ShopSavvy has announced the release of Product Cloud 2.0, the latest iteration of its big-data platform that enables the shopping community’s members to find even more real-time pricing, inventory, reviews, photos, videos and other information for more than 20 million products. In field testing conducted by ShopSavvy, the app-maker says it is consistently displaying more local store results as well as online price results and lower prices for a greater variety of products than Amazon Mobile, eBay’s RedLaser and other major platforms.

Based on a study of 600 random product searches across popular product categories such as consumer electronics, video games, books, movies, home and family, and office products, ShopSavvy outpaced other apps in the number of results displayed.  As an example, with Product Cloud 2.0 ShopSavvy displayed on average 30 percent more local, in-store offers than RedLaser, as well as almost twice as many online price results.

In the study, ShopSavvy displayed the best price on new products 67 percent of the time while Amazon has the best prices only 5 percent of the time. The average competitor had the best result only 17 percent of the time. For used products, ShopSavvy had the best price 96 percent of the time, while eBay’s RedLaser only had the best price 12 percent of the time. The average competitor displayed the best price 9.5 percent of the time.

ShopSavvy’s latest update on Android and iOS provides its millions of users a far richer user experience, making it easier for shoppers to get the product, pricing and other information they need to make online purchases with confidence through ShopSavvy Wallet, which enables shoppers to make purchases from Walmart, Target, Best Buy and other retailers without ever leaving the app.

2012 was a year during which pessimists complained that the physical store was becoming no more than a showroom for competitors that were based online. I could agree with that were it not for the one thing that distinguishes the store in a way that the online retailer would be hard pressed to equal: the customer experience. There’s nothing more powerful than friendly, knowledgeable staff and an environment that entertains the senses.

Rachel Shechtman (@rachelshechtman) is the founder of Story, a Manhattan boutique that updates its theme and the products carried every four to eight weeks. She was recognized this year by Fast Company as one of its Top 100 Creative People in Business. Rachel says, “When we think of the next generation of retail design, we think about storytelling. My rule: 70% of an experience should be what consumers know and 30% should be surprise and delight.” Rachel was also a part of a 2013 Predictions Hangout hosted by PSFK.com. There she said, “Online brands will be looking to build offline retail experiences that emphasize customer experience as a marketing outreach tool rather than looking at a physical space simply as dollars per square foot.”

The answer, it would appear, is that traditional retailers need to do what they can do well, create an engaging and compelling customer experience. They also need to embrace the opportunities of cross channel shopping, because today’s shopper doesn’t decide to buy something and just walk in to pick it off the shelf.

Awareness and research are just as likely to happen online as they are in a physical store – and for Millennials, the chances are even greater. That makes shopping experience more of a journey that can take place over a period of time.

Consumers shopping how, where and when they want

IDC Research has looked ahead and made its predictions for 2013 concentrating on the value of, and requirements for, an effective cross-channel (or omnichannel as they call it) environment. In their view, the customer has determined how we need to go to market. That determination has been made by the technology they use and the options it has created for them. Today’s consumer wants to shop how they want, where they want, when they want.

Here are IDC Retail Insights’ Top 10 Predictions:

1. Omnichannel retail maturity will move from foundation to convergence, and from precision to immersion.
2. Retailers’ omnichannel objectives will require platform and architecture investments.
3. Retailers will pivot merchandising and marketing on customer analytics to drive revenue and profit with relevance and reciprocity being the watchwords.
4. Retailers will invest in customer analytics, merchandising, and marketing technologies to curate commerce and contextualize communications.
5. The time is right to break down marketing silos.
6. Marketing processes and infrastructures will align with the omnichannel business.
7. Retailers will remove barriers and instead encourage the “stop start shopper.”
8. We will see the convergence of web-based customer experience touch points to unify the customer journey.
9. Retailers will optimize omnichannel customer service and cost by enabling trustworthy, efficient and effective supply chains.
10. Retailers will invest in technologies that enable visibility, visualization and virtualization.

