Demandware

I was excited to interview Tom Ebling last week, a true retail technology leader whose stint as CEO of Demandware from 2010-2016 included growing the software company into a $300 million public company that was acquired by Salesforce for $2.8 billion in 2016. Prior to Demandware, Ebling was the CEO of Lattice Engines, ProfitLogic and…

In episode 10 of Total Retail Talks, Total Retail's Executive Editor Joe Keenan interviews Rob Garf, vice president of industry insights and strategy at Demandware, an enterprise, cloud-based commerce platform provider, on the impact Twitter's "Buy" button will have on retailers’ operations, as well as consumers’ growing acceptance of social commerce.

At the Demandware XChange conference in Las Vegas this week, Kyle Phillips, director of e-commerce technology at Carter's; and Michael Valeiko, director e-commerce development, and Lukas Agrapidis, director of e-commerce technology, both of Sleepy's, talked about how their brands are using geolocation to drive customer engagement and conversions.

You hear it over and over again — test, test, test — but how many of you are actually following that advice? Testing is a critical component to website optimization, and two companies that have taken heed of this fact are casual footwear retailer Crocs and women's fashion apparel brand Aritzia. In a session yesterday at the Demandware XChange conference in Las Vegas, Scott Keller, senior web developer at Aritzia, and Haley Nemann, senior manager of global e-commerce user experience at Crocs, discussed how their brands are using A/B testing to increase sales, decrease costs and increase customer engagement.

For Lush Cosmetics, an omnichannel retailer of handmade cosmetic and beauty products, everything the brand does has a story, from its product creation (all prodcuts are handmade in-house) to its ethical buying practices for its sourced materials to its chartitable giving to its ethical campaigns.

The retail industry is in the midst of an omnichannel revolution, led by increased consumer confidence in web and mobile shopping, said John Kalinich, senior vice president of omnichannel and e-commerce at Deckers Brands, parent company of brands such as UGG and Teva, in his keynote address at the Demandware XChange conference in Las Vegas yesterday.

Before we get to pay with our cards, we typically have to queue at a cash register first and finally insert a credit or debit card into a point-of-sale terminal. That will start to change in 2015. Consumers will be able to cut the line because more and more sales associates will be equipped with mobile POS (mPOS) terminals — small, high-tech devices connected to smartphones or tablets — in order to process our payments on the sales floor.

Though the introduction of Apple Pay was lauded as technical nirvana by some, retail veterans know the industry has been testing near-field communication (NFC) and other advanced payment methods for more than a decade. Sure, Apple will benefit from recent retailer investments in NFC-equipped payment terminals, but adoption of these terminals has been slow. So what does this mean? The iPhone's mobile payment capabilities will change retail as we know it … eventually. Here's how I think it will do it.

Creating dynamic content that entices customers to order your merchandise and creates memorable shopping experiences is essential to maximizing traffic, conversion rates and average order size. Follow these five steps to help you accomplish that goal: