User Experience

Imagine you’re a retailer that guides a shopper to an artificial intelligence agent to return a pair of shoes. From a system perspective, measuring the agent’s performance seems simple: either it issues a refund or it doesn’t. But from a customer perspective, that only shows a sliver of the experience. If the refund requires multiple…

For decades, retailers have invested heavily in owning the customer relationship. Loyalty programs, first-party data, and personalization engines were all designed to ensure brands, not intermediaries, understand their customers best. That foundation is now at risk of slipping away as artificial intelligence-powered platforms increasingly take over the shopping experience. As consumers increasingly discover and purchase…

It seems like every holiday season brings record-breaking revenue, yet many retailers may neglect to prepare their sites for the influx of users. For events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, slow load times, difficult-to-navigate interfaces, or checkout failures can frustrate potential customers, leading them to abandon their carts altogether. Simulating holiday traffic is a…

Online shoppers don’t wake up wishing for fewer clicks between them and checkout. They wish for ease, trust, and to feel understood. Until recently, the idea that a shopper could describe what they wanted in plain language, get curated options, and complete a purchase all inside a single artificial intelligence chat window felt like a…

Retailers have spent the last decade obsessing over conversion rates, checkout optimization, and reducing friction for human buyers. However, a new customer has quietly entered the market, one that doesn’t browse the way humans do, doesn’t type into forms, and doesn’t tolerate broken workflows. Who are they? Artificial intelligence agents. According to Sean Neville, cofounder…

The way people interact with retail sites is changing, and this past holiday shopping season made that very clear. Shoppers have relied on comparison tools and search assistants for years. However, a new pattern emerged last year, with automated activity shaping the experience in ways that were hard to see from the outside. New research…

Gift cards continue to be one of the most resilient and valuable product categories in retail, and the latest research shows that their importance is only growing. According to new findings from NAPCO Research and Blackhawk Network (BHN), the U.S. and Canada gift card market is projected to reach $311.7 billion by 2029, reinforcing gift…

When growth slows, customer experience (CX) becomes the new currency of competition. The retailers that thrive will be those that turn CX signals into decisions that drive measurable revenue, opportunities to reduce costs and risk, and improve the cultures of their organizations. This playbook shows how to make that shift: organize journeys, prioritize the highest-impact…

Last year’s holiday season set new records for online shopping, with e-commerce sales on Black Friday climbing more than 10 percent and Cyber Monday sales up more than 7 percent year-over-year, according to Adobe Analytics. With this year’s peak season expected to bring even higher online volumes, retailers must be ready to handle surging traffic,…

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…