Today on Total Retail

Carter’s announced that Sharon Price John, a veteran children’s consumer and retail executive, will become chief executive officer and president and join the board effective June 15, 2026, following her 13-year tenure leading Build-A-Bear Workshop through a profitability-focused transformation. In connection with her appointment, Douglas C. Palladini departed as CEO, president, and director effective April…

We're moving rapidly into the era of agentic commerce — a shift in which AI-powered digital agents shop, compare, and purchase on behalf of consumers, making the transaction itself nearly invisible. Rather than manually browsing websites, filtering options, and navigating checkouts, customers increasingly delegate these tasks to smart assistants that handle the entire purchase journey.…

For the past two years, much of the retail artificial intelligence conversation has centered on e-commerce — personalization, chatbots and, increasingly, agentic commerce. The assumption has been that the most advanced applications of AI would emerge where digital interaction is richest. However, some of the most disciplined, and potentially most impactful, uses of AI in…

New research suggests that e-commerce fraud rates will increase dramatically over the next several years, growing 141 percent between today and 2029. One new driving force is Fraud-as-a-Service (FaaS), a rapidly growing business model in the cybercrime underworld where sophisticated hackers develop, sell or rent ready-made tools, infrastructure and expertise to novice attackers. This essentially…

Artificial intelligence in retail, especially agentic AI, first seemed to promise a leap forward in customer experience. In 2026, though, AI is likely to have the most influence on customer behavior. We’re already seeing behavior shift in ways that are pushing retailers to rethink their discovery, partnership, and channel strategies. In this article, we’ll look…

H&M launched on Tuesday on Nordstrom Marketplace, expanding the brand's reach and marking its first launch on a curated retail marketplace in the U.S. H&M is making its marketplace debut with a curated selection of womenswear, menswear and childrenswear, alongside the brand’s activewear line, H&M Move. The offering is expected to be refreshed regularly with new seasonal…

Today’s marketers are integrating generative artificial intelligence solutions across workflows, automating key components of campaign creation and orchestration. And they're seeing results in record time. However, the next era of AI-enabled marketing strategies will not be centered on automation. Tomorrow’s marketing leaders will be focused on building agentic AI solutions that can handle complex workflows…

Consolidation has long been a key growth strategy across retail and CPG. Big companies have spent decades buying up competitors, acquiring niche brands, and expanding into new categories. Why? Ideally, a large, varied portfolio would drive scale, diversification, market share, consumer trend alignment, and business growth. But as the industry evolves, are portfolio cracks starting…

For years, the conversation around commerce media has been dominated by technology and data. The industry has obsessed over the fixtures, including the API integrations, first-party audiences, closed-loop measurement capabilities, and the algorithmic precision of retail media networks. Yet, as we enter a more complex economic landscape, many organizations are finding that the most sophisticated…

Something strange is happening in e-commerce. Consumer spending is up. Online time is up. Yet traffic to major retail websites is declining. The answer is actually quite simple: shoppers are changing how they research and where they buy. Their starting point, which used to be about discovery, is now where they're making decisions. Many may…