U.S. retail sales over the upcoming November-December holiday shopping season are poised to set a new record this year and top $1 trillion for the first time, Bain & Company forecasts. The new all-time high for holiday sales is expected to be driven by 4.5 percent year-over-year (YoY) growth in nominal terms, well ahead of…

Retailers have spent years and billions of dollars on digital expansion, prioritizing e-commerce, marketplaces, and social commerce to be where their customers shop. And that investment might be paying off as a brand’s omnichannel presence strengthens consumer confidence. Recent Radial research found that 39 percent of consumers say they trust a brand more when it's…

Every earnings season brings another wave of headlines attributing retail and fulfillment gains to artificial intelligence. Stock prices react, press releases multiply, and retailers are told that a new era of automation has arrived. Yet a closer look at what's actually being described often reveals something less revolutionary: optimization logic, routing rules, and automated decisioning…

When retail executives think about cybersecurity, minds jump to classic nightmare scenarios: blacked-out register screens during peak holiday shopping, supply chain halts at distribution centers, or encrypted point-of-sale (POS) databases. But retail’s threat landscape has fundamentally evolved. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in the retail industry rose to $3.8 million…

Faster delivery is becoming an expensive promise to keep. It became a default expectation, but rising delivery costs, high return volumes, and tariff uncertainty are reshaping inventory plans. The National Retail Federation's latest estimate puts holiday returns at about 17 percent of sales, on top of nearly $850 billion in merchandise returned industry-wide annually. Growing…