Artificial Intelligence

Sears has opened a new connected home flagship store near Silicon Valley and Ryan Ciovacco, president of consumer electronics and connected solutions, spoke with Retailing Today about the major initiative.

Armonk, N.Y. – IBM is launching a new event readiness services offering that will enable businesses in industries including retail to prepare for unexpected surges in online traffic and sales. IBM experts will work with clients through a series of questions that analyze the capacity of the current infrastructure in place and the potential impediments.  

Sears has opened a new connected home flagship store near Silicon Valley and Ryan Ciovacco, president of consumer electronics and connected solutions, spoke with Retailing Today about the major initiative.

Online pricing intelligence provider 360pi compared Amazon.com and Walmart.com prices earlier this year in a dynamic pricing study and discovered Walmart changed its prices more often than Amazon.

The company looked at Amazon.com and Walmart.com prices comparing a basket of grocery pantry/household items spanning a number of CPG brands with a non-grocery basket (such as toys, electronics and tools) shopped on Amazon.com and Walmart.com between April 9 and June 9, 2015.

Three key finding from the report were:

In the ongoing battle for market share, brands pour over metrics and tweak strategies to increase customer loyalty. The stakes are high, customer acquisition costs are expensive and most businesses can’t afford to lose sales to competitors. With prices commoditized in many industries, today’s battleground is centered squarely on customer experiences.

San Francisco - Instacart is utilizing Zebra's hosted Zatar Internet of Things (IoT) platform for cloud printing and device management of Zebra printers. This new solution allows Instacart to print labels at locations across the U.S. securely and accurately.

Instacart chose to use the Zatar IoT platform for its ability to connect to and control devices in third-party locations via an API. The solution connects Instacart's printers to the cloud and enables the organization to interact with, monitor and manage Zebra printers globally.

San Bruno, Calif. -- Sears has opened a store in the heart of the Silicon Valley dedicated to smart technology products for the home.

The retailer’s new “connected solutions” flagship is located at The Shops at Tanforan shopping center, in San Bruno, California. The 4,000-sq.-ft. store features a living room, kitchen, nursery, workout room, garage and outdoor area where consumers can experience the benefits of smart technology firsthand.  

New York - Lack of a single customer view, an inability to deal with large amounts of data and lack of time for optimization are among the challenges that cause the biggest headaches for modern marketers. According to new research published by Econsultancy in partnership with SmartFocus, among the pain points marketers face are the challenges of making customer data actionable, bottlenecks caused by IT and web development teams and lack of time for campaign testing and optimization.

The report identifies the following key challenges: