Technology

To stand out during the high-stakes holiday season, merchants should start a conversation with shoppers — literally. Conversational commerce that combines human and machine intelligence is crucial to delivering the interactive customer experience shoppers crave. The conversational commerce revolution is underway. Fueled by the swift adoption of voice-activated “smart speakers,” which Microsoft predicts 75 percent of…

The future of commerce is sitting on your counter. That’s right, Amazon Alexa, the familiar voice assistant who tells you the weather forecast, will also help you purchase a new umbrella. That was the consensus, anyway, until a recent viral statistic caused some backpedaling. According to a recent report by The Information, “just 2 percent…

Retail organizations are becoming more and more technology driven, with some industry startups identifying themselves as technology companies rather than retailers. During last week's Total Retail Tech event, leaders from some of the most disruptive companies in the retail industry told their brands’ stories in a session titled, "Tech-Driven Startups Disrupting the Retail Industry." The…

Successful retailers are in the business of constantly planning so shelves are stocked in time to meet consumers’ seasonal demands, especially during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, retailers need to think differently when it comes to technology planning. With the holiday season looming, retailers need to invest time now in designing a long-term technology…

We’ll share insights from the 2018 holiday shopping season and discuss how you can leverage that information to prepare for this year.

In this episode of Retail Right Now, Total Retail's Joe Keenan and Kristina Stidham discuss the recent Total Retail Tech event, which was held in Philadelphia earlier this week. This event brought select retail technology executives together to learn from industry experts and each other, and matched retailers with technology providers for one-on-one discussions. Highlights…

Walgreens and Wing Aviation LLC, a member of the Alphabet family of companies, announced last week that it's offering what it calls "store to door" delivery of "health and wellness, food and beverage and convenience items — via state-of-the-art drone technology — in minutes," according to a press release. Wing, the first drone operator certified…

With the first half of the fiscal year in the rear-view mirror, it’s a good time to evaluate the impact of newly implemented technology and understand where technology is still needed on the IT road map. Optimizing sales, margin and inventory across all operation channels is important, but how do you know which technology to prioritize? According to…

The age-old belief for retailers was that the longer customers spent in your store, the better. But in today’s world of instant gratification, consumers are looking to streamline almost everything — including shopping. This means that retailers must find ways to shorten transactional time while enticing consumers to spend more time engaging in the in-store…

Artificial intelligence (AI) and related fields — data science, machine learning, predictive analytics — have become mainstream across industries dealing with big data, including retail. One of my favorite ways to explain this influx is a quote (and great article) from Harvard Business Review: “[Data scientists’] sudden appearance on the business scene reflects the fact…