnings preview for Wal-Mart'ssecond quarter, which publicly revealed that UBS had been using used satellite services of private-sector satellite companies to gather the comings and goings of the parking lots at Wal-Mart stores. “UBS proprietary satellite parking lot fill rate analysis points to an interesting cadence intra-quarter and potential upside to our view,” the report read.

UBS analyst Neil Currie had been looking at satellite data on Wal-Mart during each month of 2010, and he’d concluded that there was enough correlation between what he was seeing in the satellite pictures of Wal-Mart’s parking lots to the big-box chain’s quarterly earnings, that he was ready to incorporate that data into UBS’ report on Wal-Mart..

Charles Darwin once said, “In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.”. Walmart is doing just the same in India. It is going out of it’s shell and adapting new measures to first survive and then probably one day thrive against all odds. The odds include Indian Government’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) policy restricting Walmart to act as a wholesaler only, low efficiency/dependability of suppliers, expectation of free credit by the small time vendors (who are essential to Walmart’s growth given the restriction to act as Wholesaler). To counter these odds, Walmart’s India Angle includes the following measures:

• Inventory levels are kept high because suppliers are less reliable
• Goods are delivered to the buyer’s doorstep
• Regional focus: All suppliers in the same state as the stores
• Collaborative farming, on verbal commitments
• Free credit to buyers through credit cards

Read more. It happens only in India.

A newly released study by Kantar Retail and BrandZ examines the most valuable global retail brands and reveals critical success requirements for retailers and suppliers to thrive in the new retail environment. The Top 20 Most Valuable Global Retail Brands report combines retailer and shopper insights and analyses from Kantar Retail with the definitive Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking produced annually by Millward Brown Optimor and powered by the BrandZ database. Walmart tops the list followed by Amazon, Tesco, Carrefour and Target.

Download Report

WSJ.com is reporting that Wal-Mart is offering businesses low-priced drugs if they sign up to buy directly from Wal-Mart's network of in-store pharmacies, rather than contracting to buy drugs through third parties known as pharmacy-benefit managers. This will heat up competition for other Pharmacies and Retailers by increasing footfall to Wal-Mart stores. And you all know what happens when you visit a store like Wal-Mart, you tend to buy lot more than what you go in for.

Apparently the Pilot companies have already seen benefit from buying directly from Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart began a trial of its program in September with heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar Co., which provides prescription coverage for 70,000 employees and their dependents. Wal-Mart negotiated a fixed markup over its cost for the drugs it sells to Caterpillar's employees under the heavy-equipment maker's in-house insurance. Though Wal-Mart doesn't reveal the costs to Caterpillar, they are verified by a third party. The markup guarantees a profit for Wal-Mart, while reducing the cost to Caterpillar.Todd Bisping, who manages Caterpillar's drug-benefits program, said the company was able to reduce its drug costs enough that it waived copayments on generic prescriptions bought from Wal-Mart.

Thought provoking article by StorefrontBackTalk on P&G’s decision to pull back from Wal-Mart RFID Trial. Key takeaway, The test failed and not the technology.

P&G’s Decision To Pull Back From Wal-Mart RFID Trial Quite Understandable

Say what you will about RFID, but it is the picture-perfect companion for hyperbole. Any development is either instant death for RFID or the magic trend that will make item-level RFID universal by late Friday morning.

It’s therefore not surprising that so much has been made of the decision by Procter & Gamble (P&G) to abandon its tagged promotional displays at Wal-Mart. On the one hand, this can be seen as a setback for such tagging projects. P&G touted the effectiveness of its display tagging project often.

Given P&G’s reputation for ROI worship, many assumed the company pulled the plug because RFID was failing the test.

What is closer to the truth is that the test failed, not the technology. And to the extent that Wal-Mart was as much a player in this trial as P&G, it could also be said that the test didn’t fail, the tester did.

NYTimes.com has a thought provoking article on death by trampling of a temporary worker at Wal-Mart on the day of Black Friday. The article points out on how Retailers and Media are equal to blame for the death.

The willingness of people to walk over another human being to get at the right price tag raises the question of how they got that way in the first place. But in the search for the usual suspects and parceling of blame, the news media should include themselves.

Just a few days ago, the same newspaper writers and television anchors who are now wearily shaking their heads at the collective bankruptcy of our mass consumer culture were cheering all of it on.

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Media and retail outfits are economic peas in a pod. Part of the reason that the Thanksgiving newspaper and local morning television show are stuffed with soft features about shopping frenzies is that they are stuffed in return with ads from retailers.

“Media outlets have been stride for stride with the retailers,” said Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst for the NPD Group, a market research firm. Speaking on the phone on Friday evening after nearly 24 hours of working the malls, he suggested, “Something like this was bound to happen at some point. The man who died at Wal-Mart was, from what I understand, a temporary employee and had no idea what he was dealing with.”

What do you think of this? Are Retailers to blame for this debacle or Media for driving the madness.

Wal-Mart showing it’s eco-conscious face, gives customers the ability to trace the path of their Love, Earth jewelry from mine to store.

Wal-Mart praised for ethical gold service

US retail giant Wal-Mart's new ethical gold initiative has been hailed by green campaigners.
Customers can track down the mine where the gold for their Wal-Mart Love Earth jewelry was sourced by entering a product code online, according to website Ethical Corporation.
They can also discover where their bracelets, rings and earrings were refined, polished and set, the site added.
It is hoped that the measure will reassure customers about the credibility of the chain's environmental standards.
Wal-Mart aims to have ten per cent of all its jewelry traceable in this manner by 2010 and wants all of its mines and manufacturers to meet sustainability criteria, the news provider noted.
Ethical gold has become a popular choice for couples having environmentally-friendly weddings, according to the Press and Journal.

If you want to trace the gold in your piece of jewelry purchased at Wal-Mart, head out here: www.loveearthinfo.com.