Despite shoppers returning to physical stores, Amazon has decided to close all of its bookstores, 4-star stores, and pop-ups.

Amazon will continue to expand its grocery stores but is abandoning its roots of selling books in a physical store. Aside from Whole Foods, including locations opening this month, the company runs 85 grocery-oriented stores: 58 Amazon Fresh in the U.S. and U.K. and 27 Amazon Go convenience stores.

In Q1 of this year, Amazon saw a 3% decline in its online retail sales, yet its physical stores saw a dramatic increase year over year.

So why close all their stores? Amazon’s business is centered around logistics, technology, advertising, and as of late, less and less retail.

Click HERE to learn more.

As the heat waves continue to hit across the country, analysts are hard at work predicting how consumers will shop during the winter holidays.

A recent report by PracticalEcomerce predicts that inflation will reach 6% worldwide by Christmas this year. And with that, analysts are predicting that holiday sales will increase less than inflation this year.

Similar to last year’s predictions, consumers are expected to start their holiday shopping even earlier this year. With increased prices, nearly everyone will be looking to snag deals as soon as they see them, whether that be 1 week or 3 months before Christmas.

Click HERE to read more about predictions for the holiday season.

Not all things are black and white. What some people may see as blue, others will see as purple. While some people may feel euphoric when they see a certain color such as baby blue, others may have the exact opposite emotion evoked from that same color.

Research shows that personal preferences, experiences, upbringings, cultural differences, and context all play a contributing role in our brains’ interpretation of color.

Similar to how sound can anchor retail spaces, so can color. Due to its primal function, color allows our brain to quickly connect basic constructs of our environment such as shape, distance, and temperature.

By taking the time to choose the right colors for the right areas of your store, you can personalize the shopping experience for people in your store without them even knowing how.

Click HERE to learn more about the importance of color in retail.

Customers no longer want a personalized shopping experience, they expect it.

For quite a while now, 3rd-party data was the go-to route for collecting data to personalize experience for shoppers. But as companies such as Apple continue to shed light on the mass amounts of data collected from 3rd parties, consumers have become more aware of what information they give, and regulations have made it increasingly hard to collect data.

A recent survey found that 69% of consumers are concerned about how personal data is collected within mobile applications. Although there is much controversy around cookies and 3rd-party data, 81% of companies are still dependent on third-party data.

Sooner or later, first-party data will be essential to continue personalizing experiences without buying data elsewhere. First-party data is data that you collect from within your customer ecosystem. This can include email conversations, social media followers, app usage, website traffic, etc.,

Click HERE to learn more about the growing need to collect first-party data.

With many shoppers choosing online over physical stores, it is imperative to track everything that happens in your store.

New capabilities within artificial intelligence give retailers the ability to track more than we have ever imagined.

AI video analytics is computer-vision powered by machine learning algorithms. AI video analytics can monitor and analyze visual data from cameras to improve business processes.

For retailers, this could give shoppers more personalized experiences, provide information to improve stocking levels, streamline floor plans into more efficient traffic patterns, improve inventory management, and much more.

Click HERE to learn more about Doorcounts’ plans for AI or click HERE to learn more about the capabilities of AI in retail.

Last week we learned that both the furniture and mattress industries saw increases in their daily revenue in May. When looking at the retail industry as a whole, retail sales fell 3.5% in May.

Although the industry saw a slight decrease, if you exclude the auto industry, retail as a whole would’ve increased by 0.5% during the month. The combination of inflation and auto chip shortages has resulted in people waiting to pull the trigger on a new vehicle.

Over the last month, spending at gas stations has increased 4%. Compared to the same time last year, spending is up a whopping 43.2%.

Online shopping also saw a slow down in May with a 0.1% decline in activity compared to the prior month’s 0.7% increase.

Click HERE to learn more about the current state of retail.

With warmer weather slowly making its way around the country, tourism and summer vacations have begun making a dent in foot traffic.

Not only does warm weather signal foot traffic to come, but it also gives new light to forms of advertising that would not be as effective during other seasons.

Digital out-of-home and in-car advertising is an effective way to reach on-the-go consumers. A recent study by Waze and Retaildive found that 79.2% of retail brands found in-car advertising effective, with two-thirds of respondents describing it as “extremely effective. ” Additionally, 85.6% said out-of-home advertising (as in billboards, bus ads) is effective.

Click HERE to learn more about how to make the most out of the warm weather to come.

Unfortunately, over the last few years, we have seen consumers raise their expectations for retail experiences.

Shoppers now expect much more than a simple brick-and-mortar experience, they want to be wowed.

Consumers, and younger consumers in particular, are gravitated toward experimental retail experiences. Younger consumers are so accustomed to e-commerce shopping, that unless there is a unique experience, there is little to no reason for them to not shop online as they normally would.

Although the experience is most important to consumers, savings is a close second. A recent survey by TotalRetail found that 24.8% of consumers, the largest group, say that a store offering exclusive in-store discounts is the surest way to coax them into a new store.

At the end of the day, brand loyalty is declining and anything you can do to make the customer feel special will go a long way.