Something changed over the summer at BJ’s Wholesale Club. While customers continued to prioritize essential items such as groceries and cleaning supplies, an increasinging number also left the warehouse store with non-essential items such as apparel, home goods, and electronics.

Sales of general merchandise were up 1% in Q2, and now BJ’s is taking steps to make general merchandise more than just a last-minute addition to their shopping cart. “We know it’s important to our members,” CEO Bob Eddy told shareholders. ”Our job is to move it from an opportunistic business to one that generates trips by itself.”

The backdrop for BJ’s progress is that discretionary spending overall still trails non-discretionary, as higher prices and economic uncertainty give consumers pause. This pull back has been playing out for at least the past couple of years, but recent data and comments from retail executives suggest the category still has a way to go.

Keep reading here.—AV

Ever feel like you’re always on the hunt for more information? Listrak gets it. So they enhanced their existing integration with Shopify to ensure marketers have access to more data, analytics, and tools to drive meaningful outcomes.

Here’s the quick deets on the Listrak x Shopify integration, which:

• provides marketers with supercharged cross-channel personalization and automation
• empowers marketers with the tools to enrich and augment their first-party customer data
• enables marketers to deliver new enhanced levels of personalization, segmentation, and automation across email, mobile, and push marketing channels

If your brand is on Shopify, you’re already halfway down the path to taking advantage of the ultimate marketing powerhouse. With Listrak x Shopify, you can prepare for what’s next in e-commerce by taking advantage of frictionless, real-time sharing of actionable data.

Read all about it.

While Halloween-heads are busy propping up their 12-foot skeletons, industry experts are crunching the numbers for their first holiday season sales forecasts.

Deloitte predicts holiday sales between November and January will increase 2.3% to 3.3% in 2024 from the year before, marking a slowdown from a 4.3% increase in 2023.

Although as Salesforce pointed out in its own holiday forecast, the 2024 holiday season is at a slight disadvantage with the fewest number of days since 2019. The platform is also predicting a slowdown: with a 2% YoY bump in US sales growth, compared to a 3% increase in 2023.

Keep reading here.—AV

Faire is stepping into the holy grail of digital advertising—retail media—with the launch of its first advertising tool, Promoted Listings.

Faire’s Chief Product Officer Ami Vora told Retail Brew that promoted listings is focused on “driving real growth” for smaller brands like Cheese Brothers, Lark Fine Foods, and Honey House Naturals that sell in bulk on its site.

The ad shows up like a product tile on Faire, an online wholesale marketplace that stocks 100,000 brands on its platform, with a promoted tag. Vora said users will most commonly find these ads on the search page, and Faire will feed them the promoted ads that might match what they’re searching for.

Keep reading here.—VC

Your BFCM BFF. Gearing up to convert curious shoppers into loyal customers this holiday season? Eko’s Guide to Product Storytelling is here to help. It’s got actionable tips for how to create compelling product narratives that help your brand cut through the clutter during Black Friday Cyber Monday and beyond. Get your guide.