Social media has created a whole new universe for consumers to discover, shop, and share the brands they love. And this new world has sparked an often-overwhelming range of opportunities for today’s retailers, who want to keep up with comments sections, develop AI chatbot solutions, and provide personalized experiences.

As such, it’s no surprise that enterprise IT spending in the retail market is expected to increase by 5.9% this year, to $209.3 billion. But it’s not just about spending. The road to smoother shopping experiences is paved with broken attempts at implementation with overly complex, costly technologies.

Indeed, many retailers are looking to take a more measured, strategic approach to their IT investments, ensuring they make the right moves and partnerships at the right time. So, for channel partners in this space, the pressure is rising to show their value.

With the retail landscape continuing to evolve so rapidly, relationships and expertise remain indispensable. IT channel partners must be crucial allies, enabling brands to navigate the complex technical challenges holding them back. They are the backbone behind the future of retail systems across Point of Sale, inventory management, supply chain logistics, and more.

Retailers aren’t just seeking products. They want long-term strategic advisers and allies that can bring their business goals to life.

Focusing on relationships and outcomes

Products cannot be plastered onto the challenges that many businesses are facing today. Retailers need a range of outcomes: seamless omnichannel experiences, agile supply chains, real-time inventory visibility, and AI-powered personalisation that enhances the customer journey. And no single vendor can solve or provide everything.

Nurturing relationships where partners give customers end-to-end expert counsel is crucial. The best partners think beyond just their portfolio. They ask: What does success look like for this customer? What gaps exist in getting them what they want? How can new and existing systems be integrated?

This requires a partnership that extends beyond the core services a vendor offers. The relationship and the outcome matter more than any individual sale. This is what strengthens the partnerships in the channel ecosystem.

Understanding differentiation in a hesitant market

Despite projected growth for the coming year, trade policy changes and geopolitical volatility have created multiple different realities for retailers depending on their location and products. As such, many channel partners are experiencing project delays and ingrained market hesitation that has led to increased competition.

Diversification isn't differentiation. What will set partners apart is their depth of expertise and the tangible value they bring. Retailers need partners who understand their specific challenges, whether it’s optimizing inventory visibility across distributed order management systems, orchestrating complex supply chain delays, or managing their workforce during uncertainty.

Those who can truly grasp these operational realities can help articulate a clear path forward for customers.

Committing to quality over quantity

In the channel industry, breadth can sometimes sacrifice quality. Fewer, deeper relationships are better than an abundance of shallow ones - especially to nurture valuable long-term collaboration.

When organizations commit to select channel partners and invest intensively, shared expertise develops. Partners should implement feedback loops as the basis of this development, looking to build trust on both sides and promote honest conversations. Committing to frequent, multi-level engagement across geographies is also an important basis for how to enable mutual success.

It requires discipline for this type of quality relationship to work. For vendors, that means saying no to partnerships that spread resources thin with little reward. For channel partners, it means being selective. The result is a resilient ecosystem that is capable of tackling the industry’s toughest obstacles.

Deepening partnership where it matters

AI momentum in retail will continue to grow in the years to come. Already, more than 35% of executives are using it in areas such as online customer service, image creation, copywriting, consumer search, or product discovery. Yet for many retailers, the skills to implement AI well can be the one thing they struggle with most. This is where channel partners with AI expertise have a significant advantage.

Good AI strategies require quality data, integration, change management, and optimisation. Successful implementations involve partners taking a pragmatic approach that brings specific, high-value use cases to retail. Partners need to be the ones who enable retailers to identify how to execute this well, and step by step, over time.

Building for the long term

Deeply invested channel partners quickly become authentic advocates, with every integration increasing reach and demand. Strong channel partnerships are one of the most important avenues for organic, credible brand amplification. When a trusted systems integrator recommends a solution based on real experiences, it carries weight that nothing else can match.

This is the ecosystem that will help retailers navigate a changing landscape, driven by a shared commitment to solve new challenges and share in the success. It is this philosophy of shared wins that underpins the most resilient environments in retail.

AI in retail is booming, with the vast majority of organizations planning to increase their AI budgets this year, according to new research from Nvidia.

The chip giant’s third annual State of AI in Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods report found 91% of respondents are either actively using or assessing AI. Nine-in-ten said they’d build on the success of current projects by increasing their AI budgets in 2026.

Of those using AI, 89% said it was helping to increase annual revenue, while 95% said it is acting to cut costs. More than half said they'd seen improved employee productivity and operational efficiencies and 41% reported improved customer service.

“What executives should be focused on is not green-lighting vanity projects at the expense of high-ROI wins,” said Chris Walton, co-CEO of Omni Talk. “The retailers who will succeed will start with boring use cases that solve specific P&L problems, prove the value, then scale.”

Open source AI is extremely popular, the study found, with 79% saying these models and software were moderately to extremely important to their AI strategy.

