Technology
May 25, 2017 at 10:15 am
Home improvement retailer Lowe’s capitalized on a strong housing market to attract and convert more first-time homeowners and do-it-yourself customers in 2016. The company generated net sales in excess of $65 billion in 2016, an increase of 10.06 percent from $59 billion-plus in 2015. (Lowe's ranked No. 25 on Total Retail’s seventh annual ranking of the…
May 24, 2017 at 3:40 pm
Retail has always been a complicated business, with thousands of SKUs to track from the supply chain to the customer, stock management, seasonality, and promotions. Payment networks added another layer of technological complexity, and today retailers must stay current with omnichannel integration, sales floor wireless networks, beacons, mobile checkout and much more. Of course, complexity…
May 23, 2017 at 1:41 pm
Retail has always been a complicated business, with thousands of SKUs to track from the supply chain to the customer, stock management, seasonality, and promotions. Payment networks added another layer of technological complexity, and today retailers must stay current with omnichannel integration, sales floor wireless networks, beacons, mobile checkout and much more. Of course, complexity […]
May 23, 2017 at 1:28 pm
Between 6 million and 7.5 million retail industry jobs are vulnerable to automation within 10 years, according to a report by Cornerstone Capital Group released this week. The report concluded that the jobs of 47 percent of the 16 million Americans currently working in retail could be made redundant by highly automated e-commerce and other innovations.…
May 23, 2017 at 9:41 am
Total Retail recently released its seventh annual ranking of the 100 fastest-growing publicly traded retailers. This year’s list, as in years past, is based on companies’ year-over-year net sales growth, comparing the 2016 fiscal year to the 2015 fiscal year. A relative newcomer to the industry tops the list of fastest-growing retailers for the 2016 fiscal…
May 22, 2017 at 10:15 am
Car service? Check. Dinner? Check. Beer and wine? Check. In today’s on-demand economy, consumers can order virtually anything with the simple touch of a finger and have it at their doorstep in a matter of hours, if not sooner. Not only do consumers want this, they expect it. And they don’t want to pay exorbitant,…
May 16, 2017 at 11:21 am
The past 20 years of e-commerce and digital have been a long journey for retailers. We’ve gone from slow, primitive websites with poor user experiences to the fast, intuitive, omnichannel offerings we know today. However, while retailers sometimes struggled to keep up with rapid advancements in technology and rising consumer expectations, clear standards have emerged…
May 15, 2017 at 11:47 am
The industry has been talking about RFID for 20 years, but it still hasn't come into common use or delivered significant value to retailers. The biggest issue hasn't been the technology itself, but rather the hype and promise around RFID before it was in the right place to deliver. The price of RFID tags has…
May 12, 2017 at 8:48 am
Quietly and subtly, artificial intelligence (AI) powers have been changing the way we interact with many of the most popular systems today, from filtering the things that you see on your news feed to coming up with new solutions for customer acquisition and retention. In retail, AI is appearing more often than ever before. In…
May 1, 2017 at 11:02 am
Call it optimism or just human nature — retailers, like most people, don’t like to spend a lot of time thinking about unseen threats. A series of painful breaches a few years ago forced the industry to wake up to the dangers of cyber crime and implement new measures to address and control online risks,…
