News

My latest retail IT-related travels took me to the Retail Experience Center at Microsoft headquarters (in Redmond, Washington), where I toured a simulated shopping mall environment that demonstrated a variety of innovative ways the company is using technology to enhance customer engagement for retailers.  Here are the three most interesting solutions from that visit:

A Beacon for Coffee Drinkers

It's going to be a lot easier for consumers to make meals from recipes thanks to a new partnership between food magazines and Popcart.

Bon Appetit and Epicurious have teamed up with Popcart to make recipes "shoppable," according to Ada Age. No longer will consumers have to read a recipe and make a shopping list and head to the store.

Canton, Mass. - Dunkin' Donuts has launched its newest mobile payment option, integrating Visa Checkout with its e-commerce site and mobile app as a way to purchase and reload virtual Dunkin' Donuts cards. As part of a new, co-branded campaign titled "Get Stuff Dunkin'," the two companies are offering a special $10 bonus when they load at least $25 on a new or existing Dunkin' Donuts card using Visa Checkout.

Brick-and-mortar stores are still relevant, with 87% of consumers planning to shop physical retail at least as often as they did in 2014, according to a study by TimeTrade Systems.

New York -- Another online merchant has ventured into the physical space.  Diamond and fine jewelry retailer Blue Nile has opened its first freestanding store, at Roosevelt Field Mall, Garden City, New York.

Retailers have a new way to drive sales thanks to a mobile-friendly upgrade to RetailMeNot’s popular app.

RetailMeNot, operator of the nation’s largest digital offers marketplace with more than 18 million unique monthly users, introduced the first version of a new “products” section on its app that features popular items.

The new product functionality offers a deep link to retailers’ mobile optimized sites, providing a way to help retailers market specific products in addition to the other promotional capabilities offered by RetailMeNot.

The retail industry is accustomed to weak same store sales at Sears and Kmart, but the magnitude of the decline the company experienced in the first quarter was large even by its standards.

Brooklyn, N.Y. – Etsy Inc. reportedly employs Big Data and artificial intelligence systems to better target individual customers with personalized offers. According to the New York Times, Etsy uses tools including an open source machine learning framework called Conjecture, as well as an open source Apache solution called Kafka and in-house Hadoop, to monitor real-time data for fast processing and storage.