Artificial Intelligence

A ruling in the dispute between the Federal Trade Commission and Staples could hinge on whether the judge in the case is an Amazon Prime member who appreciates the online giant’s disruptive business model and potential to impact the business-to-business marketplace.

A ruling in the dispute between the Federal Trade Commission and Staples could hinge on whether the judge in the case is an Amazon Prime member who appreciates the online giant’s disruptive business model and potential to impact the business-to-business marketplace.  

Facebook has been getting a lot of attention for recent updates which make it more of a direct customer engagement tool. The attention is deserved, because Facebook is on its way to becoming a vitally important CRM platform. Here are five reasons why.

Everyone is doing it

Online retail platform eBay wants to ensure consumers can quickly find the most relevant items at the best prices.   eBay is unveiling several types of new browsing modules and approaches to surfacing goods that go beyond traditional keyword search results. The new modules take advantage of structured data that is now foundational on the eBay platform.  

Retailers have long been interacting with customers via Facebook, but the social network is making a big push to become a full-fledged CRM platform.

Among the announcements Facebook made at its F8 developers conference this week was a beta release of its Messenger chat platform with bots and a new Send/Receive application programming interface (API).

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That’s a famous quote from the comic strip “Pogo” by cartoonist Walt Kelly. Popular during the 1960s, Kelly was commenting on how humans are often the cause of their own woes in the world. To which I would add retailers could just as easily say, “We have met the enemy, and it is email.”

Merrillville, Indiana-based membership buying club DirectBuy is hoping mobile visual search capability will help spur growth beyond its 25 brick-and-mortar stores.

“It seems that more members, instead of going to club locations, are browsing and shopping completely online,” Ted Fay, senior director of digital marketing and e-commerce at DirectBuy, said in an interview with Chain Store Age. “We see this as an opportunity to grow our membership base and go places we don’t have a brick-and-mortar store.”

Amazon is the best place in the world to fail — that’s just one of the insights and observations in CEO Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to shareholders. Bezos talks about the importance of experimentation at Amazon in the letter, and also discusses failure in words that are rare for a CEO to use in a letter to investors, according to the Washington Post. He also cites the three "bold bets" at Amazon that have worked, starting with Amazon Web Services.