The holiday retail season is heading into the home stretch, but there are still plenty of Americans who haven’t checked off every item on their gift lists yet. How can you attract them and what motivates them to buy? The PeriscopeIQ Second Annual Holiday Shopping Survey has some useful insights about what works and what doesn’t.

There are many free productivity tools available on the Internet, but many of them are a waste of time. The key is to find the right tool that fits your work personality or management type that can boost your productivity. Here are some suggestions based on the type of person you are:

Businesses are offered software that spots which customers will pay more

IN MANY types of face-to-face retailing, it pays to size up your customer and tailor your offering accordingly. In a 2006 study of Fulton fish market in New York, Kathryn Graddy of Oxford University found that dealers regularly charged Asian buyers less than whites because the Asians had proved, over time, more willing to reject high prices, and readier to band together to boycott dealers who ripped them off.

In the book The Virtual Executive, author Debra Benton tells a cautionary tale of videoconferencing: A bank executive joined in on a video call with his team, and forgot he was live on camera. He proceeded to pick up the newspaper and start reading while occasionally picking his nose. One of the other conference participants had to phone the executive's assistant to have her alert him that everyone was watching.

Do you ever feel like you’re spending your whole day with your head buried in your laptop, cell phone or tablet? Do your thumbs hurt from constantly e-mailing, texting or updating your status, yet you oddly feel like you never really communicate with anyone? Do you secretly think if one more “must-do” social network pops up, you’re going to lose it? Turns out you’re not alone.

According to a new Whitepaper from Nielsen, What’s In Store, In-Store For U.S. Retail In 2016, presented byTodd Hale, Senior Vice President, Consumer & Shopper Insights, traditional mass merchants and supermarkets have yielded share to value channels (club, dollar, and supercenter) and drug stores, prompting a series of changes, including format blurring, new marketing outreach techniques and shopper entertainment.

The numbers are in from Black Friday, Small Store Saturday and Cyber Monday and the results are nothing short of spectacular and amazing. I haven’t said those two words in years. For the past six plus years The National Retail Federation and gurus around the world were predicting either sales increases of 1 or 2 percent or decreases from 1 to 5 percent. Online sales had spectacular increases when it was new but certainly tailed off as it became more difficult to have double digit increases. 

I want to share three examples of sheer stupidity.

Mobile Apps for Retailers: A Quick Look

By the time you are reading this article which was written 6-10 days ago, everything that I am writing about might have changed. Of course I am exaggerating a little bit but that is how fast the world of mobile commerce, also known as m-commerce, changes. Just when you think you have a handle on the subject, something new is introduced. Let me give you the current and accepted concepts that are changing the face of retailing via our smart phones.