Retailers meeting customers where they are

This doesn’t mean at all that the physical store is on its way out. It just needs to evolve. John Lewis, the UK retailer, has embraced this idea with its scannable shopping windows. Its location in Brighton England features a storefront at which customers can use their mobile devices to take “window shopping” to a whole new level.

In Australia, Woolworths brings the shopping experience to you. Going one step beyond the idea of delivering to your home, or operating a “dark store” where you can drive through to do a pick-up, they have come up with a “meet you on the way home” idea. Customers can place their orders online and arrange to meet a truck on their way home at a designated location, such as their kids’ daycare). That way they can pick up the groceries and their children at the same time.

This is an exciting time in retail. The forces at work are causing us to change and look for new ways to compete with one another and engage the customer. Many of these new ideas are already here and proving their value. It’s very much an example of my favorite quote from the Canadian author William Gibson: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

I’ve been struggling with this concept ever since Steve Rowen and I wrote our latest edition of RSR’s annual benchmark on BI (or analytics, if you prefer). There are a couple of issues at play here. First off, respondents told us pretty clearly that mobile and web access to analytics, as well as new forms of data visualization and dashboards are high priorities for the future, and that integration to Excel is not.

In looking at the latest iterations of vendor applications (we’re getting some previews of things to be announced at NRF next month), it’s clear that a lot of vendors have invested a lot of money in putting a layer of analytics on their applications. This isn’t reporting, mind you. This is new ways of visualizing data, either web-accessible or designed specifically to be mobile-friendly. If you want any kind of sense for the trend, just Google the word infographic and take a look at the image results and you’ll see what I mean. Most if not all of these are not designed to be analytics tools per se, but they are creating an expectation among consumers of information that all information will eventually be presented in a visual way. Edward Tufte would be so proud.

The problem is, which application should be used to create these information-rich, visually appealing analytics? Is the transaction application that generates the data the best place to do so? Theoretically, the designers of these applications know their data the best and would have the best idea of what insights would be most meaningful to get out of that data. On the flip side, more often than not, the best insights come from connecting disparate data sources, so analytics on a transaction application would be limited to only the transactions that the application itself has visibility to.

That would argue for an enterprise analytics strategy in which important data (Note that there’s already a qualifier in this statement: Who decides what is important?) is sucked up into a giant data warehouse where people can examine relationships and generate insights at will. Oh wait – generally speaking, those kinds of data warehouses are insanely expensive, and require specially trained people who both know the analytics tools and also know the data well enough to know the right kinds of questions to ask. So it’s not just “anybody” who can play around in enterprise data, and that’s where this coin flips back on itself. If you’re not a user with access to that kind of analytics power, where do you turn? You turn to the analytics that come with the transaction application – the stuff you already have access to.

This relationship is getting disrupted, however, by high-performance analytics. Steve and I recently had an experience with this, when we worked on a social listening project that performed analytics on Black Friday and Cyber Monday social media (the results were shared on Chain Store Age). There’s been a lot of talk about social media analytics, but seeing it action drove something home to me. Sure, you can talk about “natural language processing” and “learning systems” and all the geeky stuff that makes social media analytics sound like it’s pre-Star Trek technology or something. But the reality is, a very powerful analytics machine – the combination of software and hardware – is making it possible to chunk through a much larger data set than has previously been possible. And the results are already very infographic-y – time series and other charts that take relatively little massaging (especially compared to the effort of getting that first level of information) and instantly convey an enormous amount of information – literally millions of tweets and posts – in a very concentrated space.

This is no job for Excel.

Don’t get me wrong: Excel is not going away in the retail enterprise. But we may rapidly find ourselves in a place where Excel holds sway only over ad hoc analytics, and either enterprise BI or vastly improved transactional analytics takes the lion share of end user attention.

For me, the question becomes one of the future of BI, or analytics – or both. Between Big Data on one side and mobile access on the other, the discipline of BI has never been more disrupted. Will data truly be democratized – accessible, with powerful tools for understanding what the data means, to everyone in the enterprise? That seems more likely today than ever before.

