Today on Total Retail

Pool supply and service retailer Leslie’s has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company entered into a Restructuring Support Agreement with a group of its existing lenders, according to the company. Leslie's also announced the closure of 76 stores, but the locations of those stores were not immediately known. The company, which sells pumps, covers…

Brands like BYLT Basics that grew up entirely on paid social and site conversion are reaching a new stage of growth. In this interview, recorded at Total Retail Tech last month in Dallas, BYLT Chief Marketing Officer Davide Mattucci shares why brick-and-mortar is such an important part of the premium menswear brand's future. He discusses…

Retail has spent years perfecting the customer-facing chatbot. Faster replies, automated returns, instant order updates, and self-service tools designed to shorten the wait between a shopper’s question and an answer. Every holiday season brings another wave of investment toward the same goal, and retailers have made tremendous progress improving what customers can see. Now, as…

For many retail operations teams, Black Friday week is still the operational summit of the year: peak staffing, peak inventory positioning, peak everything. InMarket’s 2026 Holiday Shopping InSights report, drawn from InMarket’s commerce and visitation data alongside a survey fielded with Kantar, suggests that assumption is wrong for most of the industry, and the operational…

AI should work as a new sales channel, not another platform standing between the small business and its customers. A merchant's store should remain the place where customer, order, and payment data lives. AI should connect to that, not replace it.

According to the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) latest research, shoplifting incidents fell 12.4 percent last year, an improvement NRF credits to investment in technology and training. The same research finds violence hasn't followed it down. lululemon’s CEO has publicly said staff are trained to step back and let theft occur; Circle K’s policy bars verbal…

U.S. online sales are forecasted to grow 6.7 percent this holiday season, nearly the same ​pace as last year, as promotions attract ‌deal-seeking shoppers, Adobe Analytics reported on Monday. Higher household costs are making shoppers more selective and value-seeking. ​Retailers, including Walmart, Kohl's, and American Eagle Outfitters, have raised concerns ​on consumers' spending capacity ahead…

Every brand has a peak season story it doesn't tell publicly. The viral SKU that kept selling for six hours after inventory hit zero. The returns that sat received-but-unrecorded through the first week of January while refund tickets stacked up behind them. Nothing broke, exactly. Every system did its job. They just didn't tell each…

Retailers engaged in online commerce with third-party sellers are generally well equipped to catch clear violations, such as a prohibited product, a known bad actor, or an obvious policy breach. Technology can typically catch these violations, often before a seller even begins transacting on a platform. The problem, however, is that bad actors are becoming…

Every retailer is hearing the same message right now: use artificial intelligence to create more personalized experiences. Produce more content. Launch more campaigns. Tailor every interaction. For years, personalization was viewed as the pinnacle of customer experience. If brands understood individual customers, the more relevant and effective their marketing became. Then generative AI changed the…