Mobile Commerce

During the 2017 holiday shopping season, retailers saw a 5.5 percent increase in sales from the previous year. Now that the holiday crush has come and gone, most executives are busy celebrating a huge jump over the prior year, and consumers are still dizzy from another whirlwind shopping season with delayed shipments and missing packages.…

If there’s any reliable barometer for the picture of retail throughout the year, it’s Black Friday — the day retailers plan to bring in their biggest sales figures and customers in droves. At close of Black Friday last year, in-store sales were down less than 1 percent year-over-year, according to ShopperTrak, considerably better than the…

As we begin a new year, it’s time to reflect on what changed in the last 12 months. What worked and what didn’t? Is your retail business keeping up with shifting consumer behaviors? My main observation is that social mobile shopping by millennials is by far the most important trend, presenting a fantastic opportunity that we…

Each day, the world seems bigger, more diverse and moves much faster. Predicting the future — always a dubious proposition — seems like a fool’s errand in this climate, given the dizzying pace of disruption. But as Peter Drucker once said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” For retailers, that…

A common question regarding web design and performance is which is better, a rich customer experience or a leaner website that loads faster? This is a question eBags posed. And the path the online retailer of handbags, luggage, backpacks and travel accessories chose generated 10 percent more orders. Here's how eBags did it. New UX…

Do small and new online retailers have a chance to succeed anymore? Industry analysts say that 2017's parade of acquisitions by major retailers — Whole Foods by Amazon.com, Kate Spade by Coach, HSN by QVC, among others — are making it harder for smaller retailers to survive. How can SMB sellers compete with these players’ same-day…

As we enter the home stretch toward the biggest gift-giving days of the year, you might be thinking “what’s done is done,” that it’s too late now to address any e-tail website issues. However, rather than wait until after the holidays and risk leaving last-minute shoppers disappointed and frustrated with your site — which could…

Retailers around the world have been working hard to make sure they have a successful holiday shopping season. From new storefronts to early promotions, retailers put in months of preparation to ensure they meet sales projections and outperform competitors. Now that shoppers are more likely to reach for their smartphones and tablets than log on…

Earlier this fall, eBay announced that it had launched two new image-based search tools — Image Search, Find It On eBay — for its mobile apps. The artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features enable shoppers to use pictures instead of words to search eBay’s catalog of 1.1 billion items. In this interview with Giri Iyengar, head of…

The buzz around progressive web apps (PWAs) has been building since designer Frances Berriman and Google Chrome engineer Alex Russell coined the term back in 2015. These mobile apps that progressively load and run in a web browser promise to blur the lines between native apps and the mobile web by bringing (almost) all the…