E-Commerce

Over the past two years, I've had dozens of conversations with retailers evaluating artificial intelligence tools and capabilities. No matter the size of the business or the sophistication of the technology, the discussions tend to follow a familiar pattern with the same several questions coming up again and again. The conversation usually starts with two…

As agentic artificial intelligence moves from pilot projects to production environments, retail CIOs are facing a growing challenge: How to accurately measure the total cost of ownership (TCO) of systems whose underlying economics change almost every quarter? Most organizations instinctively start with token costs, API consumption, and model pricing. That approach is understandable because inference…

In this episode of Total Retail Tech Insights, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Sarah Kositzke, global insights director at Blackhawk Network (BHN), the world’s largest network of gift cards and branded payment solutions. Listen in as Kositzke provides an overview of BHN and her role (1:15), current gift card market trends (3:10), and the recently released…

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) has a customer problem — and merchants play a bigger role than they may realize. According to The Motley Fool's 2025 Buy Now, Pay Later Trends Study, roughly one in four Americans regret using BNPL, and 29 percent have made late payments. A growing number of shoppers are juggling multiple…

The big summer sale season kicked off with a bang this year, with Amazon electing to move its annual summer promotion from July to June. This tactical shift meant that Amazon Prime Day, Walmart Deals, and Target Circle Deal Days overlapped during the last week of June, creating one of the most competitive promotional periods…

Food waste sits at the intersection of some of the biggest challenges facing retailers today. As grocers face tighter margins and growing pressure to improve sustainability, how they manage waste in-store has become one of the primary levers they can pull. The scale of the issue is hard to ignore. Global food waste costs have…

Join the industry event for senior executives leading the future of retail technology. Total Retail Tech is being held Sept. 14-16 in Dallas. This free, all-inclusive event for qualified retail executives brings together leaders who oversee technology and marketing strategy to learn from industry experts and each other in a small-group setting. Retail and brand…

Conversations shift fast in retail. A year ago, many were wondering if artificial intelligence was here to stay. Today, the focus has shifted firmly to realizing gains from the many and ever-growing AI investments. Given this sort of change is unprecedented even by technology’s rapid standards, the consequences are real and business value will be…

Retailers have spent the last two decades focused on conversion: driving more traffic, reducing checkout friction, tuning site search, and personalizing the experience. Those things still matter, they just don't answer the question that now decides whether many shoppers buy: What is the customer actually trying to accomplish? That's an intent problem. For years, e-commerce…

E-commerce IT teams are drowning in notifications. Nearly every system component involved in moving customers through checkout — payment gateways, inventory databases, fulfillment engines, fraud screening tools — pings someone the moment something looks off. The intent is to catch problems before customers do, but for many retailers the result is the opposite. Teams are…