eCommerce

New York City -- Former president Bill Clinton delivered a keynote address entitled “Embracing Our Common Humanity” to an overflow crowd Monday morning at the National Retail Federation’s 101st Annual Convention & Expo in New York.

In his speech, Clinton spoke about the inequality, instability and the unsustainable way of life which makes up the world today, and said there remains a strong connection between social opportunity and economic opportunity.

SAN FRANCISCO — In an effort to help the thousands of troops returning home from serving overseas, Banana Republic has announced “Our Duty to You,” a program created to help military personnel prepare for their next professional opportunities. 

Minneapolis -- Best Buy announced that Shari Ballard and Mike Vitelli, who had both been president of Best Buy's domestic business, will take on separate jobs, effective immediately. The retailer, which posted disappointing holiday results, said it was undertaking the changes to accelerate its strategy by aligning the company's senior operating talent with its highest priorities.

New York City -- According to a survey released Tuesday by the NRF Foundation and American Express, Amazon.com has the best customer service among U.S. retailers.

The seventh annual Customers’ Choice survey, conducted by BIGinsight and polling 9,374 shoppers, saw the same group of retailers occupy the Top 10 spots in the poll, with some place-switching.

Henderson, Nev. -- A Monday report by Reuters said that online shoe retailer Zappos was hacked over the weekend, affecting 24 million customers in its database.

The retailer, which is owned by Amazon.com, said that customers' names, email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers and the last four digits of credit cards numbers and scrambled passwords were stolen. But it said the hackers had not been able to access servers that held customers critical credit card and other payment data.

Atlanta -- Retail analytics solution provider QuantiSense said Monday that Urban Outfitters has licensed its full suite of solutions including QuantiSense Merchandising, Direct and Store Ops.

Urban selected the QuantiSense Decision Orchestration Platform, which combines business intelligence, data warehousing and sophisticated retail analytics into role-based, actionable and repeatable processes.

Target may have wanted to draw attention to its Shops at Target program at its media event in New York last week, the press in attendance appeared to be interested in one thing -- Apple.

Though the Target executives present did their best to steer questions toward the topic at hand, they failed to keep reporters from asking about the retailer's partnership with Apple. The persistent reporters, as is required by such a career path, kept at it and did manage to get a few snippets of information from the tight-lipped folks at Target.

Target may have wanted to draw attention to its Shops at Target program at its media event in New York last week, the press in attendance appeared to be interested in one thing -- Apple.

Though the Target executives present did their best to steer questions toward the topic at hand, they failed to keep reporters from asking about the retailer's partnership with Apple. The persistent reporters, as is required by such a career path, kept at it and did manage to get a few snippets of information from the tight-lipped folks at Target.