“Most retailers first started experimenting with AI using proprietary AI vendors. They had the models, but they didn’t own the keys to their own kingdom,” said Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer of Publicis Groupe.

“Open source flips that script, allowing retailers to leverage their proprietary data, avoid vendor lock-in and benefit from open-source community innovation.”

Similarly, agentic AI is an increasing focus, with 47% of respondents saying that their companies were either using or assessing agentic AI in their operations. One-in-five said AI agents were already active in their organizations, with another 21% reporting that agents are coming within the next year.

“The truly disruptive impact of agentic AI will hit retail supply chains and operations first, such as autonomous agents handling real-time inventory rebalancing, dynamic pricing and vendor negotiations at scale, because that’s where the ROI is measurable,” said Walton.

Retailers tackle supply chain issues with AI

AI is also helping organizations deal with supply chain problems, allowing retailers to optimize inventory at the store and customer level rather than at a regional level.

They can now incorporate many more factors in their demand forecasts, and more accurately match supply to demand.

The top pressure valve, Nvidia noted, is using AI for supply chain operational efficiency and throughput, cited by 51% of respondents. Meeting customer expectations was next on the list at 45%, and solving for traceability and transparency was third at 38%.

Physical AI is gaining ground in the industry, meanwhile, with 17% of respondents using or evaluating the technology.

“The real transformation will come from AI that makes existing physical infrastructure smarter,” said Walton. “My favorite example is in-store robotics. Through them, you get better pricing, better inventory, management and better presentation quality.”

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

A high-quality customer experience is paramount for a retailer to maintain its reputation and loyalty among shoppers. Staff must swiftly address customer inquiries, too, both in person and online, with minimum disruption. For many years, UK high-street fashion retailer River Island had been using the Zebra MC14 scanning device to check stock and answer customer queries across its 300-plus nationwide stores.

But this device was nearing obsolescence, given it was powered by an older version of Android that was slow and unreliable, River Island’s director for technology, Paul Cooper, tells ITPro. Devices were often shared between staff members, and different tasks required several pieces of equipment – not just one – such as walkie-talkies to communicate between colleagues across the shop floor.

Beleaguered with legacy hardware, River Island sought to unify its shop floor technologies across its hundreds of stores into a single handheld device – meaning upgrading thousands of employee devices at once.

Shifting from legacy to modern technology

The digital transformation journey started during the COVID-19 pandemic. River Island’s workforce needed a way to communicate while working remotely during the lockdowns, so the business settled on Microsoft Teams. The reliance on Teams continued after restrictions were lifted as it proved to be an effective communication platform.

Next came modernizing its legacy hardware. River Island trialed a variety of handheld devices in certain stores, before reviewing how each device performed. Area managers worked with the central business to choose which outlets had the bandwidth capacity for the investigation.

The Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro soon emerged as ideal for River Island’s needs. “The XCover Pro was a massive shift for us; going from an expensive enterprise device to basically a ‘prosumer’ device,” explains Cooper.

“It's a ruggedized phone, but there were multiple benefits. It’s very intuitive, as it's the same as any Android device. It’s also lightweight and worked extremely well with all of the mobile device management technologies that we use.”

Unlike the Zebra MC14, however, the XCover Pro didn’t have a barcode reader, which is essential in retail. Cooper overcame this challenge by collaborating with a smart data capture software provider, Scandit, to install a barcode reader on the XCover using the device’s camera. This could then interface with River Island’s product database. The software, however, did have walkie-talkie functionality, meaning retail assistants were able to use one fewer piece of hardware while on shift.

Using the XCover Pro also meant each member of approximately 5,000 River Island staff could have their own device for a shift, enabling smoother communication in-store, as well as with those in head office. 

“As part of our move to Samsung devices, we were able to give every single person who's on shift a device,” says Cooper. “They could all have a device and be in contact. This was a key driver for us – to make sure that we had identity correct on the devices.”

One of Cooper’s main goals was for the devices to be as easy to use as possible. Given Android’s ubiquitous nature, most members of staff were already familiar with the operating system. The apps have been designed to be intuitive and transparent, too, so new starters only need a brief induction.

Triggering a back-end network upgrade

Having a much greater number of handheld devices operating across the River Island ecosystem demanded a major network upgrade as part of the wider project. The business upgraded from MPLS-WAN to SD-WAN, in a major modernization of the UK clothing retailer’s network infrastructure.

The devices were first deployed at just a few stores to confirm they would integrate with River Island’s network, before they were rolled out to the remaining sites across the UK, in a repeat of the onboarding process.

Although Cooper says the deployment was ultimately successful, he believes with hindsight they shouldn’t have been as aggressive with the rollout, given the scale of the challenge.

“Our approach has always been to get the most value as quick as you can, and then do the iterative changes,” he explains. “With more than 250 stores and across multiple regions of the UK, that's quite an ask. 

