Today on Total Retail

In a presentation at the ICR Conference in Orlando, FL last week, Marc Metrick, CEO of Saks, a digital platform for luxury fashion in North America, discussed winning over digital-native consumers and the concept of accessible luxury, among other topics. Metrick is a self-described "lifer" at Saks, having spent more than half his life at…

While at NRF 2024: Retail's Big Show in New York City this week, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan spoke with Michael Challinger, CEO of Houzer, an emerging kitchen and bathroom product company, to learn more about the brand's partnership with commerce platform BigCommerce. Challinger discusses transforming the Houzer digital business after joining the company as CEO, why…

A looming recession. Mass layoffs. The rise of generative artificial intelligence. There’s no doubt that 2023 presented the e-commerce industry with a myriad of obstacles. For many retailers, this provided an opportunity to experiment with new technologies and ways of selling. This year, we’ll see the outcomes of those experiments come to fruition as merchants…

One of the big lessons retailers learned in 2023 is that consumers want to do it themselves. Some call it customer empowerment. Some call it the self-service economy. Essentially, it involves consumers making decisions about products and services without talking to a human. As generative artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as the breakout tech tool of…

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday behind us, it’s a good time to assess how different marketing channels performed through another record-setting BFCM shopping period and what this can tell us about consumers’ shopping habits in 2024. Looking at Omnisend’s recently released BFCM marketing report, which analyzed over 2.5 billion marketing emails, 29 million SMS,…

If 2023 marked brands' initial steps into integrating generative artificial intelligence into their e-commerce strategies, 2024 is set to witness its explosive growth. There's palpable anticipation as conversational commerce gears up — and not just for major industry players, but gradually becoming accessible to brands of all sizes. Consider conversational commerce and dynamic personalization. These…

Seemantini Godbole, executive vice president, chief digital and information officer, joined Lowe's in 2018. In a discussion this week at NRF's 2024 Big Show with Scott Rankin, principal and global head of strategy at KPMG, Godbole said when she was brought into the company, "there was a lot of things to be desired from a…

It comes with the cold and the falling leaves: The mounting horror that time is running out. It was already December and I hadn’t thought once about Christmas presents. I'm not an especially talented gift-giver, and my family doesn't have easily satisfied tastes. Every year I find myself daydreaming about a polite, hypercompetent professional who…

Retail is changing significantly as new technologies pave the way for future shopping experiences free of friction. With the industry projected to witness exponential growth in artificial intelligence (AI), reaching more than $50 billion by 2030 from just over $6 billion in 2022, this year promises to be a pivotal moment in retail’s digitization. Here…

Climate change poses significant business risks to retailers. Changing consumer sentiments, investor expectations and government regulations will require businesses to fundamentally change their operations, procurement practices and product mixes to adapt to the low-carbon economy. Retailers face a complex challenge in reducing their carbon footprint because Scope 3 emissions — generated by a company’s value…