It’s no secret the holiday season is a key sales period for retail, travel, and many other industries, so much so that these sales can make or break a business, large or small. With high inflation and fears of consumers pulling back, there are a lot of unknowns this year. To that end, Commerce Signals has produced a Holiday Spending Forecast to help companies with scenario planning. They do this through permissioned and anonymized view of consumer spending that includes both Visa and Mastercard, credit and debit for 40 million …
Looking Back: A Great Holiday Season for Consumer Spending
The numbers are in, and 2021 consumer holiday spending did not disappoint. In fact, 2021 holiday sales knocked many analysts’ projections out of the water. U.S. consumer spending on credit and debit cards from the week of Thanksgiving through the week of Christmas 2021 was up a mammoth 22 percent according to Commerce Signals Consumer Spend Tracker. As to be expected, some sectors did better than others. The categories that saw skyrocketing sales during the 2021 holiday season were those that customers missed out on the most during …
Looking Back: A Great Holiday Season for Consumer SpendingRead More
Looking at the Secrets of Victoria’s Secret Shoppers
A few weeks ago, we published a post on our blog at CheckoutTracking.com about the loyalty of Victoria’s Secret shoppers. Understandably, it generated a fair amount of attention...and an even greater amount of envy. Here’s why: Our data shows that in a world where apparel manufacturers struggle to win millennials, Victoria’s Secret has already done so. While other well-established brick-and-mortar retailers struggle to sell online, Victoria’s Secret has turned into a digital powerhouse. In an era in which fickle shoppers have made …
Looking at the Secrets of Victoria’s Secret ShoppersRead More
Understanding Omnichannel Shoppers Through Receipt Mining
Back in the day—and we mean the mythical, halcyon days of small-town America— shopkeepers were among the core, central figures in a community. Their prestige came from their well-recognized knowledge of the truths surrounding any given family. The shopkeeper knew who was short of cash, who ran late on their “layaway” plans, who scrimped and who squandered. A successful shopkeeper did two things. First, he held his tongue. No one would trust a man who spread family secrets across town. If you were low on money and it was time to feed the …
Understanding Omnichannel Shoppers Through Receipt MiningRead More
Meet the Millennials
Multi-Faceted, But Not Beyond Understanding Retailers need to tune into the 18-to-30 crowd that comprises almost a third of all Americans – a bigger population segment than Baby Boomers. The Millennial generation numbered 79 million in 2011, with an outlook to stay at 78 million by 2030. Meanwhile, Baby Boomers will be retracting from their current 76 million to 56 million by 2030. This enormous segment of the population tends to make more transactions, but spend less per transaction. They have discretionary income and are willing to spend it… …
Not Too Big to Fail?
Consumer Insights From MasterCard Advisors The Emergence of the Small Store Format We’ve heard much talk about the waning era of the “big box.” In 2012, we saw many headlines relating to planned store closures by Best Buy, with similar stories for Sears and Office Depot, among others. More recently, of course, J.C. Penney made mega headlines. In all, from the announcements of just five Big Box retailers, anything from 1100 to 1350 big boxes could be shuttered over the next year or so. Maybe this is not necessarily a bad thing. In some …
Getting a Return on Post-Holiday Returns
As a merchant, you’ve watched holiday shopping seasons come and go, and you’re well aware that in the last few years, consumer spending behavior has been through radical changes. It’s been a slow recovery since the precipitous drop in holiday spending in 2008. The excessive pre-holiday stocking of inventory and concomitant mad spending seem to be bygones. Savvy retailer that you are, you’ve become very smart at balancing inventory with sales, and you’ve planned inventory very carefully this season. You’ve made well-informed estimates of …
Multichannel Breakthrough: Segmentation Powers Insights into the Empowered Shopper
As with all new approaches, the best innovations in the digital marketplace occur not as a result of reinventing the wheel, but by integrating and retooling existing assets. Things become truly exciting for the merchant in the combination of insights derived from spending behavior with insights derived from transaction analysis—in time as well as virtual space. By including the insights from real-time transaction data, behavioral models of different segments of e-shoppers can help to extrapolate that a device that has clicked on these specific …
Multichannel Breakthrough: Segmentation Powers Insights into the Empowered ShopperRead More