It's tough to make the final decision on products as adored as those TVs from simple online recommendations without physically seeing the differences between them. Amazon cannot conquer physical retail without partnerships like this on products that have such subtle differences. Best Buy could use the extra traffic for add-on sales with new shoppers in their stores. Great for them both.

It will grow even more valuable and prevalent if this becomes the one overarching seamless transaction point for all purchases from a retailer. Not just a separate and standalone channel in an ecosystem for both digital and physical interactions. The only variable will soon be how to "receive" the items themselves. In-store, curbside, delivery or shipped. This shift in the process of transacting and acquiring products has to have a direct effect on the functional aspects of store design since now the actual transaction could be done anywhere. Smaller and more efficient cash wraps, anyone? The "scan and go" capability simply becomes a functionality within the app and ALL transactions could be done through the app. That's where this is headed.

Our experience has been large brands CAN find generalized trends (we work with 5 of the top 6 retailers in the world for data and analytics), but they are not nimble enough to capitalize on them as startups are with a fast response, because they have to do this at scale. If they tried to invest and deploy solutions for every trend, they would be years and millions behind maintaining their current inventory that pays the bills. Large brands have a piece of their strategy for partnering with these types of niche players more often as a way of bringing new shoppers and diversity to their product portfolio.

Gamification is a great way to gather data for predicting trends and behaviors. To be more successful with this idea, I would recommend that the retailers and fashion brands integrate the app functionality of gamification into their own digital experience to more effectively leverage the preference, trend and cross-sell benefits. It is separated from the actual retail experience which creates a break in the path to purchase.

Great approach! We should have always had a Customer-Centric mindset, but it seems that retailers have been distracted by other priorities over this one. If they don't forget the EQ side of hiring and training those associates, Target will be successful in their efforts. It won't happen overnight with the state of staffing at retail, but it can be done, a la Chick-fil-A. They seem to find the right kind of customer service talent and Target as an esteemed brand will also. You can train the domain, but you cannot train Attitude and Aptitude.

Technology at the edge means better insights into shopping behaviors if analyzed correctly, and the appropriate action is taken if there is a need for intervention (out of stocks, low sell-through, low dwell time, real-time promotions, etc.). Location data can help retailers make product assortment decisions much more efficiently/effectively PRIOR to distributing items that have to deeply discount to unload. One of the largest fashion retailers I worked with in the past could not make demographic decisions very efficiently because the store planners and merchandisers were working off of very old static transactional data (primarily), and consistently shipped poor product assortment to stores they KNEW couldn't sell those items unless deeply discounted. This retailer could not even adapt to environmental changes in the field and one of their brands went belly up. Not leveraging location data, from choosing locations to choosing the merchandise assortments is a bad deal all the way around. Bad experience for the customers (irrelevant products, out of stocks, etc.) and poor for the profitability of retailers. Data and analytics solve these issues.

This isn't a move by Amazon to get more shoppers (although they will) -- this is a move to gather future customers and insights on those customers for their growing push into healthcare. Wait until their new health platform lands. These folks will now be part of the initial consumers. THAT is the new direction for the "retailization" of healthcare.

The scale issue will not be out at the edge with the sensors and the array of capture devices. The scale issues will show themselves with analyzing the TSUNAMI of data and making real-time and predictive decisions based on it. Very few companies in the world truly have the ability to manage that level of analysis. I know this for a fact. Teradata is one of them and was built over 30 years. The industry throws around terms like "AI," and "machine learning" and "predictive" and "scale" like it is easy. It just isn't. This is great stuff though and startups like these will further disrupt the retail "channel" but I am skeptical of such bold claims as these.

It isn't the end-state to use AI for the entire decision but it can certainly automate the large volume of manual processes to get to a smaller decision set. Yes, EXCEL DOES STILL EXIST in large retailers making these types of decisions. Using AI to automate the core data-set analysis, with even more contextual data sources being utilized, will only increase accuracy and velocity. Let the data analysts work on strategic work for retailers and not production-level data wrangling! This will only help retailers be more successful.

Combine the two into one concept! LOVE IT!

The benefit of being able to know your shoppers and customers at that level, at the time it is needed, is how retailers will drive more relevant, timely and appropriate personalization for the shopper. Achieving the once aspirational CX Nirvana ... The hurdles? Tying the large volume of data together and being able to take action in REAL TIME and predictively while the shopper is on the journey or path to purchase. We need to stop thinking in terms of "digital data" or "marketing data" because that is our domain. We need to move past what we have and what we know and leverage the rich contextual data from across the enterprise as well as outside the enterprise. What about weather data? What about lifestyle data from your IoT devices? What about inventory data? Those data sources coupled with the marketing data provides a much richer ability to target customers and shoppers with that high-touch CX. Without that contextual data, and the underlying agile data foundation to manage it all, retailers won't be as successful. Then you have to have the ecosystem of tools to deploy those smarter actions for better messaging, next-best offer (and more importantly, most lucrative offer) and cross-sell/up-sell messaging, exactly when it is needed. It's not a small or easy task but it is one that will explode in the next few years with a data-driven digital focus!

This isn't a sprint ... it's a marathon. And the decisions to invest in the long-term e-commerce play are just now starting to pay off and some of the bills are coming due from the Jet.com acquisition. In this day and age, shareholders are not very patient to see the end game. Let's not ignore "online sales grew 23 percent in the fourth quarter." That's 23% GROWTH.

I sense the diehard fans are not fans because of the replacement policy, and therefore probably aren't the ones abusing the system. L.L.Bean could use all the help it can get to stay afloat and the people who will abandon the brand over this change, represent a dollar sum far smaller than the cost of replacing the product for people taking advantage of the system. It's 2018 -- we're used to fair return policies and know that a small demographic of people will ultimately ruin a good thing for the rest of us.

The answer will depend on whether or not Walmart can attract the slightly different demographic they have publicized they are going after. If the new shopper demographic will support a higher "priced" product (but lower than other retailers) then YES, this will work for Walmart but it will take time to do so. Those shoppers are used to additional costs for better CX and for the service they expect. If the prices are still lower than other retailers, this move could work out very well for them, long-term.

Grocers need to stop thinking in terms of loyalty based on shoppers' transactional needs. If grocery retail wants to drive deeper loyalty, then they need to move past simply providing products with different delivery models. We still talk in terms of "basket size." There is dwindling value there, and therefore dwindling loyalty. It's a commodity mindset. We're past that. And as the research states, this approach of retail only addresses one-third of the overall pie. Great grocery retail brands are pushing past shopping and are starting to incorporate innovative new models that will help increase "share of stomach." Like meal replacement, meal subscription models, prepare-at-home innovations, etc. that will help to take market share from restaurants and will provide nutritional value to the home. These types of initiatives for supporting the family through meals versus simply ingredients will help to connect shoppers with brands in a much richer way. Take care of the nutritional needs of my family, and you are no longer simply a commodity transaction.