Artificial Intelligence

Retail facilities are making the shift to LEDs, a more efficient, brighter and longer lasting lighting option saves energy and reduces operating costs. Its rapid return on interest makes LED retrofitting a smart, simple fix.

But what if LED lighting installations could also increase and guide purchasing decisions? What if thoughtful placement and controlled lighting could make customers feel more comfortable and safe, and make employees more productive?

Seamless commerce is constantly evolving, and SAP is attempting to stay at the front of the curve with its new SAP Jam Communities with Commerce solution. The cloud-based customer engagement tool is natively built on the SAP Jam enterprise social collaboration platform, and also integrates with the SAP hybris commerce management platform.

At a recent event in Boston, SAP explained how the new solution enables retailers to build community pages that support and drive seamless commerce. Here are three of the most innovative community page features.

With 2016 upon us, most everyone is thinking about the New Year’s resolutions they have in place for the upcoming year. The perennially popular resolutions range from losing weight to getting out of debt.

If you look closely, the resolutions could mirror goals that retailers may want to consider in 2016, especially as it relates to loss prevention (LP).

Plug and Play brings together retailers and start-ups that offer specific technology and expertise that can relieve merchants’ pain points. Chain Store Age offers a Q&A with the head of one of those start-ups, Wibe Wagemans, president of Palo Alto, California-based IndoorAtlas.

What does your company do?

The holiday promotion season is fast approaching with the arrival of Thanksgiving and Black Friday. From that moment the race is on for customer dollars through to the New Year. We’ve all been through this many times, and it seems like no sooner has one season finished than we are shortly into planning for the next. But what impact are the prices we set having on customer behavior and the profits of retailers?

What if you could target parents based on their specific stage of parenthood, such as expectant or parents of a newborn? According to The Drum, eBay Advertising is rolling out a new tool that will let retailers using its service do just that. [The Drum]

Apple Inc. may be planning an entry into the fledging industry of mobile person-to-person payment.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is in discussions with several banks to develop a service that would let consumers make mobile payments to each other, rather than use cash or personal checks. The service would be in direct competition with the Venmo mobile payment platform from PayPal, which is popular among millennial consumers.

The Amazon Echo smart home device represents a potential threat to Amazon’s competitors, but sales are sales.

Amazon Echo will be available in more than 3,000 stores around the country in time for the holiday shopping season. Select locations of ABT, BJ’s Wholesale Club, The Home Depot, Staples, Sears, Brookstone, RadioShack, Fred Meyer, Fry’s, Hhgregg, P.C. Richard & Son, and R.C. Wiley will offer Echo.