RPW 11-11-08

Retail Paradox Weekly

Retail News Analysis by RSR Research

November 11, 2008

Bailout ROI: Retail Needs Stimulation

By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
11/11/2008

In the US, Election Day and its associated hangover (literal and figurative) are behind us. It was an historic day but as we awoke the following morning, we found the nagging migraine of a flailing economy still with us. Wild stock market swings continue despite the ubiquity of bank and other institutional bail-outs. The Fed is restructuring AIG’s bail-out, the one that started it all. And even China is now forced to bail-out some of its troubled industries.

Most people I know have... More

You're Not Measuring Online Conversion Rates as Well as You Could

By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
11/11/2008

Google posted a video interview on their retail blog last week, talking about two critical measures that cross-channel retailers ignore when looking at their websites. Those measures are click-throughs onto the store locator page, and then the number of users who utilize the mapping feature to locate a store. Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist at Google, said that he was amazed at the number of retailers who ignore these metrics when looking at the value of a retailer’s website – that nothing could be clearer about a consumer’s intent if they do these things before, say, abandoning a shopping cart online.

Our research on multi-channel has shown... More

Catalina and Walgreens Successfully Walk the Line of Pharmacy Consumer Privacy

By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner
11/11/2008

Retail Pharmacy CIO’s know that there is no greater ethical issue than ensuring the security and privacy of “patient” information (a very specialized version of “customer” data used to fulfill customer prescription orders), that they are likely to encounter in their careers. That’s because it’s relatively easy to determine the health state of anyone based on the prescriptions that they use. For example, from knowing that a person is taking prescription beta blockers, it’s straightforward to assume that the person might have hypertension. But in the hands of the wrong people, sensitive prescription information could be truly damaging to consumers’ privacy.

It is for this reason that... More

One Retailer's Experience in a Post-Election Economy

By Steve Rowen, Managing Partner
11/11/2008

Time for a confession: I’m still a retailer. When RSR opened its doors in 2007, it was built on a home-office work environment. In fact, Paula, Brian, Nikki and I weren’t even in the same room together until 6 months after we formed. And as a fairly social person, I recognized that all that time spent alone could probably stand a bit of interruption (before I started talking even more to my cat). So I made a decision to keep my once-a-week retail job, as well.

As a result, every Wednesday night I shut down the home office at 4PM and head to my retailing gig... More