Pricing

What a difference a year makes. At this time last year, consumers were hesitant to spend on much besides essentials and products that would make their life at home more comfortable. They were fearful about going into stores, many of which were temporarily closed due to the pandemic anyway, worried about how COVID-19 would affect…

After the whiplash of store closures, supply chain havoc, and demand see-saws of the pandemic era, retailers are relieved to see that consumers are enthusiastic about back-to-school shopping in 2021. In fact, a recent Mastercard SpendingPulse study found that U.S. retail sales during the back-to-school shopping period in 2021 are expected to be up 5.5…

The concept of promotions dates back a few centuries where businesses of all kinds printed messages on various items in order to generate consumer awareness for their goods, products or services. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands popularized the concept in the 1950s with the help of the earliest ad agencies on Madison Avenue in New…

In this episode of Retail Right Now, Total Retail's Melissa Campanelli and Kristina Stidham discuss an article recently published by Total Retail, “A Pricing Reboot: How Optimization Science Can Recharge Your Omnichannel Pricing,” authored by Geoff Pofahl, Ph.D., head of science at DemandTec. Pofahl writes that many of the shoppers who flocked to online channels…

Nowadays, consumer culture is both fueling the retail industry and gradually taking its toll on it. While it gives retailers an excellent opportunity to generate revenue streams from consumers' whims and needs, it still plays against them. The latter is well-reflected by the growing number of product categories whose life cycle keeps declining. Once, it…

In a retail landscape pivoting at last to a post-pandemic reality, retailers need to strategically recalibrate their pricing strategies for what lies ahead. One thing is clear: many of the shoppers who flocked to online channels during COVID will stay digital, and retailers must evolve their thinking accordingly. Shoppers impacted by the economic shocks of…

Price optimization, where retailers use data from multiple sources to adjust their prices, is on the rise. The rate at which retailers adjust their prices change by vertical and store, but prices are certainly changing in response to market forces in a way we haven't seen since John Wanamaker introduced the first price tags in…

For retailers, creating a pricing strategy is an art and a science. A pricing team must balance customer focus, the competition, and a number of moving factors. And just like learning a new language, it takes dedication to develop the skill and confidently become fluent. Presently, retailers have an opportunity to become pricing-fluent organizations by…

Let’s face it, the world of retail promotions is often a shoot-first, aim-later environment, where merchants either just repeat last year’s promotions or randomly toss out desperate offers driven by trade fund incentives or competitors’ current offers. However, in an unprecedented retail environment where shopper behaviors and preferences bear no resemblance to those of past…

Over the past decade, e-commerce has seen tremendous growth, and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated it further. The retail landscape has changed drastically, and retailers have had to find creative ways to compete with giants like Amazon.com. As we kick off the new year, it's top of mind for retailers to come up with strategies…