retail

Last year was one of the biggest years for retail data breaches, with credit card data from well over 106 million shoppers stolen from two of America’s largest retailers alone. The attacks shook consumer confidence, eroded brand loyalty, and cost the industry millions of dollars. Even though the ret…

As an omnichannel retailer, you are probably offering your products to shoppers both online and in brick-and-mortar stores. And, like most retailers, you are no doubt collecting online data and running detailed website analytics that help you track preferred products, pricing, shopper behavior, rati…

Hello, everyone! My name is Anne McClelland, and I am the new director for Cisco’s retail and hospitality sales team in the U.S. I’m excited to have the chance to write for Cisco’s retail blog program, and you’ll be hearing from me regularly sharing some insights, musings, and speculations on trends…

If every click made by a shopper on an online store can be considered valuable information, surely every step taken by a shopper in a physical store is also a similar wealth of data. While clearly this is valuable input that many stores would like to have, the means to collect and process it is not…

The lines between offline and online experiences are blurring. Customers no longer go online, they are online 24/7, and that includes inside your stores. In fact according to recent Google research, 89% of smartphone users leverage their smartphones while shopping in stores. And close to 70% of thos…

The key to retail today is customer understanding —where each customer stands on his or her personal shopping journey, whether in-store or out. Retailers must “know” each shopper as never before. And they must offer the kinds of contextual, personally relevant experiences that will optimize their me…

We’ve all been there. A grocery store, a department store or even a coffee shop, standing in a long checkout line that hasn’t moved for what seems like an eternity. You ask yourself, ‘Is this purchase worth it?’ For one third of customers, the answer is no, if they have to wait more than five minute…

With Cisco’s cloud-hosted, analytics solution Mobility IQ, retailers and their partners can now gain invaluable insight into their customers’ “showrooming” habits, understanding more about why customers browse in-store – but buy online. This breakthrough solution is making it easier to capital…

As retailers compete for consumers’ attention—and purchases—they are always looking for ways to deliver a better shopping experience that will make customers want to come back to the store, again and again. A good starting point is to eliminate some of the common frustrations of the shopping experie…