Omnichannel

Mooresville, N.C. — Paul D. Ramsay has been promoted to CIO of Lowe’s Companies Inc., effective immediately. He has been serving as acting CIO since March.  

Irvine, Calif. — Sage North America is releasing the new Sage Exchange Payment Management System to consolidate all of retail small-to-mid-sized business (SMB) payment activity onto one platform. SMBs can use Sage Exchange to monitor and manage the payments from all their sales environments: on the web, over the phone, through mobile devices, or at their storefront, on a 24/7 basis.

Weis Markets plans to offer online shopping with in-store pick-up at its Fogelsville store beginning June 8.

Los Angeles — PriceGrabber has partnered with Channel IQ, to power "Buy Online", Channel IQ's latest product that will be available to consumers early this summer. Powered by PriceGrabber's shopping content, Channel IQ's "Buy Online" solution allows manufacturers to offer consumers a way to find and purchase their desired product from authorized retailers and ecommerce sites.

While the mantra of “keep it simple, stupid” has long been a staple in the world of business, the message of the recent SAP Sapphire 2014 conference in Orlando could be summed up as “keep it simple, smart.” Speakers throughout the three-day event stressed how leading-edge technology allows enterprises to operate with a previously unavailable simplicity and flexibility, providing new and exciting capabilities.  Here are a few examples.

Boston — Three in four (75%) retailers can or intend to identify customers when they walk in the store, including 3% who already do so and 72% who are planning to do so within five years. According to the new 2014 CRM/Unified Commerce Benchmark Survey of top North American retailers from Boston Retail Partners, 95% of respondents indicated customer experience/ customer engagement is one of their top three current initiatives.

Silicon Valley saw some drama late Monday when PayPal announced that president David Marcus was leaving to lead Facebook’s messaging products.

The split was amicable with eBay president and CEO John Donahoe wishing Marcus well at Facebook.

According to a Reuters report, Amazon is making headway into the online payments arena, which has long been dominated by PayPal.

The article says Amazon will start managing subscription payments for startups and other companies as soon as Monday. The service, according to the report, will allow the company's more than 240 million active users to use credit card details stored on Amazon.com to pay for services such as a monthly phone bill or a digital music subscription — for a fee on each transaction payable to Amazon.