E-Commerce

Consumers spent a record $6.4 billion online on Thanksgiving, up 5.3 percent year-over-year (YoY) as shoppers took advantage of Cyber Week deals that came in stronger than expected. The spend is above Adobe’s initial forecast of $6.37 billion for the day (up 4.9 percent YoY). Online sales peaked between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Mobile shopping hit an all-time high on Thanksgiving,…

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In episode 495 of Total Retail Talks, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Joe Cano, senior vice president of digital commerce at Lowe's, a FORTUNE® 100 home improvement company. Cano details the company's approach to personalizing the digital shopping experience for both DIY homeowners and professional contractors (1:45). He explains how Lowe's uses real-time data and artificial…

During BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday) most brands focus on offering the biggest discount and driving as much traffic as possible. They blow money on promotions and ads, but waste the traffic they worked so hard to attract. The reason? Conversion leaks. The real winners optimize each part of the funnel and compound little improvements:…

E-commerce has been moving at warp speed lately, and it’s thanks to artificial intelligence. The last two years have brought more changes to online shopping — and how we discover products — than the two decades before. Consider this: Think back to 2023: Back then, shopping online for a game-day barbecue meant searching for each…

Search functionality has always been central to digital commerce. For years, it functioned like a rigid index, where shoppers typed in keywords and hoped the right products appeared. Now, as consumer expectations have evolved, that passive model fell behind. Today’s shoppers expect more than functional search; instead, they want guided discovery that's tailored to their…

Retailers everywhere are trying to prepare for a host of unknowns this holiday season, not least of which is how tariffs may impact consumer spending. Deloitte predicts that peak-season sales will grow only about 3 percent this year, the slowest pace since the pandemic. Yet within those muted expectations lies a bright spot: e-commerce is…

In episode 493 of Total Retail Talks, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Liza Lefkowski, vice president and chief merchant of stores at Wayfair,  a leading home and furniture retailer. The interview was recorded at Shoptalk Fall in Chicago last month. Lefkowski discusses Wayfair's strategy of using design, storytelling, and product curation to connect emotionally with customers…

Kelly Pedersen, a partner in PwC's Global Retail Division, discusses findings from the consulting firm's 2025 Holiday Outlook report. With 80 percent of holiday shopping expected to be completed by Cyber Monday, Pedersen advises retailers to stock early and focus on personalized offers. In this video interview, recorded at Total Retail Tech last month in…

While its systems are back online, yesterday's massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services outage brought down thousands of high-profile apps, websites and online platforms with it. The outage on Monday prevented consumers from making purchases on certain apps and websites whose e-commerce platforms, backend infrastructure, or customer-facing tools rely heavily on AWS. For example,…