Target

Palm Beach is just an aisle away. Retail giant Target announced Tuesday its latest designer partnership, with Lilly Pulitzer — sorority-girl favorite and the queen of bold American resortwear. The 250-piece collection, which launches April 19, will feature apparel, accessories and shoes for women and girls, as well as home decor in 15 exclusive prints.

Is Target headed towards the same fate as Sears? Analysis of the discount retailer's latest numbers suggest it's possible. According to a Seeking Alpha report, Target reported a small revenue decline on Oct. 31 of last year compared with the year prior; the firm declared $73.7 billion in TTM revenue, compared with $73.81 billion the same period in 2013. While the drop is far from catastrophic, the numbers show a more troubling picture when held up against Target's top rivals. Wal-Mart, Kroger and Costco all reported multibillion-dollar revenue increases in the same period.

2014 was a transitional period for the retail industry. It was the year when mobile and online sales exploded, and retailers worked harder than ever to fuse their physical and digital stores. It was peppered with a number of high-profile CEO exits, including American Apparel's controversial Dov Charney and

For top U.S. retailers, free delivery is now the norm. That is good news for shoppers, but not so much for investors. During the just-ended holiday season, outlets from Target to Wal-Mart to Amazon expanded their free-delivery options, adding more items eligible for free shipping. They also did away with minimum spending thresholds to qualify for the perk. Yet as

Target and Home Depot's recent data breach crises have left Americans questioning the overall safety of point-of-sale (POS) transactions. They're fearful of continued credit card fraud, and with almost 100 million total people affected by the two megastores’ hacks alone, who can blame them? Many, however, view Apple's not-so-creatively-titled Apple Pay as the solution to a more secure checkout process.

A federal judge has ruled that customers suing Target for last year's data breach may move forward with their claims. U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson in St. Paul, Minn., dismissed claims by plaintiffs in certain states but largely denied Target's request to toss out the proposed class-action lawsuit. Magnuson rejected Target's argument that the consumers lacked standing to sue because they could not establish any injury. The customers' "allegations plausibly allege that they suffered injuries that are 'fairly traceable' to Target's conduct," Magnuson wrote.

Four months since he took over as Target Corp.'s chief executive, Brian Cornell is making some of his first leadership changes to emphasize innovation and digital prowess within the company's corporate structure. Cornell is expected to unveil his long-term strategic plan for the company early next year, but he's already been vocal about his goal to make Target a leader in mobile and e-commerce. On Wednesday, he announced a number of moves to elevate and expand some positions and to create two new "centers of excellence."

If retailers want to keep both their customers’ financial data as well as their brand reputation out of harm's way, it's imperative they take the right steps in protecting vulnerable information. Below are five critical steps that retailers need to be taking to keep their customers’ financial information safe from a potential breach:

The future of commerce is here, and it's omnichannel retail. Cyber Monday was the single biggest online shopping day ever. Mobile led the way, with a 27.6 percent increase in sales from last year. However, while mobile sales are on the rise, shoppers are still spending the bulk of their holiday budgets in physical retail stores. If you concentrate on one channel alone, you're going to lose out on potential customers. The best thing you can do is to take advantage of mobile, e-commerce, and brick-and-mortar retail this year. Here are four tactics for using an omnichannel approach to increase conversions among holiday shoppers:

The retail industry is a prime target for fraud and data breaches. One of the reasons why the retail industry is so attractive to fraudsters is because every transaction has the potential to yield multiple types of customer data associated with credit and debit cards, whether it comes from infecting in-store technology or if data is stored elsewhere. Contrary to what you may think, however, brick-and-mortar retailers, which carefully deploy heavily tested and proven point-of-sale (POS) software to handle critical checkout tasks in-store, may be struggling more than online retailers, who have much more frequent updates to their order and payment applications to protect customers’ sensitive personal data and banking information.