When you pull up a website, what’s the first thing you look at? The stock photo model splashed across the page? The large company logo at the top? The search bar? EyeQuant, a German artificial intelligence software company that…
Twenty years from now it will be bizarre if you walk into a store and the store doesn’t know who you are,” say veteran technology journalists Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the…
As an industry, we remain far too focused on the tactics, e.g., mobile and social media, and tend to miss the bigger change that is taking place with our shoppers. This isn’t a question of whether we’re all going to…
The decline of the high street is not a new phenomenon. The growth of out of town retailing – a process that’s been ongoing since the 1980s – combined with the recent economic downturn has left some high streets in…
Showrooming, the practice of price-comparing on a smartphone while shopping at a store, isn’t really the huge threat to traditional retail that it is made out to be. The ravages of showrooming may in fact be more reflective of…
The more you know about your customers, the better you can serve them. But what you do with that data makes all the difference in the world. It’s amazing how two companies–competitors in a number of ways–can make some…
Online retailers devoted 19% of their search ad budgets to Google’s new “product listing ad” (PLA) format, which shows photo suggestions to shoppers who are browsing the web, according to Marin Software. Marin handles $6 billion in online ad spending,…
Increasingly, retailers are looking to beacons to enhance the in-store shopping experience while simultaneously bridging their physical and online experiences. These Bluetooth-enabled devices are being installed in stores across the country, but despite the deluge of media and retailer interest,…
It’s the season of returning holiday gifts that didn’t quite meet expectations. So if you’re a retailer with a friendly return policy, it’s a stressful time of year. That return policy, however, may be the key to winning the trust…
High-end fashion is one of the last holdouts against e-commerce. A virtual fitting room could change things–but the technical challenges are enormous. Even as we buy more stuff online, clothing remains a holdout for brick-and-mortar retailers. Why? The fitting…
