Over the last year, payment card security — or actually, the lack of payment card security — has been one of the top discussions among retailers and consumers. New payment technologies are coming forward such as Apple Pay and Point-to-Point encryption, but will those new payment technologies do the trick?

A recent study by ACI Worldwide and Aite Group titled, Global Consumers: Concerned And Willing To Engage In The Battle Against Fraud,  found retailers have little consumer trust when it comes to data security. Only 55% of survey respondents said they think the stores they frequent deploy security systems to prevent data breaches. And nearly one third of respondents (29%) said they don’t trust retailers to protect their personal and financial data from criminals.

Brick-and-mortar stores such as Walmart, Kmart, Target, Best Buy and Sears are opening their doors to the public on Thanksgiving Day, and consumers appear to be taking advantage of this recent trend. More than one fourth (27%) of people shopping during Thanksgiving weekend say they will shop at stores open on Thanksgiving Day, according to the SAS Holiday Shopping Styles Report.

The survey of more than 2,000 holiday consumers revealed that 40% of respondents will shop at retail locations on Black Friday, with an additional 14% still on the fence. The number increases for online purchases, with almost half (49%) of consumers saying they will shop online on Black Friday and 53% planning to shop online on Cyber Monday. In total, 57% say their primary shopping will take place in the store, while 42% will make the majority of their purchases online.

Only 16% of businesses believe they have a highly effective loyalty program, according to a recent survey conducted by the International Institute for Analytics (IIA) and commissioned by SAS.

More than half (56%) of respondents said they use a customer retention rate metric to measure loyalty program success, while 27% calculate customer lifetime value. Only 54% of organizations said they could calculate the revenue impact of their customer loyalty programs.

With 400 stores and growing, DSW is constantly challenged with providing the right selection of shoes for every shopper. Adding a series of smaller format stores to the mix has heightened the challenge.

“These [smaller format] stores are 8,000 to 12,000 square feet so the precision of the assortment has to be right,” said Linda Canada, SVP of Planning and Allocation of the shoe retailer. A typical DSW store is approximately 20,000 square feet, she explained.

As part of a new collaborative effort, SAS and 360pi are linking together their pricing intelligence and revenue optimization solutions to provide retailers with complete visibility into competitive pricing.

This is Part 1 of the Retail TouchPoints Retail Analytics feature, spotlighting how retailers can make better marketing decisions by using retail analytics. The two-part report also highlights current trends and challenges retailers are facing while collecting and analyzing customer data across digital and physical channels. Part 2 of the Retail Analytics feature will appear in the October 23 newsletter.

Today’s consumers are more hyper-connected and educated than ever before, causing retailers to scramble to deliver optimal marketing messages and offers based on the unique wants and needs of every shopper.

Merchants are struggling to implement cross-channel marketing campaigns that match customer demographics and psychographics ― largely because they are in the early stages of conquering Big Data. The sheer amount of customer information retailers must collect continues to rise as the amount of unstructured data collected via social networks and mobile increases exponentially.

Just a few years ago, Amazon only sold books, Apple sold computers, eBay connected buyers and sellers of used goods, Facebook didn’t exist, and Google was a search engine. Today these five Tech Titans ― with a combined market cap of more than one trillion dollars as of mid-August 2012 (see chart below) ― are competing head-to-head for the same customers and, in the process, are fueling thousands of new companies. As they continue to reshape the retail landscape, it’s no longer business as usual even for the industry’s most influential merchants.

Cognizant of this major inflection point, solution providers are developing powerful technology suites that can help all types of merchants compete more effectively in this new era of the tech titans.

A webinar conducted during August 2012, titled:  Retailing in the Tech Titans Era: What's Next from Amazon, Apple, eBay, Facebook, and Google,explored the influence of today’s tech titans on the retail arena. The session ― conducted by Lori Schafer, Executive Adviser for SAS Institute’s Retail Practice, and hosted by SkuLoop, a retail systems supplier ― looked at the growth strategies within the five companies, and how retailers can and are competing.