Small-item fulfillment continues to grow, especially with e-commerce orders, but a lot of traditional sortation technology was never designed to handle smaller and lighter pieces, says John Park, product manager, Accu-Sort Systems.
Retail theft, including shoplifting, employee theft, administrative error and vendor fraud is down, according to an annual survey recently conducted by the University of Florida. The National Retail Security Survey 2011 report found that theft as a percentage of revenue was 1.41 percent, down from 1.49 percent in the previous findings. This calculates to an approximate $2.6bn decline in losses.
The Consumer Goods Forum has created what it calls the first professional online network of the retail and consumer goods industry. The purpose is enable the group's mission to facilitate industry-wide collaboration and to enable members to work together by serving shoppers, consumers and communities better, faster, with greater value and more responsibly.
One could imagine European bankers emitting a collective sigh of relief over the latest election results in Greece, whose citizens last week gave a narrow edge to the conservative New Democracy party. In the process, they ratified the controversial $220bn bailout plan that is intended to keep Greece in the eurozone and avert economic disaster throughout the European Union.
Just when you thought cloud computing couldn't get any more complicated and fraught with hidden gotchas, the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue has jumped in to sprinkle taxation magic on your cloud business cases. What the Keystone State did - and other states are likely to follow - doesn't make cloud any less profitable, but the specifics of the cloud deployment could now impact tax costs.
Top-performing companies in the food, beverage and household products sectors that leverage the demand chain will be in the best position to continue to grow, according to the 2012 Financial Performance Report by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and PwC US, entitled Profitable Growth: Driving the Demand Chain.
There is great effort now to make buying electronics in a store appealing again, but the trends are not favorable. People are increasingly buying electronics online, even if they go to stores to examine product features.
When prices are updated at the E.Leclerc supermarket in Saint-Jean-du-Falga, France, as many as 30,000 labels can change automatically, bringing an end to a time-consuming process by which staff previously had to manually print and swap out printed labels on store shelves.
Webgistix Corp., a provider of order-fulfillment technology for electronic commerce, has integrated its SmartFill platform with the online shopping cart of BigCommerce. As a result, the vendor said, retailers can build online stores in BigCommerce environments with two-day ground delivery of e-commerce orders to more than 98 percent of U.S. consumers.
