It doesn’t matter if they sell snacks, cosmetics or a collection of nerdy knick-knacks – subscription retail programs have taken the market by storm. There’s not a retailer out there that wouldn’t jump at the chance to automate and optimize the steady revenue that these services provide, but with...
Payments innovators had to do away with a pretty large assumption early on in the process of updating worldwide payments systems – societies need not achieve peak-cash-using status before moving onto a cashless stage. Southeast Asia is full of examples of this payments sublimation, and...
When the phrase “consumer confidence” is thrown around, it’s usually in relation to how convincing a brand has been at telling shoppers they’re the one to buy. However, fast-casual restaurants are finding out that, when things get ugly in both the political sphere and that...
It was Mark Twain who said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” And while that’s all true, a new study appears to highlight an added effect of cross-border sojourns that Twain missed: a willingness to spend, spend, spend on luxury goods. Get the...
Of all the changes wrought in the retail world as it navigated from bricks and mortar to clicks and servers, somehow the impulse buy has managed to stick around. At first, it might have been just candy bars and packets of gum in checkout aisles,...
It hasn’t taken long for retailers to fall in love with chatbots. Everyone from mega-corporations like Facebook to small businesses looking for a helping hand on the customer service front have at least experimented with the automated messaging tools, and a simple Google search will...
Ready or not, automation is coming to retail. Whether it’s Amazon’s delivery drones or in-store robots that scan a warehouse’s worth of inventory in a matter of minutes, unattended commerce will be a fact of future life. Until that happens, though, retailers better not lose...
Retailers often treat millennials with a mix of attraction and disdain that mirrors the “can’t live with them, can’t live without them” way of life. Whatever their opinions, any merchant worth its salt is already targeting millennial consumers to shore up their consumer base of the future....
Despite the millions of ways social media was supposed to make life simpler and more convenient, retailers have long since found that it’s not the selling playground that they once imagined it to be. More often than not, brands are running afoul of their shoppers’ preferences...
