MSA South Atlantic and Southwest Central Chapters Are Ready for Their Fall Meetings
from MSA
Detailed meeting information with complete agendas for MSA's South Atlantic and Southwest Central Chapters has been posted to the MSA Web site. Choose your chapter from the pull-down menu to download the registration form and start making plans to see your local colleagues. More

Now, MSA Members Receive Better Rates on Shipping!
from MSA
MSA has negotiated new rates with PartnerShip for our members-only discount shipping program. Whether you ship daily or only once in a while, take advantage of this free MSA program that will save you money! Use FedEx Ground® to save up to 20% on parcel shipments, and FedEx Express® to save up to 29% per package on air shipments. And, get a minimum of 66% off inbound and outbound less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping for UPS Freight®, Con-Way and YRC (formerly Yellow and Roadway). Get more details and enroll online today! More

Welcome New MSA Members
from MSA
MSA would like to welcome several new museums and vendors to the Association. For the most up-to-date listings, MSA members can log in with User ID and password to access detailed information and search the online directory at www.MuseumStoreAssociation.org.More

Tougher New Product-Safety Rules Go Into Effect 8-14-09
from AttorneyAtLaw.com
A slew of tougher, new federal rules designed to make millions of children's products safer while boosting consumer confidence in the products we all bring home will go into effect on August 14, 2009. More

July Consumer Spending Rose to 2.15 Percent
from Brand Week
The Deloitte Consumer Spending Index, which attempts to track consumer cash flow as an indicator of future consumer spending, rose to 2.15 percent in July. This was steered by falling unemployment claims and tax burdens, along with a rise in real wages. More

2-D Barcodes Present Path to Get Shoppers to "Opt-In" to In-Store
from Retail TouchPoints
During the course of 2009, more retailers have been utilizing shopper path tracking and gaze tracking to better understand how shoppers are responding to in-store promotions (both traditional and digitally based). As these technology tools become more prevalent, we have seen some retailers use them responsibly and others use them to track age, race and gender with the intent to eventually serve up "targeted" messages to shoppers. This raises potential privacy concern and, until we get in front of them, retailers are looking for new methods to stimulate shopper "opt-in" to their targeted in-store promotions. One of the technologies of great potential interest for this is the 2-D barcode. More

D.C. Tourism Expected to Drop By Two Percent in 2009
from the Washington Business Journal
The number of tourist coming to Washington (D.C.) is expected to decline slightly this year and remain flat through 2012, according to projections released at the city's annual marketing meeting Thursday. More

Park Service Says Visits to National Parks Are Up
from The Associated Press
It could be the upside of the economic downturn: The Obama administration says visits to national parks are up nearly 4 percent this year. More

How to Discount (If You Insist)
from BusinessWeek
Discounting can wreck brand value and profits. Follow this discount strategy to avoid those pitfalls. More

Five Tips for Adding Mobile to the Mix
from Retail TouchPoints
It's no secret that retailers' ad budgets are shrinking and countless executives are tasked with doing more with less. So what's the secret? Well, when the times get tough, the tough get innovative, or in this instance, mobile. Here are five easy tips to help you get started adding mobile to your marketing mix. More

Retail Sales: How to Get Consumers Spending Again
from BusinessWeek
Consumers need more money in their pockets and confidence that the paychecks will keep coming. That might not be so easy, say economists. More

Why Packaging Matters More Than Ever
from TheDieLine.com
New research demonstrates consumer purchasing patterns no longer fit the classic marketing model. So could the wrong marketing emphasis be one of the reasons, along with a soft economy, for real shifts in consumer spending and overall loyalty? Given the data, it's likely. More

Five Tips For Getting More from Facebook
from Duct Tape Marketing
The author covers some tips for business use of Facebook. This can act as a quick primer for folks who like their info snack sized. More

When is it Time for a Redesign?
from MultiChannel Merchant
When do you know it's time to redesign your e-commerce site? That question was posed to a panel of three merchants during a session at eTail in Baltimore last week, and no one person had the same answer. But all three answers did have one common theme: If enough customers tell you that parts of your Website are affecting the shopping experience, then a redesign may be in order. More

Fed Views Recession as Near an End
from The New York Times
Almost exactly two years after it embarked on what was the biggest financial rescue in American history, the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that the recession is ending and that it would take a step back toward normal policy. More

Wholesale Prices Fall More Than Expected in July
from Fox News
Wholesale prices dropped sharply in July, and over the past 12 months fell by the largest amount in more than six decades of record keeping. That's triple the decline economists had expected and was driven by big decreases in both energy and food costs. Over the past 12 months, the prices of goods before they reach store shelves fell 6.8 percent. More

Gift Industry Hopes Flexibility Will Boost Sales
from Reuters
Wholesale and retail gift sellers hope a mix of personal attention and understanding will entice recession-battered buyers to spend this holiday season, vendors at a top trade show said. More

Most e-Retailers Let the Easy Pickings Go By
from Internet Retailer
One of the easiest ways to save a sale is to send a reminder to a shopper who has abandoned a cart that there is still merchandise in the cart waiting to be checked out. Yet barely 10 percent of the Internet Retailer Top 500 online retailers give shoppers the chance to retrieve an abandoned shopping cart, according to a test by e-mail marketing company Listrak. More

U.S. Retailers Tip-Toe Through Mobile Commerce Minefields
from StorefrontBacktalk
It began, arguably, with the iPhone two years ago and it hasn't let up: Consumer excitement about today's breed of Web-friendly smartphones is undeniable. So it's reasonable to expect that, by now, most major retailers would be running great mobile commerce sites designed to capitalize on this long-awaited blossoming of the Mobile Web. Reasonable, perhaps, but not real. More

PCI Talk is Cheap: Even Small Merchants Can Afford It
from StorefrontBacktalk
The author of this article had the opportunity over the last several months to help launch a research study of PCI compliance among small businesses, and the findings from this study were just published this week. It's very difficult to get small businesses interested in PCI compliance at all (judging from low attendance at the webinars and events aimed at that market), and hopefully this research can be used as a tool to understand why that is, and if anything can be done to raise awareness and motivate security improvements. More

Internet Marketing “Is as Effective as Television Campaigns”
from ClickThrough Marketing
Online advertising is as good a way of targeting consumers as campaigns for television, a new report suggests. According to findings from studies conducted by comScore and dunnhumbyUSA, looking at how successful web marketing is at converting retail sales of consumer packaged goods, internet advertising proved to build sales by an average of nine percent, compared with eight percent for television -- as measured by Information Resources. More

"Visual Time Machine" Created for Smart Phone Tourists
from Fox News
Doing virtual reality one better, a consortium of technology companies and European Union countries have created a "visual time machine" that allows tourists equipped with a smart phone to take a picture of an ancient object and then instantly review its history and see what it originally looked like. More