Walmart

Home Depot, Amazon.com and Safeway are tops when it comes to offering the best mobile commerce experience according to a new study that benchmarks 20 top U.S. retailers against one another.

Although numerous players have entered the mobile payment arena in recent months, Walmart Pay is poised to be much more disruptive to the mobile payment landscape

New technologies, new products, new consumer preferences — change always threatens to disrupt the status quo, and the retail landscape is no different. The trick is to determine which trends are passing fads and which have real staying power.

To help, we asked six experts from the Daymon Worldwide family of companies (Interactions is a subsidiary of Daymon Worldwide) to share their predictions for trends that will have the biggest impact on the U.S. retail environment in 2016.

Improved Transparency and Distribution

Shoppers at Walmart stores will soon be able to pay with their smartphones as the retailer has developed a unique solution to become the newest entrant in the crowded world of mobile wallets.

Former Target CMO Michael Francis will reportedly serve as a marketing consultant at Walmart when the retailer’s current CMO steps down.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Stephen Quinn will retire as executive VP and CMO in January after spending nearly a decade at the Walmart. Francis, who spent 27 years with Target, is expected to join Walmart to initiate a broad marketing revamp and work closely with Quinn’s successor, The Journal said, citing a person it said was familiar with the situation.

In October, Walgreens announced plans to acquire Rite Aid in a deal that had been widely anticipated. The deal is most certainly going to reshape the retail market by creating a drug store giant with nearly 13,000 stores in the United States; as well, it foretells of the significant changes occurring in the healthcare market.

Looking back on the 2015 edition of Cyber Week, we can reminisce on big traffic, big sales … and big fails?

Several high-profile site outages hit major retailers during a period of historically heavy online shopping. While nobody would call these positive events, they do offer retailers a few valuable lessons about the need to stay one step ahead of digital customer demand.

Not Too Big to Fail

For many years, Black Friday sales promotions have defined the retail environment during the long Thanksgiving weekend. Despite evidence that Black Friday has lost some of its luster, it remains a very large shopping event and is actively contested by major retailers.

Indeed, according to the NRF, close to 102 million consumers shopped in brick-and-mortar stores over the Black Friday holiday weekend.