Considering how retail has historically been not very measured – it’s only been in the last decade or two that the industry really cared which customers specifically were walking through the door (or shopping online, or posting about them on Facebook), as opposed to which products they put in their shopping carts. I think retail, more than a lot of other industries, has the potential to be transformed by the waves of change hitting BI – not because they’ll be doing anything different when it comes to retail execution, but because they’ll be able to learn so much more from the things that they are doing.

More on that in 2013.

Nikki Baird is managing partner of Retail Systems Research, which first published this article in its Newsletter.

Panopta, which monitors website performance as part of its business, reports in its 2012 Availability Index Holiday Edition that 77 retail sites have reported website outages. Several, including kmart.com and sears.com have been down for nearly 11 hours. It’s hard to imagine the sales lost during that downtime.

Kohl’s gave customers a jump on Black Friday sales by offering 500 early-bird specials starting the day before Thanksgiving. Then came Thanksgiving evening, when eager shoppers were met with an outage message every time they tried to click on their shopping carts. You have to think a lot of these problems go back to inadequate functional and performance testing. How do you test apps under loads hundreds of times heavier than normal?

Testing isn’t an after-the-fact activity

Too many people in the software community still think of performance testing as an “after the fact” activity. You run a finished or nearly finished app under a certain load, record the app’s response time and ensure that it meets specifications. If it does, great. But what if it doesn’t? If testing comes at the end of the process, when you have the least ability to actually fix problems, then you have no option but to start over.

Agile techniques, where smaller, independent teams define, test and develop small units of functionality in shorter cycles, help some. But even then, some hard-to-catch structural code errors and bugs will often slip through. And that’s to say nothing about load tests under the extreme conditions of holiday shopping season. What if the loads are 10 times larger than anticipated? Or 100 times?

Will your company be on the sideline when it counts?

With service virtualization techniques, we can capture the performance and response rate of constrained systems and measure a profile of the requests that an app would typically make of it — load patterns, scenarios, types of data, etc. The result is a more reliable outcome, with lower costs for development, repair and adjustment, so when online shopping is hitting new records, you’re not sitting on the sideline wondering where you went wrong.

Service virtualization should be ready and available between every layer where dependencies exist between systems to ensure that apps are developed in an environment that is as realistic and “live-like” as possible. We’d hazard a guess that several dozen retailers wish now that they’d checked out SV.

Mike Drago helps edit servicevirtualization.com, which first published this article.

Cross-channel shopping was certainly a big hit, as 58% of mobile customers were using their devices while shopping in the traditional stores. There are those who would say, “that’s showrooming in action.” And while that may be true, it would also be fair to say that any retailer that had a multichannel presence was going to benefit from the condition. With all the traffic congestion on the roads I just can’t see anyone driving to another mall to get a better price. Mobile devices represented 16.3% of all online sales, so people are using them to enhance and enable their shopping expeditions. The smartphone is still the form factor of choice over the tablet with almost 59% of mobile shoppers using their phones as the way to shop and buy.

Category information also featured prominently in the report. Home items led the way with a 28.2% increase over last year’s sales. Interestingly enough, while many people mourn the death of the department store at the hands of specialty and big-box retailers, the department stores saw an increase of 16.8% against the previous year.

The data collected by IBM shows similar trends and consumer behaviors to those of recent years. The volume of transactions and dollars, however, are much higher than we’ve seen over the last two years. The spike on Black Friday attributed to in-store sales corresponded to the early opening of most retailers.

Cyber Monday demonstrates a higher trend in the after-dinner hours with a sharp drop occurring at about 9pm, (is it coincidence that this is the start of prime time on television?). Online shopping, however, is fairly consistent through the day; clearly, a great deal of shopping is happening while most of us are sitting in our cubicles at work.

This year’s reports, centered on current sales trends and social sentiment, struck a chord and stirred interest and debate on the evolution of the digital consumer, “couch commerce,” multichannel and multiscreen shopping, the new mobile shopper and the impact of social media on sales and marketing. The findings drive brand eminence for their Smarter Commerce offerings and highlight the continued opportunity for CMOs to adopt an approach to an intelligent buying experience for their customers.

