Retail Stores

Consumers often turn to search engines when they begin their shopping research. Search engine results pages now include not only the organic and paid text ads, but also Product Listing Ads (PLAs) that can be a powerful way to engage consumers with pictures and prices of the products you sell. Smart retailers jumped on the PLA wagon early and they're already making tweaks — large and small — that help these ads work better for them. In the next two posts, I'll be sharing eight best practices that successful online retailers are using to power up their PLA results.

A typical mommy blogger who considers blogging her full-time job can average anywhere between 1,000 to 1,000,000-plus unique visitors to her site each month. This is in addition to the thousands of fans a mommy blogger can have on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social platforms she uses to spread messages about your products.

Eighty-five-year-old Chicagoan Martin Shafron, a self-described "computer illiterate," steps into the rotunda-like entrance of AT&T's flagship store in the city's high-end retail district known as the Magnificent Mile. Though Shafron doesn't realize it, he's also smack in the middle of a retail revolution showing off its gadgetry and pageantry from here to Beijing.
 

Michaels Stores uses Facebook (where it has 1.2 million fans and typically posts three times a day) to showcase do-it-yourself projects and craft tips and to publish product info, discounts, class announcements and store sales flyers. It also cross-promotes content from its other social platforms, like Pinterest, where it has a variety of boards, including Polka Dots and Sweets and Treats, aimed at inspiring creativity.

It was said more than once at this year's student program at the National Retail Federation's BIG Show that retail is one of the few places that your last name doesn't matter, where you grew up is almost irrelevant, you can start at any level or any position, and you can end up at the top. Two retailers on the 2013 Forbes list of the 100 Most Powerful Women — one new, one returning — are shining examples of this statement.

We're proud to bring you our annual list of the 100 fastest-growing cross-channel retailers for the 2011 to 2012 fiscal year. To compile the list, we researched 2012 fiscal year net sales figures for all the public retail companies in the U.S. and Canada. We then compared those numbers to the previous fiscal year's net sales. After we figured out the percentage change year-over-year, we ranked each company in descending order for our top 100. We've also included some profiles that highlight specific companies on the list.

Nickelodeon has opened a "Nick Shop" on the first level of the Toys"R"Us flagship in New York City's Times Square. The 1,000 square foot in-store is designed as an immersive Nickelodeon retail experience, with vibrant orange walls and columns covered with decor stencils of characters from Nickelodeon's hit animated series. Several interactive, touchscreen LED screens are placed throughout. The large digital displays create a unified canvas that showcases humorous and entertaining Nickelodeon content. When guests walk near the space, they can interact with and explore the content using their hands to swipe and tap the screens.

Sears Holdings, which also operates franchises your mom used to shop at like Kmart and Lands’ End, has been in a "death spiral" for some time now, a classic victim of disruption, first from big-box discounters like Wal-Mart and then from the web. Sears’ most recent and representative quarterly report last week showed declining margin rates, net losses of $279 million and a financial performance the company's CEO called "unacceptable."

Lands’ End celebrated 50 years in business last week. The chain, which got its start as a mail order operation in Chicago in 1963, gained fame, in part, because of its unconditional satisfaction guarantee and high levels of customer service that remain with the chain today under the ownership of Sears Holdings.

Along with in-memory data analytics and mobile applications, cloud computing was one of the key tech trends discussed at SAPPHIRE 2013, SAP's international customer conference, held in Orlando last week. Before the reader gets bleary-eyed, this has the potential to be very important stuff that may very well shape the way retail and CPG professionals at every level make business decisions in the future.