From Our Blog

Announcing Gartner Cool Vendor 2012 - Analytics and Business Intelligence

The team at First Retail is proud to announce that leading analyst firm Gartner has included First Retail in its 2012 list of Cool Vendors in Analytics and Business Intelligence. The report notes that "First Retail represents the crowded market of content analytics, but it was its machine learning that caught our attention." READ MORE

Semantic Retail

Why would a retailer care about the semantic web? Surely this is just another technology fad that the IT department can distract itself with instead of delivering faster transaction systems or more accurate and up-to-date reports. Not so. In fact it turns out semantic technology may enable robust solutions to your retail business users' most pressing problems. READ MORE

Value Added Aggregators

Retailing has been with us for as long as we can remember. Aggregation and Comparison Sites are today's drivers of traffic and how consumers search for products. Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) has yet to take off bringing the ability for consumers to interact with vendors of products. Do retailers need to behave more like aggregators, particularly as they grow their marketplaces? How are retailers gradually and perhaps unconsciously beginning to adopt VRM practices? READ MORE

Five for Five - 5 Retail Trends 2011-2016

Five emergent trends that will shape retailing - VRM, Multichannel, Globalization, Payments and Data. What will be the evolution of each of these trends and how should retailers respond? READ MORE

VRM, Fourth Party and the Empowered Consumer

What happens when you reverse the marketing funnel and you allow a consumer to specify exactly what they want? So a merchant or manufacturer would be able to go to the market and ask 'who is looking for this item at this price at this location?' and will obtain a list of qualified buyers. A number of ideologies and start-ups are taking advantage of web-technology to allow consumers to publish their needs and wants - will the end-result be a new breed of electronically enabled 'middle-men'? READ MORE