The question to be asked now is: How can today’s retailer can take advantage of this knowledge and put it to use to compete in the marketplace? The winners will be marketers who use technology to deliver customer experiences that not only connect shoppers with personalized offers but do so at the right touch point and at precisely the right time and place, whether on the couch or in the store.

Dave Rodgerson is the senior managing consultant for IBM’s Retail Strategy & Transformation practice.

Reporters and pundits alike pontificated about the significance of earlier and earlier store openings, the relentless quest for the best “door busters,” the incredible growth of online shopping and the startling (to some at least) emergence of mobile apps.

Casting aside the glaring irony that after spending a few hours (allegedly) being grateful for all that we have, we quickly pivot and decide that, after further review, we don’t have nearly enough, much of what the media shares about the significance of our shopping habits during the past week is highly misleading.

Consider a few facts:

1. Historically there has been poor correlation between retailers’ performance during the Thanksgiving weekend and their overall performance for the quarter. In fact, there is growing evidence that there is an inverse correlation.
2. For most brands, Black Friday and Cyber Monday represent a small percentage of total sales for the holidays.
3. With Thanksgiving coming early this year, holiday sales are going to be more back-loaded than usual.
4. As more brands launch promotions prior to Black Friday, consumers spread their sales over more days, making any single event less important.
5. Sales aren’t profits. Giving product away, and driving an abnormal amount of business to one or two days, wreaks havoc on profitability.

For those of you who breathlessly conclude that a given retailer “won” because of big increases on a given day or that Cyber Monday was a huge success because of a double-digit sales gain, please realize the jury is still out.

A quick anecdote: When I was at Neiman Marcus we kept sweetening the deal on our thrice-yearly InCircle Rewards promotion. Every time we added a new element our comp stores sales went up nicely, and it appeared that the incremental cost of the promotion was more than covered by the extra gross margin dollars we gained during the multiday event.

Then a member of my analytics team wondered if anyone had looked at the possibility that as we made the deal better and better perhaps we were driving sales that would have occurred anyway (at a higher margin) into those sales days. Great question. So we did the analysis.

Lo and behold a comparative analysis that included a week before and after the event showed clearly that there was no appreciable increase in total sales. There was a change, however. Our profits got worse.

The lesson is clear and compelling. Concluding that a sales event was a success without a more complete picture of how consumer behavior was changed over a longer period of time AND without including a profitability analysis is irrelevant.

I can hope that the media will pull back on disseminating useless information or that they will at least provide more helpful context. Not very likely, I know.

But there is one thing I can do. I can pay less attention.

And so can you.

Steven P. Dennis is president and founder of SageBerry Consulting and president of the Dallas-Fort Worth Retail Executives Association. This article first appeared on Steven P. Dennis’ Blog.

IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, which tracks e-commerce transactions from more than 500 retailers, said online sales on Monday were up 30 percent from Cyber Monday a year ago. Jay Henderson, strategy director at IBM Smarter Commerce, was quoted as saying, “The reports of the death of Cyber Monday are greatly exaggerated,” Certainly, we saw shopping start earlier this year, but it hasn’t diminished the growth in sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”

Once again, the reports seem to agree that mobile devices are a big reason why. Bloomberg BusinessWeek said, “Results show Americans are getting more comfortable shopping across all screens — computers, smartphones and tablets — and retailers are capitalizing on this by improving e-commerce offerings and beefing up Cyber Monday-specific deals.”

The year of the tablet

CNN said, “about 18% of shoppers checked out deals on their mobile devices on Monday, and 13% made purchases by phone or tablet – up from 12% and 7%, respectively, last year.”

The popularity of the tablet computer was another factor. More than 7% of online shopping on Monday happened on the iPad, more than any other tablet or smartphone, IBM said.

Preparation apparently was another reason. Brad Wilson of BradsDeals.com told USA Today that websites “in general are better prepared than in prior years. I think this move to virtual Web hosting in the much-discussed ‘cloud’ is a part of why the day (was) better overall.”

Always ready for a deal

Other suggested reasons for the big Cyber Monday:

• More shoppers bought after being referred from social networks
• More consumers are shopping in store and online at the same time to get the best deals
• Shoppers responded to retailer offers like free shipping.

