Retail Stores

Think back to before you recognized the screech of AOL dial-up connecting the triangle to the key. Back in the damp darkness of the pre-web, when you read about things in glossy magazines and saw them on TV. Then, if you wanted them badly enough, and it wasn't raining outside, you put on your coat and tromped down to Main Street to buy them. Fast-forward to today, where, by the magic of the interwebs, all that reading and watching and shopping can happen in one place online. Efficient, right? Well, no.

As spring sports move into full swing, Under Armour's customer service team is ready to play ball. The sportswear retailer topped three of four categories in STELLAService's Monthly Benchmarks report for March. Under Armour was dominant in phone support, besting its peers in issue resolution, product knowledge, policy knowledge and total time to reach a live agent. The retailer's email issue resolution was 20 percent better than its closest competitor in the metric. And, the company had the best package quality and fit in the vertical.

A still-shocked Tarek Hassan described the scene in front of his two Tannery stores on Boylston Street Tuesday afternoon, one day after the deadly bomb attacks near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.  Hassan, who ran the race with Tannery store manager Andrew Hampshire, said he was still reeling from the incident. (He was about a half a mile away from finishing the 26.2-mile race when he heard the explosion.) "This seems like the next big thing after Sept. 11," Hassan said. "It gives us a flashback to what happened [then]."

The Facebook pages for Silpada Designs (174K likes), Boot Barn (590K likes) and 1-800-PetMeds (110K likes) are full of color, variety, warmth and humor. All three brands have a lot of fun with their fans on the social platform, and while not all of their posts succeed, they're earning — and sustaining — engagement.

When I was a kid, assembling my Christmas list meant snipping photos from the back of the Service Merchandise catalog. I relished the arrival of that thick, glossy tome each fall, not least because its pages meant my first look at that season’s new line

So much for new spring shorts and T-shirts. As cold weather lingered across most of the country, Americans shopped modestly in March. U.S. retailers reported a key revenue figure rose slightly during the month, as shoppers held back on spending because of the cold weather across the nation, particularly the Midwest and East Coast, and continued fears about the economy. Economists monitor consumer spending because it accounts for more than 70 percent of economic activity

Traffic from image search isn't paid traffic, but it isn't free either. Those seeking to have their images rise to the top of image SERPs will need to invest time and effort in the images themselves and in the text describing them that help the search engines put them into their proper context and category. Here are a few things you can do to improve the search performance of your images:

Earlier this year while at the National Retail Federation's conference in New York, I listened to Wal-Mart's U.S. President Bill Simon talk at length about how retail was still a great career for young people to embark on. He reflected on his own career path, and that he put himself through college on the $2 he earned an hour as a young man, implying that today's young retail worker should be able to do the same.

For omnichannel retailing to be most effective, retailers must be willing to connect to consumers in new ways. Reinventing the customer experience means more than just protecting sales; it's about creating a deeper connection and providing true customer value.

At the heart of Ron Johnson’s plan to turn J.C. Penney into a mini mall of boutiques was the notion that the department store model needed reinvention. Yet while J.C. Penney faced challenges on Johnson’s arrival — not least that its middle-income customers had been hit hard by the economic downturn — other department stores have been thriving without a radical course correction. Exhibit A: Macy's, which has turned in 12 consecutive quarters of sales growth and managed to remain relevant in an age when many brick-and-mortar retailers have lost ground to the web.