Expert Advice

E-commerce continues to become more competitive as large companies like Amazon, Target and Walmart soak up market share and customer attention. Shipping window expectations have become shorter, and many online retailers struggle to keep up, particularly SMBs. How can SMBs compete? Not only is compet...

Nowhere is the customer experience more vital to the long-term success of a business than in retail. This is particularly evident as retailers work to ensure that brick-and-mortar shopping experiences are as seamless and personalized as those offered by their digital counterparts. Nearly 80 percent ...

In technology parlance, the emotional result of a person's interaction with a website or digital app is called "user experience" or "UX" -- and the success of a business depends on it. Users who have easy, positive experiences with websites and apps likely will be drawn back to the business. On the ...

Shopping: It's not what it once was. Forget the long drive to the mall and countless hours of browsing. Customers now simply log in from the comfort of their own home to have the world at their fingertips. The massive uptake of e-commerce is an unprecedented shift in consumer behavior, expectations ...

Flipping assets is nothing new -- just turn on HGTV to find countless house-flipping shows. The concept is simple: You buy an underperforming property, make some upgrades, and sell it for more than what you put in. Flipping real estate is no easy venture, though, and investors regularly lose money.

Retailers' biggest worry is increasing e-commerce fraud -- including data breaches, targeted attacks and card-not-present fraud -- according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Online fraud is one of the biggest challenges facing retailers, with CNP fraud being one of their top...

Viewability -- that is, a display or video ad's ability to be viewed effectively on a Web page -- is the most critical factor in any video or display ad campaign. However, a surprisingly large percentage of display and video ads lacked either visibility or longevity, the two most important pieces of...

Up to 30 percent of their firms' security incidents this year should have been detected by perimeter security measures -- but weren't -- said 55 percent of respondents to a SANS Institute survey. The truth is that today's attackers have become skilled at bypassing conventional defenses, which no lon...

Any industry player sitting at the vortex of mobile marketing and retail has a great deal to be excited about at present. The marketplace is witnessing an incredible growth and innovation surge. At the end of last year, mobile technology clearly upped the ante -- creating fresh, breakthrough marketi...

Malware has been turning computers into what security pros calls "zombies" since the turn of the century. Ever since, the security industry has struggled to keep pace with new malware variants to keep the threats in check. An approach called "containerization" adds a promising new way to control the...

There's a common perception that implementing comprehensive IT security to protect against today's sophisticated threats and attacks is a difficult and expensive task, and that the benefits of replacing current solutions, even if highly ineffective, are seldom worthwhile. This mindset has resulted i...

With the ever-increasing use of the cloud by more and more businesses, there is good reason to be concerned about legal risks, which are an inherent part of the cloud. The term "cloud" may be relatively new, but the concept of remote computing started more than 60 years ago, when Dartmouth Universit...

Consumers have gotten on board with the concept of buying apparel online. Especially in this era of free returns and nifty sizing tools, buying clothing and shoes off the Web has become mainstream. However, some advertisers have been slow to respond. While most of us have at some point been served a...

Mobile advertising is booming. Revenues increased by 92 percent to $19.3 billion in 2013 over 2012, based on global figures IAB, IAB Europe and IHS Technology released this summer. More and more marketers are eager to engage with consumers on the devices they use for just about everything these days...