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When stay-at-home orders took hold this past March, retail sales dropped dramatically — as everybody knows. But that change in customer behavior has resulted in a phenomenon that hasn’t been talked about much: the flow of sales information to retailers’ data repositories has dried up. That’s a significant problem, because a healthy flow of that information is the lifeblood of customer loyalty programs, AI-driven product recommendations, and a wide array of critical business decisions.
What this change means is that many retailers – independent or chain, brick-and-mortar or e-commerce, startup or legacy – are now facing an information deficit. That’s what happens when the data and intelligence derived from customer transactions becomes scarce or unusable due to a sudden change...
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