Kevin Regan, senior managing director of the marketing firm FTI Consulting, may have summed it up best in comments to The Christian Science Monitor: “What this Cyber Monday tells us more than anything is that consumers are ready to buy no matter where they are or what they are doing if that is the moment that the best deal shows up.”

While sales for weekend overall were up 13 percent to $59.1 billion, the most revealing number of the weekend was Black Friday sales in stores; and they were down 1.8 percent from last year to $11.2 billion, according to ShopperTrak. It was the first decline since recession-plagued 2008. Early openings and promotions, as predicted, kept some shoppers home on Friday. The National Retail Federation chief executive, Matthew Shay, said that while Black Friday “is certainly not dead,” he conceded that “it’s starting to spread out.”

Holiday shopping is spreading out all right. Black Friday sales online topped $1 billion for the first time, according to comScore, which said online sales went up 26 percent from a year ago. ComScore said that for the entire holiday season, it expects online retail spending to increase 17 percent. That’s more than last year’s 15 percent increase and much more than the 4.1 percent increase in spending forecast for spending overall. ChannelAdvisor chief executive Scot Wingo said, “Online has been around 9 percent of total holiday sales, but it could breach 10 percent for the first time this season.”

One of the big drivers of that online sales growth is mobile devices. I.B.M., which analyzes online traffic and transactions from 500 U.S. retailers, said mobile devices accounted for 26 percent of visits to retail websites and 16 percent of purchases on Friday. That was up from 18.1 percent and 10.3 percent, respectively, from the same day last year.

Online shopping’s traditional big day is today, Cyber Monday, and the NRF predicts that more than 20 million shoppers plan to use mobile devices, up from 17.8 million a year ago. ComScore predicts Cyber Monday sales overall will increase 20 percent over a year ago.

“Cyber Monday will be a big day, but not as much of a big day as it has been in the past,” Mia Shernoff, executive vice president for Chase Paymentech, said in a Reuters story. She offered an interesting insight into why. “Faster broadband Internet connections in the office used to drive this. But now many consumers have faster connections at home and smart phones and tablets — they don’t have to wait.”

That’s all part of the Power Shift. All these devices and all this product information have transferred so much of the power in the retail equation from retailers to consumers. They’re shopping online and with their phones and tablets. They’re getting reviews and pricing information to get the best deals. They’re pushing retailers to look at their businesses in new ways and meet them where they are.

If you still need proof that this is happening, just look at the numbers.

A customer enters a big-box retail store and is confronted by a pushy clerk.

Clerk (speaking rapidly): “Good morning, and welcome to Amazon. Please shop by department. We have books, movies, music, games, electronics, computers, home, garden, tools, grocery, health and beauty, toys, kids, baby, clothing, shoes, jewelry …”

Customer: “I want to take a look at the new phone.”

They walk together toward the phone department.

Clerk: “Did you want an unlocked phone, a no-contract phone, a phone with a plan? Did you need a sim card? Mobile broadband service? How about a tablet? The new Kindle HD 4G LTE is just $499.”

Customer (beleaguered): “No, just the new phone.”

Arriving at the phone department.

Clerk: “I can show you 1-24 of 147,341 results. How do you want me to sort these results: by relevance, popularity, price low to high, price high to low, or average customer review.”

Customer: “Just the phone.”

Clerk (holding up a photo of a phone): “Here it is. Roll over the image to zoom in.”

When Customer puts his finger on the photo, Clerk moves it closer to his face.

Customer: “You can’t show me the phone?”

Clerk (holding up photo): This is the phone. Roll over the image to zoom in.”

Customer: “Is this phone as good as people say?”

Clerk: “We have 79 customer reviews. Ronny G says it’s the best he’s ever had, but Andrew B says it locks up a lot. CubsFan says she isn’t impressed by the battery life.”

Customer: “How many of those reviews are real?”

Clerk: “Customers who bought this item also bought the anti-glare, anti-scratch, anti-fingerprint matte-finish screen, and the slim-fit polycarbonate slider case and the one-touch windshield car-mount holder.”

