Omnichannel

Foster City, Calif. – Visa Inc. is introducing Visa Digital Solutions, a comprehensive suite of offerings that facilitate secure payments across a broad range of Internet-connected devices and wearables.

Visa Digital Solutions fall into two main categories of supporting new payment models and protecting consumers and supporting innovation.

Revenue optimization services provider Extraprise is rebranding as QuickPivot and launching a new real-time, cross-channel marketing platform to support lifecycle marketing.

The new QuickPivot platform enables marketers to derive customer insight, listen to brand interactions and then adapt campaigns with highly optimized messages and offers to create seamless buying experiences.

Urban Outfitters has gone big — really big — in New York City, opening a 57,000-sq.-ft. “lifestyle center” store in Manhattan’s Herald Square area. The space, the brand’s largest location to date, is big on in-store shops and includes such extras as a hair salon, bookshop, coffee bar and photography shop (with a booth for printing Instagram snapshots). All this is featured along with Urban’s menswear, womenswear and home collections.

Denver – Auto repair services retailer Meineke has been ranked as the national, multi-location brand that performs best in digital marketing in a survey by location marketing automation provider Placeable. The company’s NatLo Top 30 identifies and ranks the most successful large digital marketers in the U.S. by using a set of local search and location-based marketing criteria to assess their performance.

Cambridge, U.K. -- Grafton Shopping Centre, Cambridge, is hoping to dazzle shoppers with a “virtual” employee who greets customers when they enter the mall. The shopping center is using the Tensator Virtual Assistant, innovative technology which projects a life-like image of a person.

The display interacts with customers, answering common questions and promoting mall offers. This is the very first use of the technology in a United Kingdom shopping mall.

By Tyler Roye, Co-founder and CEO, eGifter

Cleveland -- Shopping ranks as a favorite activity among nearly half of all teens and young adults aged 13 to 24, according to a new survey by Forest City in partnership with Alexander Babbage. Shopping at malls ranked above a virtual shopping experience among the entire group, with the 13-to-17-year-old age group showing the strongest preference for a bricks-and-mortar shopping experience.

San Jose, Calif. - On average, consumers say 64% of their back-to-school shopping will take place in-store, the rest online via computer or mobile device. A new survey of 1,001 U.S. parents with school-age children from customer experience solutions provider Baynote and The E-tailing Group also shows that 40% of consumers say that paper catalogs influence their in-store purchases, more than any other channel.