Retail & Ecommerce

BJ’s Wholesale Club is the latest retailer to launch a media network: At the same time, Instacart is adding more promotional capabilities to help drive sales among cost-conscious shoppers.

Ulta store traffic exceeded pre-pandemic levels in Q3: The milestone comes as the beauty retailer makes extensive changes to store layouts and reported strong quarterly sales growth.

If Cyber Five trends hint at what to expect from the rest of the holiday season, expect buy now, pay later (BNPL) to be a big hit.

TikTok is Gen Z’s No. 2 social commerce destination and is almost as popular as Facebook among millennial social buyers, per Klarna.

The retail landscape in Europe looks bleak: Retail sales in Europe fell at the highest rate since July 2021. That’s a sharp contrast to the US, where consumers keep spending.

Ultrafast delivery app downloads exploded worldwide during the pandemic. The top 10 apps in this space were downloaded 23.1 million times collectively in Q1 2022, according to Apptopia. Getir leads by a wide margin, ahead of rivals like Gopuff and Gorillas.

On today's episode, we discuss a mixture of new store formats, whether there are too many ads on Amazon, how consumers keep spending in the face of inflation, the battle for the TV ratings crown, whether you can guarantee delivery, the number of books that have ever been published, and more. Tune in to the discussion with our analysts Suzy Davidkhanian, Blake Droesch, and Paul Verna.

Search proves its worth on Black Friday: Search ad spending grew steadily and drove strong results during the event despite a year of ad troubles.

Weixin users can receive remittances from Tencent’s global partners directly to their wallets.

Now that the dust has settled from this year’s record-breaking Cyber Five (the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday), it’s time to see how the industry’s advertising efforts shook out, according to new research from Tinuiti.

Not all discount retailers are benefiting from economic uncertainty: Big Lots’ sales fell 9.8% in Q3, Five Below’s earnings dipped 32%, and Dollar General missed expectations.

Retailers reassess supply chains as consumer demand softens: As lead times shorten, companies have to decide whether it’s worth returning to a “just-in-time” strategy to avoid inventory pileups.

The third quarter was a hard one for many US retailers, as inflation, supply chain strain, and more normalized post-pandemic consumer behaviors set in. We checked up on five major retailers on our “Behind the Numbers: Reimagining Retail” podcast to get a nuanced take on who took a hit in the short term and what our experts expect looking further out.

The share of online purchases that shoppers return keeps rising: That’s a growing challenge for retailers seeking to rein in costs without hindering the customer experience.

It’s official. The Cyber Five (the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday) have not lost their touch. Let’s dig into the data as retailers take a deep breath and ready themselves for what’s shaping up to be a pretty busy holiday season.

Email and TV may not be flashy, but they were critical to Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Both marketing channels may be older—but they’re far from deprecated.