While it’s fair to say there’s plenty of disagreement among many issues these days, most consumers—across all income levels—generally agree on something: a sense of pessimism surrounding our current economy. So says the Index of Consumer Sentiment, a widely regarded metric from the Surveys of Consumers, as tabulated by the University of Michigan.

During our very worthwhile appearance at NRF just a few weeks ago, quite a few questions from visitors to our booth revolved around the ongoing challenges affecting retail replenishment. Nobody needs to belabor the problem—our post-pandemic economy is still plagued by unwieldy supply chain disruptions, leaving retail customers regularly disappointed with empty shelves—leaving them little choice but to consider competing stores (or online options) for everyday items they rely upon.

One highlight of NRF 2023 was our well-received co-presentation with Walgreens Group VP Andy Kettlewell, joining our CEO, Sivakumar Lakshmanan to discuss Walgreens’ landmark AI demand planning transformation—serving 9 million daily customers’ health and wellness needs across almost 9,000 stores nationwide.

For those outside the grocery industry, direct store delivery (DSD) is a distribution model used by manufacturers/CPGs that entails delivering products directly to retail store shelves. This model is extremely conducive for perishable food categories. During your typical grocery shopping, you may notice that store employees these days do relatively little replenishment in the aisles.

Digital experience is now as important as low prices for consumers, and pressure is on retailers to deliver incredible application performance.

AI/ML is reinventing the reality of many industries, including retail. From brick-and-mortar stores to online marketplaces, retail companies are all increasing their investments in artificial intelligence, in order to gain a competitive advantage, better understand their customers and solve some of their long-lasting problems.

We recently featured in Ecommerce Age. If you missed the write up, you can catch up in full, here… As ecommerce continues to outdo the high street, Black Friday sales are becoming as much of a tradition as Christmas dinners. But shoppers are very influenced by external factors, from the economy to website experiences. We outline the key ecommerce challenges this Black Friday…

The holiday shopping season is one of the most stressful periods for operators of retail and ecommerce businesses, as the seasonal surge of holiday shoppers can put massive amounts of stress and strain on even the most well-architected websites. Here’s a recent example from 2021: The Office Depot website suffered an outage during Cyber Monday that knocked the online shop offline for hours, impacting the ability of customers to place orders online.