Omnichannel

Sears has been struggling for a few years now, and matters weren't helped by a less-than-stellar holiday season for the retailer. The department store chain is trying to avoid bankruptcy with a new plan, closing 150 more stores — including 108 Kmart locations — and selling its Craftsman brand to raise cash. USA Today reports…

If Italian eyewear brand Luxottica — which controls 80 percent of the frames and sunglasses market — is an 800-pound gorilla, then Warby Parker is a chimpanzee: lean, agile and smart enough to shake things up. Where did Warby Parker Co-Founder Neil Blumenthal get the gusto to take on the incumbent ape? Before starting Warby…

For retailers big and small, the holiday shopping season is both the tipping point into profitability and the springboard to success for the coming year. Therefore, my team at Square Root studied and surveyed consumers this holiday season to gain a deeper understanding of what drives in-store shopping for the holidays. The overarching discovery from…

Best Buy has joined the list of retailers opening outlet stores in 2017. The Dallas Morning News reports Best Buy has opened five locations this month in Farmers Branch, Texas, near Dallas; San Antonio; Raleigh, N.C.; near Philadelphia in Newark, Del.; and outside Los Angeles in Moreno Valley, Calif. A spokesperson for the electronics brand said…

Retailers have made their holiday lists — and checked them twice. With the holiday shopping season in full swing, retailers need to review their strategies and leverage technology to make this holiday season as successful as possible, both in terms of sales and omnichannel customer experience. Even on what are traditionally the biggest in-store shopping days…

As 2016 ends, retail marketers and senior executives will take a long, hard look at their company’s margins over the last year, goals that were attained, best practices that worked and strategies that didn’t — all in an effort to reprioritize and gear up for success in the New Year. Retailers should always keep in…

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday let stand a Colorado tax law that pressures online retailers to collect sales tax. In its latest order list, the Court announced that it won’t hear a challenge to a February ruling by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that sided with Colorado in a lawsuit from the retail industry.…

Starbucks is making news … again. Yesterday, the coffee Goliath announced it will join the growing wave of companies using artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots to supplement employees, planning to unveil what it calls an “innovative conversational ordering system.” GeekWire reports that the ordering system will be available via the Starbucks app and titled “My Starbucks Barista.”…

Customers typically represent a widely diverse range of backgrounds, ages and preferences, but when it comes to how they want to interact with retailers for service requests, they have more in common than you might think. A recent worldwide study of more than 24,000 consumers and 1,000 businesses makes it clear — consumers everywhere, of…

In episode 65 of Total Retail Talks, Jim Garlow, director of marketing operations at CDW, a leading B-to-B retailer of computers, hardware, software and IT solutions, talks about how the company is managing the customer experience through all the different ways it interacts with and markets to its customers. Garlow discusses CDW's strategy for segmenting…