E-Commerce

When shopping online, customers expect everything to work seamlessly. There’s no room for friction like a pricing error, payment failure, or out-of-stock item masquerading as “in stock.” If anything goes wrong, online shoppers take their business elsewhere. That’s why e-commerce continuity is table stakes for retailers today, especially when high-profile events such as Cyber Monday…

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…

In large retail operations, category management teams spend significant time deciding which product goes onto which shelf and in which order. Shelf space is very expensive real estate in retail. According to Consumer Packaged Goods(CPG) Research, 10 percent improvement in shelf availability can drive a 5 percent sales lift. Shelf updates don’t happen frequently because…

For retailers, the mobile inbox has become an extension of the storefront. Promotional alerts, order updates, loyalty rewards and curbside pickup confirmations increasingly reach customers through text messaging. SMS continues to outperform email in engagement, and consumers routinely open and act on messages delivered directly to their phones. Yet as retailers rely more heavily on…

Target announced on Wednesday it was reducing prices for more than 3,000 "on-trend" items across apparel, home baby, food and beverages for spring. The company said most of the price reductions would be between 5 percent and 20 percent. It's unclear how long the lower prices will last. Cara Sylvester, executive vice president and chief…

New York Fashion Week (NYFW) has always been about more than what happens on the runway. Look behind the shows and you’ll see a real-time signal of how the fashion industry is evolving and where its biggest pressures lie. As I spoke with designers, brand leaders, and retail executives at NYFW last month, one theme…

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…

A new global consumer survey from SOTI, Retail Tech Assessment: Opportunities for Enhanced Consumer Experiences, reveals a retail landscape shaped by rising anxiety and shifting expectations. Drawing on insights from thousands of consumers, the report highlights how fraud, economic uncertainty and supply chain disruption influence how people shop — and whom they trust. For retailers,…

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…

Artificial intelligence can identify your target audience in seconds, optimize campaigns in milliseconds, and generate hundreds of creative variations in minutes. Marketing automation has never been more powerful — or more tempting. Yet the marketers winning right now aren't the ones automating everything. They're the ones who know exactly what not to automate. Because while…