Retail Stores

Luxury retailer Sephora has deployed a mobile point-of-sale solution in a large number of its U.S. stores using software from Agilysys and RedIron on Apple iPod touch devices. "We wanted a solution that seamlessly integrates and extends our SAP POS system via a mobile POS customer-engagement experience," said Sephora vice president of retail store systems Shah Nagree in a statement.

Home Depot is testing PayPal at five brick-and-mortar stores and is the first retailer to participate in a limited pilot program for PayPal's new point-of-sale technologies. Home Depot first began accepting PayPal on its website at homedepot.com a year ago. In a blog post, PayPal revealed that the pilot is currently being run in five Home Depot stores and involves a small number of PayPal employees.

Returns are often emotionally charged events. Think about it: Customers return things that don’t fit, they don’t like, can’t afford, don’t need, don’t want or weren’t what they expected. For many customers, returns are embarrassing, filled with disappointment, frustration or, at the very least, a major inconvenience. How you handle this touchy situation could very well impact your customer’s decision to continue doing business with you.

One can only imagine what the people in this department store in Osaka, Japan were thinking when they came up with this advertising slogan for its sale. Shopper Zarina Yamaguchi thought it was “pretty funny” when she snapped this picture on Jan. 4th.

Boots, a British retailer, has been criticised by parents for selling sex toys in its shops within full view of children. The chemists' chain has prominently displayed a range of unpackaged sex aids close to health care products such as reading glasses, blood-pressure monitors and pregnancy testing kits.

Similar in many ways to Renew Australia's efforts to connect community projects with vacant buildings to revive derelict areas, popuphood in Oakland, Calif. is an urban initiative offering free retail space in unused buildings to local entrepreneurs, in yet another variation of the pop-up concept.

Momentum remains on the side of Family Dollar, as the company reported another quarter of record sales and profits and the opening of 101 units, which included its first stores in California. Family Dollar said earnings per share increased 17.2 percent, a penny better than analysts' forecast, compared with 58 cents the prior-year first quarter.

Apple will be opening new store-within-a-store locations in select Target locations later this year, enabling the company to expand its retail reach into smaller metro areas. The company plans to begin operating Apple-branded areas within 25 larger Target stores in locations which can't support a standalone Apple Store.

New Balance plans to open a New Balance Experience store in Boston. Situated at Copley Square, the new location will be the second "experience" location in the United States for New Balance. The company opened a store in New York in August 2011 that sells its clothing and footwear.

After getting women hooked on fancy handbags and expensive shoes in recent years, retailers are trying to rekindle a love affair with clothes. Department stores are leading the charge, with Saks, Nordstrom and Macy’s improving in-house clothing lines and refurbishing women’s departments.