E-commerce trends: Why technology and retailers are playing nice, and why it hurts jobs

As a follow-up to his webcast with FactSet, Richard Hastings discusses how the retail sector has proportionally increased its IT spend while decreasing spend in areas such as new store building. He also discusses the relationship between consumers and online purchases.

Read our show notes below for more details on our episode. 

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1:05 - Everybody in the industry is looking at social networking data to see if a pattern can be traced from a metric like Facebook fans to website-based sales.

2:35 - Analysts and the public are reliant on comments from marketing and CEOs in conference calls to see what's happening in social media. The conversations surrounding social media are only increasing.

4:30 - Many retailers do not even disclose e-commerce numbers as yet. One trend that can be spotted is that retailers who once had a strong catalog now have a strong online business.

7:00 - Awareness and concern about e-commerce sales is so great, based on what we see at conferences, that any retailer who is not saying anything about it will be under pressure to disclose more.

7:45 - From an operational level (down from the CEO) everyone is already very concerned with e-commerce statistics.

 9:00 - Retailers with younger shoppers have much more interesting e-commerce data, as a rule. Younger shoppers also lead to more consumption through mobile devices, especially as it pertains to them locating a product.

12:30-13:30 - During the market crisis, retailers began to think of how they could be competitive. Retail adapted sooner than other sectors.

14:00-15:20 - Retailers may see that technology can point towards redundancies and inefficiencies. Ironically, firms can use technology to see labor inefficiences, and subsequently can eliminate jobs. This, in turn, provides more free cash flow to purchase, in many cases, more technology.

16:00 - Taken in absolute terms, IT spend is still overall less for most retailers (though it is a larger portion of total capital expenditures).