E-Commerce

A shopper looking for a Christmas gift for a coworker is making a very different decision from someone decorating a small apartment or searching for an easy craft to make with children. Yet retailers often ask all three shoppers to navigate product information built around the same basic fields: category, brand, price, color and specifications.…

For years, preparing for the holiday shopping season meant launching bigger campaigns, promoting earlier, and ensuring inventory could keep pace with demand. Today, artificial intelligence is changing what peak season readiness requires. Consumers now move seamlessly between social media, e-commerce, reviews, and customer service before deciding whether to make a purchase, creating more opportunities for…

Investment in warehouse automation has moved from experimentation to a genuine spending priority for retailers racing to meet delivery expectations. Roughly 4.7 million commercial robots are expected to be installed across more than 50,000 warehouses worldwide by the end of 2026, according to recent warehouse automation research. And the automation market is on pace to…

Retailers have spent the last decade investing heavily in customer experience. They've optimized websites, refined mobile journeys, embraced personalization, and invested in CRM platforms to better understand their customers. Collectively, these efforts have transformed how people discover and buy products online. However, while businesses have become increasingly sophisticated at winning the sale, many still underestimate…

The National Retail Federation forecasts U.S. retail sales will reach $5.6 trillion in 2026, reflecting continued growth in an increasingly competitive market. As retailers prepare for the year's busiest shopping season in Q4, every pricing decision, promotion, and merchandising strategy carries greater weight. That's why the recently completed Prime Day cycle deserves more attention than…

The Home Depot enhanced its AI assistant, Magic Apron, to include localized store knowledge to assist in-store shoppers, reports Yahoo Tech. The retailer said in a Thursday press release that the tool is now available in all of the company's over 2,000 U.S. locations. Customers can access the tool while using Store Mode in the…

Eighty-four percent of software developers report they're using or planning to use artificial intelligence coding tools. These tools are especially useful in front-end e-commerce development, dramatically increasing developer productivity, accelerating feature delivery, reducing routine work, and more. Unfortunately, adoption of AI coding tools can often mean that digital accessibility suffers. Over the past decade, we’ve…

Millions of user records belonging to Carhartt customers have been leaked onto the dark web, exposing people’s names, email addresses, postal addresses, and phone numbers, to all sorts of scammers and cybercriminals. The infamous ShinyHunters ransomware gang recently added Carhartt to its data leak site, saying negotiations broke down. ShinyHunters uploaded the entire data archive…

In episode 515 of Total Retail Talks, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, a certified B Corp online book retailer supporting independent bookstores. Listen in as Hunter explains the book retailer's mission and revenue-sharing marketplace model (0:47), his career journey that led to launching Bookshop.org (2:40), and what's driven its…

Walmart announced on Friday it will finally accept Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other tap-to-pay methods at its U.S. stores after holding out for over a decade, reports Yahoo Finance. Starting this past Monday, Aug. 24, Walmart and Sam's Club rolled out tap-to-pay options at select locations, allowing shoppers to pay with contactless cards, smartphones,…