Technology

Building a digital-first culture will dominate this year’s NRF Big Show as retailers advance the immersion of digital experiences for shoppers in-store. It’s easy to see why. It’s a common sight to see shoppers today scanning their mobile devices for deals while in-store. Shoppers also have the expectation that retailers should cater to their habits, providing…

The promise of artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to make its mark in real-world applications, impacting industries from gaming to education and everything in between. Expected to reach a staggering $35,870 billion (USD) by 2025, the market for AI lends itself to be a serious business consideration for the retail sector, which is currently applying…

Talk doesn’t come cheap, and this is especially true in retail, where managing customer care costs across the ever-expanding landscape of communication is top of mind for retailers. While retailers will spend exponentially more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, taking care of an existing one is expensive. Recent research…

Amazon.com is upping its virtual reality game. CNBC reports Amazon has patented a blended-reality mirror that lets you try on clothes virtually while placing you into a virtual location. The imagined mirror works by scanning the environment to generate a virtual model, and then identifies the face and eyes of the user to determine which objects…

While the debate will continue around businesses’ expectations of virtual reality's potential vs. the realities of consumer adoption, VR has gone ahead and found a growing number of ways to make business and industry more efficient, more effective and better connected to its customers. And not always in the most obvious ways. Take VR retail…

While the debate will continue around businesses’ expectations of virtual reality’s potential vs. the realities of consumer adoption, VR has gone ahead and found a growing number of ways to make business and industry more efficient, more effective and better connected to its customers. And not always in the most obvious ways. Take VR retail […]

Kroger announced it will be testing “cashier-less” technology in 2018. Business Insider reports Kroger's new "Scan, Bag, Go" technology allows customers to scan and pay for goods as they shop. Here's how it works: shoppers scan the barcodes of items they wish to purchase using a handheld scanner, provided by Kroger, or the chain's "Scan,…

Wal-Mart's Code Eight, the first portfolio company in its newly launched incubator, Store No. 8, has started testing personal shopping services for moms in New York City, Recode reports. The  service is targeted to “busy NYC moms ” who are "high net worth urban consumers" and will enable them to get product recommendations and make purchases simply through text messaging. The…

Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com’s CEO and founder, last week announced a joint venture to launch a global property registry system, based on blockchain technology, and added that he will either privatize or sell his e-commerce business within the next 90 days. "My goal is [within] 60 to 90 days we walk away from this," Byrne told…

Earlier this fall, eBay announced that it had launched two new image-based search tools — Image Search, Find It On eBay — for its mobile apps. The artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features enable shoppers to use pictures instead of words to search eBay’s catalog of 1.1 billion items. In this interview with Giri Iyengar, head of…