E-Commerce

The retail industry spent the past decade building big. Scale was every CIO's mantra — massive systems designed to support millions of users and petabytes of data. And for a while, that strategy worked. E-commerce platforms handle holiday spikes. Cloud infrastructure powers businesses of every size. The engineering challenge of scale has largely been solved.…

Retail technology teams face a paradox: artificial intelligence is transforming how software gets built, yet the very tools that accelerate delivery are outpacing the security processes designed to protect it. For retailers competing on digital experience, faster development is essential. However, as the use of generative AI to create code and automate features becomes standard…

At Shoptalk in Las Vegas last month, Total Retail Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan spoke with Elina Vilk, president and chief business officer, and Lisa Horton, chief communications and creative officer at David's Bridal, the wedding technology company, media powerhouse, and marketplace platform. They discuss the bridal company's "Aisle to Algorithm" strategy, balancing the risks and rewards…

Artificial intelligence is already reshaping retail payments in practical ways. The impact is not theoretical. It is visible in how transactions are approved, how devices operate, and how customers move through the buying journey. The biggest structural change is in real-time decisioning. Retailers rely on fast, consistent payment flows, and friction at checkout directly affects…

Scam robocalls continue to generate the largest volume of consumer complaints received by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Recent data show that scam and telemarketing calls increased by 15.6 percent in 2025 compared to the prior year, adding roughly 420 million additional scam calls each month. For retail and e-commerce companies, the implications are real…

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…