User Experience

Amazon.com went down for some users on Thursday afternoon for approximately 20 minutes before being restored. Users trying to access the Amazon website as well as the mobile app at around 2:20 p.m. ET were greeted with error messages. During the outage, many users took to Twitter to vent their frustration.

There's not one defined path for increasing customer engagement. This makes perfect sense — a manufacturing company and a financial services firm don’t operate from the same playbook. Your businesses has to determine the most important factors or “key drivers” that speak to your customer experience. Key drivers pinpoint the behaviors that support customer engagement…

Retailers today have to differentiate themselves with experiential products and services, since most can no longer win on price. This was the key message delivered by Ron Boire, CEO of Barnes & Noble (B&N), during a fireside chat with James Green, CEO of Magnetic, during a session at eTail West yesterday. During the chat, Boire…

On Monday, Samsung opened a new 40,000-square-foot store in New York’s Meatpacking District. Across the street from the High Line and a block away from the Whitney Museum of American Art, it’s a prime piece of retail space. But one pursuit "the flagship" isn't focused on, says Zach Overton, its general manager, is retail. Yes, you…

With 2016 still in its infancy, I can’t help but wonder what’s in store for the year. As retailers have had time to wind down after the busy holiday shopping season, there's an opportunity to look at what’s to come in the year ahead. The team at Demandware has been busy making a few predictions…

February is here and that means Cupid is on everyone’s mind. Unlike other holidays for which consumers shop months in advance, the sudden two-week period leading up to Valentine’s Day causes a gift and flower frenzy. In fact, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF), Valentine’s Day is the fourth largest spending holiday, following winter holidays,…

Everyone has already heard how important the cloud is to the future of business, but that doesn’t just apply to the Fortune 500s. E-commerce companies of all sizes can get terrific benefits — e.g., reduced costs and quicker recovery times — from moving their website and back-end to the cloud. Most important of all however is that the…

Cyber Monday, the online version of Black Friday, isn't immune to traffic jams of shoppers rushing to take advantage of post-Thanksgiving sales. Some of the most popular websites experienced an overload on Monday, similar to a crowd pushing its way into an already packed brick-and-mortar store. Shoppers were for a period of time unable to…

Holiday sales traditionally constitute a huge portion of retailers’ annual revenue, and there’s a lot at stake in the upcoming season. According to PwC, web sales for the overall retail sector will see a mid- to high-teens percentage increase over last year, with the leading retailers poised for a 40 percent to 50 percent increase.…

Wal-Mart’s website malfunctioned during the Thanksgiving shopping rush Thursday morning, throwing a wrench in some shoppers’ plans to avoid long lines by grabbing deals online. For the first time, the world’s biggest retailer offered most of its Black Friday “doorbusters” on its website hours before they were available inside its U.S. stores. The discounts, which were…