Armed with skeins of data and the gift of intuition, retail buyers are pretty successful at choosing the items that will move. But that’s not always the case — buyers have been known to place one too many re-orders, get stuck with a slow-moving item or face a product that’s not quite what they expected upon arrival.
That’s where Good360 comes in. “Instead of something going into a landfill or being sent out to a jobber, Good360 connects companies who have things to people who need things,” explains Carly Fiorina, the chair of Good360. Since its inception, the nonprofit has delivered more than $7 billion in product donations to some 34,000 charities, schools and libraries across the country and has been recognized by the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. read more »
Jack Dorsey may not be a household name, but if you are keeping tabs on the skyrocketing growth of the Square commerce experience or have ever Tweeted, you’re familiar with his handiwork. The 36-year-old innovator co-founded Twitter and developed Square in 2010. At the time, most weren’t sure what to make of the credit card reader that snaps into a smartphone, allowing anyone to accept credit cards anywhere, anytime.
Today, Square processes more than $10 billion in transactions annually and has signed up more than three million individuals and businesses — including more than 7,000 U.S. Starbucks locations. read more »
While most retailers are focused on extracting every bit of revenue from the current calendar year, industry analysts are already looking ahead to identify the trends that will take root, the technologies that will be judged “top priority” and other changes in store for the retail landscape in 2013.
What follows is a compendium of educated guesses and forecasts, and the editors at NRF Stores would like to think that most of them have value. Still, if we had to sum up our expectations for 2013 in one word, it would be “convergence” - tying together the web, Big Data, analytics, mobile, social and all things digital to deliver a seamless experience to shoppers. read more »
