Spotlight Features

The mushrooming popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home will fuel e-commerce in the coming year. "You're going to have a whole new frontier of commerce space driven through voice and brand recognition," said Michael Levine, marketing vice president at Photon. "It's going to be ...

Moves that allowed major e-commerce players to jockey for position both off and on the Internet made headlines in 2017. "The year was a triumph for market leaders," said Mike Comstock, a senior adviser at GrandCanals. "Leading companies like Amazon, Target and Walmart just got stronger, as they have...

One thing the latest holiday sales season made crystal clear is that mobile commerce is on the rise. On Cyber Monday -- which set an all-time-high overall sales record of $6.6 billion -- mobile shopping totaled 47.4 percent of visits to retailers' websites, according to Adobe. However, etailers coul...

This holiday selling season may have been a good one for retailers, but every silver lining has a cloud. In this case, one shadow will be cast by chargeback fraud, which can occur when shoppers request credit card chargebacks from the issuing bank instead of from the merchant. "Merchants bleed $227 ...

For many online shoppers, shipping has become a pivotal issue, and one of the worst things an etailer can do is allow a shipment to be late. On-time arrival is such a high expectation that many shoppers find late delivery worse than other notoriously disagreeable things, a recent survey of online sh...

Let's face it: Your website is central to your e-commerce business. Upgrading your website is one of the most important things you can do to bring in new customers and sell more products. Sometimes, though, it's difficult to know exactly how to improve your site. To help you out with that dilemma, h...

At least 145 million Americans -- half the United States population -- were impacted by a data breach at Equifax that netted thieves personal information such as names, addresses, birthdates, Social Security Numbers and driver's license numbers. That pales in comparison to the earlier Yahoo breaches...

Keeping customers satisfied is the No. 1 priority of any retail business. Technological advances such as interactive voice response systems, chatbots, omnichannel accessibility and robotics have helped many large e-commerce companies improve customer satisfaction rates. However, these options requir...

Content marketing, which bridges the divide between marketing and storytelling, is vital to attracting and keeping e-commerce customers. Here are some tips from experts for boosting the effectiveness of your business's content marketing strategy.

Shipping has become a key part of success in the online shopping revolution. Amazon has raised consumer expectations dramatically when it comes to shipping, and etailers have been scrambling to keep up. Because changes occur on a near-daily basis in the shipping world, here are some tips for getting...

Once just a hangout for teenagers, Snapchat has matured into an engaging and effective social media platform. If you're trying to reach a younger demographic, it's somewhere you probably want to be. "Snapchat is the best channel to reach young people, as they count for more than two-thirds of its au...

Voice computing is replacing the graphical user interface, Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association, said early this year at CES. Digital assistants will be integrated into many household objects, he noted. About 5 million voice-activated digital voice products had been...

The American Technology Council, which President Donald Trump established this spring by executive order, has four years to rebuild the federal government's information technology structure. A massive reboot of both hardware and software will be necessary to bring government computers up to modern s...

Recent ransomware threats have escalated into a global crisis, and cybersecurity experts and government authorities have redoubled their investigative efforts. Of grave concern is the possibility that the recent Petya attack had more sinister motives than typical ransomware operations, and that stat...