Beacon vendor ShopX is planning to give away a million beacons to U.S. retailers in hopes of grabbing a bigger share of the market for its software-as-a-service management platform. Why the big giveaway? “Beacons are going to get commoditized at some point anyway,” ShopX CEO...
Malls are not exactly the healthiest of shopping species in the U.S. Much has been written about rising vacancy rates and the changing consumer shopping patterns which doesn’t drive consumers to the malls the way they once did. At 8 percent, mall vacancies through 2014...
It turns out e-tailers aren’t going to consign real-world stores to the ash heap of history — at least not yet. Shoppers are increasingly returning to stores, according to online company executives at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich this week. While growth in...
A hedge fund with stakes in both Staples and Office Depot is ratcheting up pressure on the office-supply rivals to merge, Bloomberg News reported. The CEO of Starboard Value, Jeffrey C. Smith, sent a letter to Staples CEO Ronald Sargent on Tuesday (Jan. 20), demanding...
Whole Foods is set to open seven new stores in the Chicago area that will each include in-store dining options and bars, in hopes that will give adult customers more reasons to visit, the Chicago Tribune reported. The stores, which formerly belonged to the now-defunct...
Toronto-based startup Rubikloud has raised $7 million to help retailers use a big-data approach to customer analytics, according to TechCrunch. The Series A funding round was led by TOM Group — a joint venture between Cheung Kong Holdings and Hutchison Whampoa — and Ule, the...
The outlook for the retail industry in 2015 looks bright, with lower gasoline prices and decreasing unemployment boding well for consumer spending, Kantar Retail is predicting. Kantar expects retail sales to rise 4.5 percent in 2015, a full percentage point stronger than 2014’s growth of...
Apple Pay has gone live at yet another regional grocery group. The 217 Lucky, Save Mart and FoodMaxx supermarkets in Northern California and Nevada now all officially support Apple’s mobile payment system, their corporate parent announced on Thursday (Jan. 15). The official rollout comes weeks...
Instacart, the grocery delivery startup that just reached a $2 billion valuation, has quietly shifted its business model. Originally it decided on the markup for the products it delivered, but now it largely leaves pricing to the grocers and charges them a fee for its...
