Payment Options

What do you do when thousands of mobile industry leaders from around the world get together in one place? You take their collective pulse with a survey, of course. This was the third annual Sybase 365/SAP Mobile survey of the operators, fixed telco providers, over-the-top players and other industry execs at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. 

eBay buyers reported yesterday that when they attempted to pay sellers for their eBay purchases, PayPal charged their accounts multiple times. The glitch also affected the PayPal IPN (Instant Payment Notifications) on merchants' own websites. The glitch...

If you have an online catalog or e-commerce site, you already know that a critical aspect of conversion optimization is reducing your cart abandonment rate. According to comScore, 67 percent of shopping carts are abandoned just before the purchase is made. If your site stats are similar, that means 67 percent of the money you've put toward getting traffic to come to your site has gone to waste. It also means you have a huge opportunity to improve your profitability simply by addressing these three common reasons shoppers bail.

Is Best Buy's gain Amazon.com's loss? An article/discussion last month on RetailWire explored the reasons behind Amazon's continued sales growth in states even after it has begun to collect sales tax. Now, a Best Buy financial report shows that while its physical stores didn't get a huge boost in states where Amazon has started to add sales tax charges to purchases, its website has seen a pickup in sales.

Wal-Mart Stores may be facing sizeable fines related to allegations of widespread bribery at its Mexican affiliate, after a second report from the New York Times provided more details about the scope of the potential...

What shoppers seem to want most this holiday season is free shipping. But at what cost? Before the end of 2012, about 90 percent of retailers say they will offer free shipping, according to Shop.org, the website of the National Retail Federation trade group. But that kind of near-universal acceptance leaves a lot of room for variety.

Square has lined up its first luxury brand partner, a new report claims. Square and the Burberry clothing chain are testing out a deal to see how the payment processing might work in its stores, The Next Web reported, citing people who claim to have knowledge of the deal. The announcement could be made soon. Burberry Chief Technology Officer John Douglas already spilled the beans, albeit unofficially. On Twitter last week, Douglas noted that Square was "live in our Burberry Brit store in San Francisco."

Citing internal research indicating that nearly two-thirds of home improvement customers shop at more than one retailer and that lack of differentiation is the culprit, Lowe's newly minted Chief Customer Officer Gregory Bridgeford identified multiple steps the retailer is taking to grow share of wallet among its customers. "There's a real opportunity to create a more differentiated brand experience and earn greater customer loyalty," said Bridgeford during a recent presentation to analysts. "We've chosen to focus on delivering better customer experiences rather than differentiating on price or product alone."

Did your customer experience get on the naughty list? Check out the following infographic to find out the top customer service mistakes made and how you can get your brand on the nice list.

The digital consumer is turning conventional marketing wisdom on its head. This fundamental shift in the way that consumers connect with brands means that retailers must evaluate how to create meaningful connections. It used to be that relationships were forged by friendly face-to-face conversations in brick-and-mortar stores. Now, those consumer connections are happening across various channels — telephone conversations, e-commerce websites, mobile devices, blogs, social media sites, in-store.