Reactions to Retailers using Technology to track Shopper movements in Stores. NYTimes writes:

Like dozens of other brick-and-mortar retailers, Nordstrom wanted to learn more about its customers — how many came through the doors, how many were repeat visitors — the kind of information that e-commerce sites like Amazon have in spades. So last fall the company started testing new technology that allowed it to track customers’ movements by following the Wi-Fi signals from their smartphones.

But when Nordstrom posted a sign telling customers it was tracking them, shoppers were unnerved.

“We did hear some complaints,” said Tara Darrow, a spokeswoman for the store. Nordstrom ended the experiment in May, she said, in part because of the comments.

Nordstrom’s experiment is part of a movement by retailers to gather data about in-store shoppers’ behavior and moods, using video surveillance and signals from their cellphones and apps to learn information as varied as their sex, how many minutes they spend in the candy aisle and how long they look at merchandise before buying it.

All sorts of retailers — including national chains, like Family Dollar, Cabela’s and Mothercare, a British company, and specialty stores like Benetton and Warby Parker — are testing these technologies and using them to decide on matters like changing store layouts and offering customized coupons.

It’s funny how we would give our location and get subscribed to alerts to apps from retailers like Amazon or search on Amazon for shoes and get hounded by similar ads from any site you visit for next one week, but we find it highly intrusive when the same thing is done in the physical world. This is the kind of disadvantage offline retailers reel under.

2012 Future of Food Retailing Report (Needs registration)

With the U.S. economy experiencing slow growth, persistent unemployment, and stagnant household incomes, consumers are moving toward extremes. Cost-conscious shoppers continue to seek extreme value and acceptable quality or better at low prices. Other shoppers less affected by the downturn have returned to upper-tier food retailers. Retailers who cater to the middle are finding their positions more challenging to maintain.  With the most recent bout of food inflation seeming to moderate, the pressure on their sales and profits is likely to continue.

This year’s edition of The Future of Food Retailing Report highlights market share figures for grocery and consumables by store format, illustrates which formats are thriving and look to continue growth in today’s challenging economy, and forecasts how these key formats will perform over the next five years, i.e., by 2016.

PODCAST: John Orr, Trends in Human Capital Management for Retailers

On this two-part podcast, we talked about trends in human capital management and what retailers need as it relates to human capital management.

On part one of the podcast, we focused on compliance among labor laws and visibility of the business. On part two, we addressed the need for speed as a big trend in retailer human capital management.

Retailers are under attack from many angles. There is scarce talent, they’re in a high turnover industry, they’re being legislated left and right, whether it’s gift card legislation in NJ, or California labor laws and class-action lawsuits. We discussed the challenges retailers face navigating through this landscape.

Concerning the challenge of visibility, more and more retailers are expressing the need for better visibility at the store level and above store. Legacy applications, however, have fallen very short in giving retailers access to the information they need. Most retailers are fraught with manual processes, inefficiencies and spreadsheets. The reporting from these systems is not timely enough for the executives to be proactive and make the decisions they need to do on a day-to-day basis. Retailers need solutions that provide intuitive real-time information, and should not be held hostage to legacy systems and interfaces and processes.

How deep are your pockets?

The internet, by allowing anonymous browsing and rapid price-comparing, was supposed to mean low, and equal, prices for all. Now, however, online retailers are being offered software that helps them detect shoppers who can afford to pay more or are in a hurry to buy, so as to present pricier options to them or simply charge more for the same stuff.

Technology Grows in Importance for Retailers, New CompTIA Research Study Reveals

Seventy-two percent of retailers surveyed rate technology as important to their business, CompTIA’s Retail Sector Technology Adoption Trends Study reveals. That figure is projected to increase to 83 percent by 2014.

A net 63 percent of retailers expect to increase IT spending in 2012 with the remaining 37 percent planning to cut back or hold the line. Large retailers expect to boost IT spending the most – 4.8 percent, on average. For all firms, the planned average increase is 4.2 percent.

Competing With Amazon on Amazon

Thousands of small merchants depend on Amazon.com Inc. to reach customers who otherwise wouldn't know they exist. A few of them complain, though, that Amazon sometimes eats their lunch.

According to some small retailers, the Seattle-based giant appears to be increasingly using its Marketplace—where third-party retailers sell their wares on the Amazon.com site—as a vast laboratory to spot new products to sell, test sales of potential new goods, and exert more control over pricing.

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.

Amazon set to launch services in India next year

World's largest online retailer, Amazon.com is set to enter India, riding on the second wave of ecommerce boom in India. Amazon is in discussions with leading Indian e-commerce players like Flipkart.com, LetsBuy.com and Exclusively.in, among others and may enter the market as early as the first quarter of next year.

Retailers Fear Becoming Amazon’s ‘Showroom’

A growing number of consumers had taken to going to Best Buy to test consumer electronics and then going online to get them at a cheaper price. As Greg Melich of ISI Group and others have pointed out before and since then, Best Buy appears to be in danger of turning into Amazon’s “showroom.”

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."

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.

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

Amazon.com has launched Windowshop.com which enhances the shopper’s experience. The site provides a unique view by encouraging users to use the arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate the site. Shoppers can scroll through the items and zoom in which plays either video or audio related to the product. I found the site very appealing and fast and easy to use.