Omnichannel

CNBC's Courtney Reagan speaks with Terry Lundgren, Macy's president and CEO, about the future of malls and competition in the retail sector. Lundgren also addresses the promotion of Jeff Gannett.

Retail entrepreneur Brett Markinson, the founder of Sole Society and HauteLook, has launched a new venture that he thinks will revolutionize the way shoppers find deals. It's called Savoir Mode and it collects and offers up discounts on current-season apparel. The site, which launched last week, is a bit novel in its approach. While flash sales contain discounted merchandise from previous seasons, Savoir Mode uses a special algorithm to pull items that have been recently marked down from hundreds of retailers.

Weighing the revenue generated by subscriptions against the cost of shipping, Amazon.com has clearly lost money on Prime. And let's be honest: Prime isn't about the Kindle lending library or the on-demand videos; it's about the fast, "free" delivery. So it's no surprise that Amazon's recent announcement of a price increase for Prime was welcomed by investors, who foresee improved margins in the coming years. Retailers should treat the announcement as good news too. Why?

According to a Forbes article titled "Why Aren't There More Powerful Women In Retail?," author Laura Heller questions why there were only a handful of women in the retail industry named to the publication's 2013 "World's 100 Most Powerful Women" list, which ranks the most powerful women by dollars, media presence and impact.

You may remember the scene in the movie "The Minority Report" when Tom Cruise's character enters a Gap store and is greeted by a hologram of a store associate who welcomes him back to the store and asks how his last purchase — assorted tank tops — worked out for him. When this movie was released in 2002, this personalized in-store experience seemed far into the future, but it's now almost upon us.

It's well known by now that U.S. retailers have been trying to combat declining mall traffic and increased online competition, and it's incumbent upon them to set themselves apart and get shoppers to visit their stores and open their wallets. In the industry's latest attempt to engage consumers, Japanese conglomerate Fast Retailing's Uniqlo chain on Friday became the first specialty apparel retailer to  install a Starbucks inside its 90,000-square-foot flagship store on Fifth Avenue, its largest location of the 1,400-store chain. 

During a keynote talk I delivered in London last week, I was asked the question: "What brands really 'get it' when it comes to customer experience today?" This wasn't a naïve question. It came from one of the 100 senior marketers from the strongest global brands in the world. The question extends beyond great digital customer journeys — Zappos, Peapod, Travelocity or AirBnB — and great physical customer spaces - Nordstrom, BMW, Southwest or Virgin. What company has so seamlessly integrated its

After Country Road, an apparel retailer located in Australia and New Zealand, acquired the Witchery and Mimco brands in 2012, the company quickly realized it had a massive change management issue to deal with, according to David von Blanckensee, the IT director at Country Road, who spoke at Oracle Connect in Boston this week.

Karen Katz, chief executive officer and president of Neiman Marcus Group, told a packed audience at the Oracle Industry Connect conference in Boston yesterday that the specialty retailer is putting a big focus — and a lot of money — into its technology infrastructure.

As retailers are tallying their holiday profits and setting a course for 2014, there are five ways that merchants can capitalize on their earnings and avoid pitfalls. The responsibility of retail profit margin and loses largely falls on marketers and merchandising leaders. By working together, they can improve their understanding of customer demands and product preferences.