Omnichannel

In this episode of Total Retail Tech Insights, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Eugene Yukin, vice president of products at MessageGears, the data activation and engagement platform that helps enterprises harness their data by streamlining the tech stack. Listen in as Yukin discusses his career experience in retail and product (1:10), the MessageGears platform (2:30), and…

It’s no secret that effective inventory management is essential to supply chain success. It enables organizations to maintain optimal stock levels, meet customer demand, minimize operational costs, and sustain healthy cash flow. Companies are always looking for ways to enhance inventory, whether by adopting better tracking systems, implementing just-in-time practices, or using advanced analytics. With…

For years, retail demand forecasting worked because consumer behavior was relatively consistent. Shoppers gravitated toward familiar brands, orders fell within predictable size ranges, and historical sales data was a reliable guide for inventory decisions. A 2026 consumer survey from Locus found that 45 percent of U.S. shoppers now use artificial intelligence as either a primary…

As retailers pour investment into customer-facing artificial intelligence, are they overlooking the operational foundations that decide success? The race to put an AI face on retail is accelerating. Shopping assistants, conversational storefronts, and agentic checkout powered by the likes of Gemini and ChatGPT — attention and budget are gravitating toward the customer interface. Yet critical…

The retail industry is increasingly adopting agentic artificial intelligence into its task execution processes. Industry analysts predict the market size for agentic AI in retail and e-commerce will grow from $60.43 billion this year to $218.37 billion by 2031. Yet when investing in AI, many retail technology leaders overlook the one area that determines whether…

Consumers can now discover products almost anywhere — streaming platforms, social feeds, artificial intelligence platforms. However, the systems that actually complete the transaction still lag far behind. Nowhere is that gap more visible, or more instructive, than shoppable TV, a format that has cycled through waves of enthusiasm for decades but has never fully scaled.…

When a retail supply chain technology implementation reaches go-live, the typical reaction inside the organization is relief. Months of planning, design sessions, data migration, integration work, testing, and executive updates are finally behind the team. The platform is live. The project dashboard turns green. The software vendor confirms the system is working as designed. Then…

During an interview at the 2026 CommerceNext Growth Show last month in New York City, Josh Friedman, senior vice president of e-commerce and digital at Ulta Beauty, shared the company's strategic focus on omnichannel engagement and personalization.

More than half of consumers (58 percent) have replaced traditional search engines with generative artificial intelligence tools for product recommendations. That figure was 25 percent just two years earlier. Your next storefront visitor may not be a person at all. It may be a large language model (LLM) deciding whether to recommend your products. Most…

On August 31, Shopify is sunsetting Stocky, a free inventory tool used by over 120,000 merchants. For most sellers of physical products and goods, there is no native replacement decided, and retailers will be left scrambling with Shopify’s condensed features. Furthermore,  Shopify has confirmed that current Stocky user data will not automatically migrate to its…