Customer (frustrated): “Just give me the phone.”

Clerk (handing over phone): “There are more items to consider. The 40-inch 1080p 120-hertz LED HDTV is just $299.  An Incredible Hulk action figure is $15.99. And Fifty Shades of Grey is just $9.57!

Customer: “How I can get out of here?”

Clerk (stone-faced): “Proceed to checkout.”

At the cash register, there’s a line of people all with the same phone. They all stare as a man with a T-shirt that says “PRIME” happily waltzes past everyone in line.

Cashier (to the first person in line): “That’ll be $299, please.”

Quick transaction and that customer exits.

Cashier (to the next person in line): “That’ll be $329, please.”

Quick transaction and that customer exits.

Cashier (to Customer): “That’ll be $349, please.”

Customer: “Wait a minute. You charged him $299, her $329, and me $349 and we all bought the same thing! That’s not right!”

Cashier: “Sir, this is Amazon. We made $631 million in profits last year. Do you think we did it just selling products? We did it by driving up prices to consumers and holding down prices for retailers. Sweet, huh?”

Cashier: “And there’s sales tax of $28.79. I guess you heard we finally lost that battle. … And how quickly did you want that to arrive? Shipping charges will be $7.95 for standard delivery in three to five business days or $10.95 for two-day and $13.95 for next-day.”

Customer: “But, I have the item right here!”

Clerk: “Not exactly, sir. It’s just in your cart. I’ll take that as standard delivery.”

Customer pays and starts to walk dejectedly toward the exit.

Cashier (shouting): “Your order number is 872-785542-489314139…”

Customer gets outside and is surprised when a burly man in a brown jumpsuit snatches the purchase out of his hands and throws it to another guy standing next to a dark brown truck full of packages. That man flings the package on the top of the mound, rolls down the door, bangs it twice. The truck speeds off.

Burly Man (menacingly): “Three to five days.”

Customer joins other shoppers slogging slowly toward their cars, heads down and hands empty.

ShopSavvy

ShopSavvy, the world’s largest shopping community is out with ShopSavvy 6, which adapts the app to Apple’s iPad. Comparison shopping and search capabilities are both improved and shoppers will be able to find more local deals through a Deals tab. Another feature details retailers’ price-matching policies. ShopSavvy Co-Founder Alexander Muse has said that if 2011 was the year of shopping with your smartphone then 2012 will be the year of shopping with your iPad. The recent introduction of the iPad mini seems likely to fuel that trend during the holidays and beyond as a popular gift becomes an ever-more-popular shopping tool.

Google Shopping

Google Shopping is working to take its experience to another level this holiday season, and with Google Shopper 3.0 it is introducing a number of new features. Customers will be able to more easily browse, find gift ideas, research new products, and find sales in local brick-and-mortar stores.

Many of the products on Google Shopping now have a 360-degree swivel feature that allows shoppers to view items more fully before they buy.  There is also a Shortlisting feature that allows customers to keep all of their products and reviews in one location.  They can share their Shortlists with friends and family.  For those who find something that is just almost right, Google Shopping has another feature that lets customers conduct a search on visually similar items.

TheFind

TheFind mimics brick-and-mortar shopping by bringing shoppers sales, coupons, and promotions organized by brand or retailer. Siva Kumar, co-founder and CEO of TheFind, has said, “In this current economic environment, coupons are king.  People who come to TheFind expect to find what they are looking for and be incentivized to purchase at sale prices or through discount coupons.”

InvisibleHand

InvisibleHand is what its name implies. Use his browser app when you are looking at an item on a retail website and it will automatically give you an alert indicating where you can get that item cheaper.  It only alerts you if the item is available cheaper elsewhere; and once you set it, you can forget it.

Lish

Lish, part of the Facebook Commerce platform, seems like the place to look for ideas when you have no ideas. Lish features the most-talked-about products on Facebook and Twitter, and allows vendors to have branded storefronts and one-click purchasing.  As Jim Stoneham, Payvment CEO, said, “Branded storefronts give sellers a well-designed ecommerce presence without the hassle of creating their own dot-com storefront.”