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Every year it seems like retailers roll out the Christmas decorations just a little bit earlier. Kmart started airing holiday ads this September. Why? Kmart wins big on layaway plans, and it figured out that customers need to start thinking about that now to have items paid for in time. Kmart knows its customers and is hitting the nail on the head.

Global online retailer Modnique launched a responsive web design (RWD) version of its website this past September in an effort to optimize the experience of visitors using screen sizes as small as the iPhone and as large as 36-inch monitors. Here's a look at the brand's experience with RWD. 

Gift cards are a tried-and-true strategy for influencing purchase decisions and, as such, have proven to be a lucrative revenue stream for small and big-box retailers alike. Today, gift cards take many forms and represent more than $110 billion in sales. Tomorrow, however, holds something much bigger for retailers with gifting programs. There's a "branded currency" revolution on the horizon; those retailers that can make the transition from a traditional gift card program to a comprehensive branded currency strategy will have the opportunity to increase online and in-store sales, drive new customer acquisition and grow loyalty.

In the spirit of the season, I thought I'd check in with North Mankato, Minn.-based HalloweenCostumes.com, a leading online Halloween costume destination, to see how it was faring this season. HalloweenCostumes.com was started 10 years ago out of a garage; today it receives hundreds of thousands of costume orders during the Halloween season. The company attributes its growth and success to several factors, including leveraging scalable technology from partners such as PayPal, Google and Amazon.com.

Always-connected, digital omnivores present brands with the opportunity to build richer and stronger relationships with customers, but competition for their attention is fierce. In order to connect with digital omnivores and meet their expectations, retailers must provide consistent, tailored and content-rich experiences as consumers jump between tablets, phones and desktops. Here are five simple tips to help retailers engage digital omnivores across any online touchpoint:  

As websites continue to see a rise in visits from searches conducted on Bing, the search engine optimization world wonders about the degree of focus the search engine should be given. On average, Bing pales in comparison to Google at percentage of organic traffic share (10.5 percent vs. 78.1 percent in this year's third quarter). However, with Facebook Graph Search presenting Bing search results since January, and now Apple defaulting to Bing as a blanket solution for questions Siri can't answer, is Bing really beginning to gain ground? The answer is a little and there's potential for more, but no thanks to Siri or Facebook … yet.

The concept of attribution modeling isn't overtly sexy. It enables marketers to look at a variety of ads that contribute to a sale or conversion over an extended period of time and then attribute credit to each ad or "touchpoint" within the sales funnel. After I learned about how omnichannel men's apparel brand Bonobos uses attribution modeling to cut its marketing costs and double sales, the concept downright sizzles. I had a chat recently with Craig Elbert, the vice president of marketing at New York City-based Bonobos, and got the skinny about the company's attribution modeling program.

Retailers typically focus on improving the online customer experience through personalization, omnichannel integration, rewards programs and other incentives, but as Amazon, Google and Nasdaq demonstrated, none of the bells and whistles matter if your site is unavailable. Consumers today expect 100 percent availability, so during and after any outage, organizations typically have two questions top of mind: One, what caused the outage and two, what did the outage cost?

This past week, Uri Minkoff, co-founder of fashion apparel retailer Rebecca Minkoff, sat down with Refinery 29 Co-Founder and CEO Phillppe von Borries for a fireside chat at Fashion Digital NY. During the candid conversation, Minkoff shared what "growth hacking" is, how the brand connects with its millennial audience and what it's like working with his sibling.

If the pundits are to be believed, big data is the retailer's nirvana, telling you the exact profile that will buy a specific product at a specific time of day through a specific channel at a specific price. There is, to be sure, more than a grain of truth in that, but the path from data collection to customer fulfillment is fraught with potential pitfalls. As anyone who has had experience with Google's AdWords’ algorithms can attest, one wrong assumption can easily send you wide enough of the target to lose tens of thousands of dollars in sales, which would be a huge setback for most retailers.