Technology

The consumer products and retail industry has undergone an evolution from mall to mail over the past decade. Brick-and-mortar retailers have aggressively sought out ways to remain competitive against the rising popularity of online shopping. E-commerce outlets are able to take advantage of a variety of tools to tag a consumer’s purchase history and autonomously…

Customer experience is quickly becoming the brand differentiator, and there’s no customer experience game-changer potentially bigger than artificial intelligence (AI). In a recent market analysis from UBS, retail ranked among the top industries predicted to be most impacted by AI. It's easy to see why. While online giants like Amazon.com and online disruptors such as…

No retailer deliberately sets out to complicate the lives and shopping experiences of its customers. In fact, headlines point to ways the industry is doing the opposite, adding convenient fulfillment options or altering store formats to accommodate quicker in-and-out trips. However, if as many as 17 percent of items in a category are duplicative in…

When asked what are the top challenges when implementing a new technology into their business, 70 percent of retailers said integrating it with existing technology. That's just one of the key takeaways from Total Retail’s 2019 Retail Technology Report, which was produced in conjunction with Arm Treasure Data, an enterprise customer data platform. In this year's second…

The age of digital disruption has arguably impacted retailers more than any other industry, with well-known brands going out of business or closing stores on a regular basis and consumers increasingly choosing online shopping over brick-and-mortar because of convenience. With pressure to stay competitive, when an outage of any kind (point-of-sale system, inventory management, etc.)…

Brick-and-mortar retail is getting dissed by millennials, who increasingly prefer to shop online. With millennials representing an estimated $1.4 trillion in purchasing power, brick-and-mortar retailers can’t afford to ignore their needs as e-commerce and subscription services eat into market share. In the words of Vanilla Ice, retailers need to “stop, collaborate and listen,” brick-and-mortar retail…

With the growth of voice search and the media buzz surrounding it, it can be a challenge to separate the truth from the hype. All of the biggest brands have a hand in the market, and they all want you to use their voice search service, be it Alexa, Cortana, Siri, Bixby, or Google Assistant.…

Retailers are cautious of emerging technologies, but believe in the power of artificial intelligence (AI). That’s just one of the key takeaways from Total Retail’s 2019 Retail Technology Report, which was produced in conjunction with Arm Treasure Data, an enterprise customer data platform. In this year's second quarter, Total Retail surveyed its audience of retail executives to…

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) struggle to compete on equal footing with the enterprise behemoths that dominate their industry. In other words, how do local retailers compete with the Amazon.com and Walmarts of the world? Providing a better customer experience is fast becoming the competitive differentiator and driver of success for businesses of all sizes…

Conversational commerce is the latest trend taking the retail industry by storm. By leveraging human brand specialists, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and augmented reality (AR), conversational commerce delivers a more simplified and personalized shopping experience for consumers on participating retailers’ online stores and social media platforms. This model provides consumers with a seamless, on-demand shopping interface…