Please join Oracle experts on April 17th for a webcast discussing the benefits of Engineered Systems for retail operations.  You'll hear about Engineered Systems delivering faster queries, data compression, and reduced batch run-times for retailers around the world.

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In past postings I've spent a fair amount of time talking about targeted promotions.  Using a complete view of the customer that includes purchase history, location history, and psychographics gleaned from social media, we can select the offer with the greatest chance of redemption.  This is done to influence shopping behavior, which might be introducing the consumer to a new product line, increasing their basket size, increasing frequency of purchases, etc.

Bloomberg is reporting that Gamestop, JCPenney, and Nordstrom have all closed their Facebook stores.  That's not the best timing with Facebook's IPO just over the horizon, but I don't think this should really be news to astute retailers.  Duplicating an e-commerce store within Facebook doesn't really offer a different experience, and Facebook users are used to punching out to the Web for all

Just like physicists are fond of saying matter is neither created nor destroyed it simply changes form, so goes retailing.  The industry has morphed from small independent stores, to chains, to big-box, to online, to mobile.  Consumers' tastes, habits, and preferences change over time, thus retailers must always stay in-tune.  Unfortunately, many don't.