Artificial Intelligence

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).

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.

Specialty retailer 1-800-Flowers.com operates across several banners and channels, and is trying to present as unified a customer experience as possible.

1-800-Flowers has chosen the IBM Commerce on Cloud solution to ease the process of conducting transactions across all its brands, including Harry & David, Wolferman’s and Fannie May. The platform will also help deliver a seamless customer experience across the Web, mobile and call center channels.

Domino’s Pizza has built a reputation for speedy delivery, and now the chain wants to be known for fast mobile ordering.

Discount online apparel/accessories retailer Bluefly knows how important looking good is, but also knows there needs to be real quality beneath the shiny veneer.

To that end, Bluefly is partnering with solution providers including Mozu and DynamicAction to overhaul its e-commerce site and mobile app, from the user interface to the underlying architecture.

Do well by doing good. U.S. businesses are taking this adage attributed to Benjamin Franklin to heart.

It's good business. Happy employees are engaged employees, and that translates into productivity gains and ultimately to happy customers and a better bottom line.