Pricing

With very few other retailers offering layaway programs, Kmart has a point of difference in the market. Now, the retailer is looking to draw even further attention to that difference and bring in new customers by promoting a 5 percent discount on layaway purchases made for back-to-school. To qualify for the discount, Kmart customers put down $15 or 10 percent of the purchase amount, whichever is greater, and pay a $5 fee. The offer is good until August 18. The program is also available to online shoppers.

Following in the footsteps of Target's and American Eagle's nationwide rollouts, Macy’s announced Wednesday it would begin offering shopkick rewards at its more than 800 stores. Using shopkick's app for iPhone or Android devices, shoppers can collect points, or "kicks," by visiting and performing certain tasks in Macy's stores. They can then exchange their kicks for Macy's-specific rewards like gift cards, as well as for more general rewards, including song downloads, restaurant certificates, movie tickets, Facebook Credits, charity donations, etc.

OneStopPlus.com, a division of Redcats USA and the world's first and only online shopping mall for plus-size women, announced today the launch of OSPFlash, a limited-time sale destination offering consumers deep discounts on designer merchandise. For the first time, designer brands that are typically excluded from promotions, discounts and coupons will now be participating in the site's latest venture, giving consumers access to some of their favorite brands at discounted prices. The offers will be accessible via the OneStopPlus.com homepage and will be available for 48 hours every Tuesday beginning at 9:00 a.m. 

It's every seller's nightmare: a glitch that results in products being listed — and sold — for a penny instead of their regular price. It happened for about 15 minutes on Tuesday to some Amazon.com sellers, but the third-party vendor whose clients were affected said it's making good. Appeagle was pushing an update to Amazon in order to conform to the marketplace's new requirements for repricing software when it noticed a problem in one line of code. 

PriceGrabber released results from its 2012 Back-to-School Shopping Forecast survey, showing more signs of economic recovery. The survey revealed that 63 percent of consumers plan to spend up to $500 this back-to-school shopping season (compared to 48 percent in 2011). Twenty percent of respondents plan to spend between $500 and $1,000, and 17 percent of shoppers said they don't have a back-to-school shopping budget this year.

Blame it on poor performance data or short attention spans, but the daily deal space has lost the attention of many in the media and research community. Forrester, for one, recently projected minimal success for such sites. A new study funded by Rice University, however, portrays a strong sector with no signs slowing down.

When J.C. Penney announced its radical no-sale "Fair and Square" pricing strategy at the beginning of the year, comp-store numbers started tumbling soon thereafter. The retailer announced earlier last month that it would backtrack on the plan a bit, having concluded (correctly) that consumers like the word "sale." Then its top marketer abruptly resigned. There's speculation that CEO Ron Johnson will have to cave and return to incessant couponing and sale events. I hope not.

After 9/11, political leaders and commentators had a suggestion to boost American spirits and fuel patriotism: Go shopping. This Fourth of July, more Americans are doing the opposite: barbecuing instead of buying. A fifth of Americans (21 percent) said they don't plan to celebrate Independence Day and those who are plan to spend less than last year, according to a survey released Sunday of a little more than 1,000 people by Visa.

Zone pricing, the practice of selectively raising or lowering prices on products based on a variety of factors, is common in retail. Consumers, for the most part, understand there are differences based on factors such as real estate costs. People in the New York metropolitan area, for example, expect to pay more for a Big Mac in Manhattan than they would in the suburbs. But they are not likely to be as understanding if retailers are charging higher prices for goods or services based on criteria that is less clear. 

Toys"R"Us has enhanced its loyalty program with the launch of a new integrated, point-based system that delivers streamlined benefits for members, as well as new and existing "R"Us credit card holders. Rewards"R"Us members can now enjoy unlimited access to expanded loyalty benefits when shopping at Toys"R"Us and Babies"R"Us stores nationwide and online at Toysrus.com and Babiesrus.com. Toys"R"Us is also launching its new credit card program, including an "R"Us-branded credit card and a MasterCard co-branded card, issued by GE Capital Retail Bank, connecting cardholders with all the perks of Rewards"R"Us and more.