This Week In Retail: Finances, Delivery And IT

This week in retail, there has been news coming in from opposite sides of the spectrum. We saw a huge surge in bitcoin’s value, expansions in speedy home deliveries, Amazon’s increasing presence and Gartner’s research on increasing global IT spend.

Bitcoin’s year has seen its fair share of ups and downs in value. In addition to this, other cryptocurrencies have popped up, and recently there was a hard fork with the development of Bitcoin Cash. Over this past weekend, however, bitcoin surged far ahead to its highest value to date.

Target and discount grocery chain ALDI have boosted up delivery and logistics efforts, which may be in response to other eCommerce companies offering speedy deliveries as a competitive edge. To help with this, Target has acquired transportation and logistics technology company Grand Junction and ALDI has partnered up with Instacart in key larger markets.

Amazon is moving ahead at full steam by boosting digital sales and adding on more instant pickup kiosks around the country.

Gartner’s latest research is showing that security IT has no signs of slowing down. As more and more businesses go online, the chance for a cyberattack also heightens, which results undoubtedly in increased spending to help secure information and sensitive data.

Here are the numbers:

$86.4 billion | Amount Gartner predicts information and IT security services will be in 2017

$3.4 billion | Amount ALDI plans to invest to increase its U.S. presence

$4,135 | Amount bitcoin price surged to this weekend

700 | Number of Grand Junction delivery carriers now available to Target

11.5 percent | Amount of increased year-over-year sales for non-store merchants (i.e. Amazon’s retail category)