Inventory Management

As retailers pour investment into customer-facing artificial intelligence, are they overlooking the operational foundations that decide success? The race to put an AI face on retail is accelerating. Shopping assistants, conversational storefronts, and agentic checkout powered by the likes of Gemini and ChatGPT — attention and budget are gravitating toward the customer interface. Yet critical…

On August 31, Shopify is sunsetting Stocky, a free inventory tool used by over 120,000 merchants. For most sellers of physical products and goods, there is no native replacement decided, and retailers will be left scrambling with Shopify’s condensed features. Furthermore,  Shopify has confirmed that current Stocky user data will not automatically migrate to its…

From jerseys to hats to keychains, major sporting events like the World Cup create massive retail opportunities with the popularity of themed merchandise. They also create inventory challenges, especially for an event that takes place only once every four years and marks its first time in the U.S. since 1994. Event-themed and seasonal inventory presents…

Most retailers still think of RFID as a counting tool. The ones gaining ground have figured out it's something else entirely. I've spent the better part of two decades working in retail technology — including in IT at lululemon, at Avery Dennison, and as a vice president of supply chain at PVH — and the…

Managing inventory is challenging across all industries, but retailers face the added challenge of scale. While a standard company may need to plan for 100,000 products in a single warehouse, a major retailer needs to manage that same volume across thousands of different store locations. This makes even basic data collection difficult. For example, even…

Inventory data has quietly become the most important customer experience (CX) system in modern retail, and the foundation of true, storewide intelligence that connects what customers see on shelves with what systems believe is available. When shelf reality and system reality match, every other experience promised — from personalization to buy online, pick up in-store…

After attending NRF Big Show earlier this year and EuroShop more recently, it’s clear that retailers aren’t short of ideas. They’re focused on what actually works, consistently, across stores, day in and day out, and that shift points to a broader reality the industry has been circling for some time. Retail’s biggest challenge is execution…

Imagine this: a shopper walks into a store, spots a sleek digital display promoting a popular item, and makes a beeline toward it, only to come away empty-handed because the item is sold out. It’s a small moment, but one that leaves a lasting impression. While retailers have invested heavily in digital signage to modernize…

Retail profit margins in 2026 are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Operating costs are sky high and tariffs have dampened consumer spending, triggering the largest e-commerce slowdown in more than a decade. In addition, returns are taking a huge bite out of profits, accounting for an estimated 19.3 percent of e-commerce sales in 2025. With profitability under…

The first brush with “agentic shopping” often feels deceptively simple. A short ChatGPT or Gemini prompt, “Find a blue quarter-zip sweater in men’s size large,” produces, within seconds, a neatly curated set of results, complete with images, prices and purchase links. While discovery feels effortless, the next step, however, still reveals a familiar frustration: perhaps…