Retail Stores Record Single-Digit Declines in Sales and Traffic Among Mixed December Results

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 8, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- RetailNext Inc., the worldwide leader in applied retail analytics for physical stores, today released its monthly Retail Performance Pulse, showing a 6.5 percent year-over-year decrease in sales on a 7.1 percent decline in traffic at brick-and-mortar stores for the retail month of December (November 30 through January 3 on the retail 4-5-4 calendar).

"December started slowly, but ended with a strong surge at the end of the month," said Shelley E. Kohan, RetailNext's vice president of retail consulting. "The fourth week – the week inclusive of the post-shipping cut off for most retailers and the days after Christmas - was a strong performer for brick-and-mortar retailers. In fact, the after-Christmas selling days of December 26 and 27 boasted a 7.9 percent increase year-over-year in sales, on a 3.2 percent increase in traffic. Average Transaction Value (ATV) for those two post-Christmas days was also up 11.1 percent, a positive sign from a margin perspective for retailers."

"Overall, the holiday period for physical retail can be summed up with strong 'bookend' performance," Kohan added. "Early-November and late-December had the most positive results for retail stores. While digital stole the show in between and captivated shoppers with aggressive promotional strategies, retailers who were able to effectively converge digital and physical channels to encapsulate the entire period will show the most positive results for the Holiday season."

The complete Retail Performance Pulse can be downloaded at retailnext.net/resources/downloads/.

New advanced metrics add actionable value

RetailNext also introduced three new advanced performance metrics designed to give retailers and analysts more descriptive indicators of store performance and opportunities for improvement. The new performance metrics are Sales per Shopper Minute (SpSM), Shopper Experience Score™ and Interaction Impact™.

Sales per Shopper Minute helps retailers understand the relationship between sales and conversion to the time shoppers spend in store. "Sales per Shopper Minute helps find the appropriate correlations for each shopping environment," said Chitra Balasubramanian, head of business analytics at RetailNext, "and an understanding of SpSM, combined with the capability of RetailNext's analytics platform to measure time spent on specific in-store activities, allows retailers to maximize shopper satisfaction and store sales."

The RetailNext Shopper Experience Score is a baseline score, customizable to reflect all of a retailer's most pressing priorities, and allows a retailer to compare and contrast performance across benchmarked time periods for its stores. An aggregate measure from data across a variety of merchandising displays, the Shopper Experience Score allows a retailer to fully understand the impact of displays, store design, and product interaction. 

The Shopper Experience Score combines exposure across display/fixture locations with engagement to empower a retailer to assess how well the store is performing in driving shoppers through sections or departments within a store. A high Shopper Experience Score indicates high levels of exposure and engagement across displays, while a low score suggests lower levels of exposure and engagement as compared to the benchmark period.  

Interaction Impact is a valuable metric to layer with others in the context of reducing friction points in consumers' shopping experiences, including the relationship between the number and length of shopper-staff interactions to sales.

"These new metrics are additional proof points that RetailNext can establish high-level Key Performance Indicators to give retailers a scalable methodology to measure their stores," added Balasubramanian. "The result of extensive R & D funding and client feedback, these metrics provide the critical layers of detail and measurement for operational managers to optimize the core tasks that lead to driving store KPIs in the right direction."

About RetailNext

The first technology platform to bring e-commerce style shopper analytics to brick-and-mortar stores and malls, RetailNext enables retailers to collect and correlate data from the broadest available set of data sources. More than 160 retailers and brands worldwide have adopted RetailNext solutions to glean the insights necessary to improve customer experience, increase same-store sales, reduce theft and eliminate unnecessary costs.

RetailNext measures the behavior of more than one billion shoppers per year by collecting data from tens of thousands of sensors in retail stores and analyzing trillions of data points annually. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, RetailNext is a growing global brand operating in 40 countries. For more information, please visit www.retailnext.net.

RetailNext Inc. and RetailNext are trademarks of RetailNext Inc. in the United States.

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SOURCE RetailNext

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