Retail

Is it time to shelve same store sales metrics?

Commerce is changing at a record pace. So shouldn’t the metrics be changing commensurately? Wall Street may love looking at same store sales to determine success, but as customers do their shopping through different channels, the entire model of tracking same store YoY for just one channel is starting to seem a bit inaccurate, if not downright wrong. Let’s examine the current landscape. Three large trends dominate the retail industry: Large, established retailers continue to languish in a ballooning middle, where they face ongoing struggles and possible extinction (Sears, Kmart and JC Penney are several examples). Retail store sales at physical locations are faltering Ecommerce is expanding and forcing out brick and mortar counterparts by grabbing larger market share. Yet even as these trends continue,…

Retail

Co-Browsing: Five Ways to Leverage this Trend with BI

We’ve all heard the news: e-commerce is going to be the downfall of the retail industry. And while online shopping is definitely going to be a major part of how people make purchases in the future, this doesn’t have to be the doomsday scenario you might be imagining. In fact, leveraging trends like co-browsing can actually be a way to increase your profits using habits that online shopping has created. To give you a brief breakdown of this term, co-browsing, or collaborative browsing, is when two people are navigating on a website simultaneously. Whether that be with a sales representative using a chat box, a voice or video call, or even screen sharing, co-browsing mixes the convenience of online shopping with the experience, and responsiveness,…