"We should have pulled it back a tiny bit to allow the rollout to be smoother.”

Over the course of the project, River Island unified functionality into one device for each employee while simplifying processes and streamlining communications. It's reduced frustration among staff and boosted morale while improving the customer experience – since staff can quickly and accurately resolve queries.

The retailer plans to build on this momentum by deploying a self-checkout system across stores in its next major project. The system is already being tested at one location, with more sites preparing to trial the technology soon.

JD Sports has confirmed it will be refreshing its cyber security stack following the serious cyber attack it sustained at the start of the year.

In a regulatory filing published on Wednesday, the retail group said it has appointed a third-party consultancy that will work to create a “better-integrated cyber vendor ecosystem” for the company.

“The Group has appointed Boston Consulting Group who will work with best-in-class suppliers to design key tactical and strategic solutions for an efficient and better-integrated cyber vendor ecosystem,” read the company’s financial year-end statement. 

“We are confident that this multi-vendor approach is the best solution to deliver outcomes at pace whilst ensuring value for money.”

Additionally, JD Sports has appointed an interim chief information security officer (CISO) to oversee the strengthening of its cyber security posture while the company continues its search for someone to fill the role permanently.

It said the company is also recruiting for a chief information technology officer (CITO) too. 

The CISO role will most likely handle the company’s wider cyber security strategy, while the person hired for the CITO role will focus their time on ensuring the company’s technology - hardware and software - meet the cyber security ambitions set by the CISO.

JD Sports owns a number of high street retail brands, including JD, Go Outdoors, Size?, Blacks, Scotts, and Millets.

Many of these companies were thought to have been affected by the January cyber attack, which at the time JD Sports said potentially affected 10 million customers.

In a statement, the business said that “affected data is limited” - referring to the nature of the data that was exposed to attackers - and the messaging remains the same in today’s regulatory filing.

“On 30 January 2023, the Group announced that it had been the target of a cyber incident which resulted in the unauthorized access to a system that contained customer data relating to some online orders placed between November 2018 and October 2020,” it said. 

“Whilst the affected data was limited, the Group took the necessary immediate steps to investigate and respond to the incident, including working with leading cyber security experts. The Group also engaged with the relevant authorities, including the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), as appropriate.”

The ICO has told JD Sports that it won’t face any enforcement action as a result of the incident but has identified areas in which the business must demonstrate improvement.

Neither JD Sports nor the ICO has revealed what these specific areas were. ITPro has approached both for additional comment.

Enforcement action can relate to a number of different types of punishment. According to the ICO, powers can include enforcing cooperation with an official audit to check compliance to service obligations, an enforcement notice that sets out required steps to maintain legal compliance, monetary fines, legal prosecution, and reporting to Parliament.

Failure to comply with an enforcement notice can lead to legal prosecution and the issuing of “more substantial fines” of up to £17.5 million or 4% of a company’s annual turnover, whichever is higher.

For staff at Crew Clothing, traditional point-of-sale (PoS) tills had, over the years, become restrictive – holding back sales activities and future growth.

"As technology moves on, people get frustrated with the speed at which things happen, and the nuances of areas of the system that tend to go wrong," says Richard Surman, head of IT at the coast-inspired casualwear chain. Surman was brought in around the time of the first COVID-19 lockdown to "come up with a strategic IT direction". 

Going mobile, partly inspired by free-roaming Apple Store layouts, has already seen costs reduce, the customer experience improve, and agility rise, he says.  

"As technology moves on, people get frustrated with the speed at which things happen, and the nuances of areas of the system that tend to go wrong," says Richard Surman, head of IT at the coast-inspired casualwear chain. Surman was brought in around the time of the first COVID-19 lockdown to "come up with a strategic IT direction". 

Going mobile, partly inspired by free-roaming Apple Store layouts, has already seen costs reduce, the customer experience improve, and agility rise, he says.  

The business faced a 13% revenue decline in 2021, when COVID-19 was at its peak and retail moved largely online. Now, the company has more than 100 stores and reported a 40% growth in sales last year to £82.7 million. It predicts further expansion in the future.

Working with IT partner PMC over 12 weeks, the London-headquartered retailer developed a cloud-enabled Android app-and-tablet-based sales solution integrated with Crew's card payment provider, enabling staff to serve customers as and where needed, he says.

"Staff log in, press a button, scan the barcode, press 'total', job done. You pay for the products and away you go," says Surman. "The key was to make it really easy – and it was quick to develop because, basically, we had a set number of products we wanted to sell." 

Key mobile sales components

Front-end architecture with e-basket functionality was coded by PMC to 'talk' to a Couchbase database layer, with both elements integrated into a Splunk-based reporting platform.

All stores can view all sales transactions, customer capture information, e-receipt percentage versus physical printed receipts, average basket value, and more, with sales data fed in real-time into the Microsoft-driven enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Data is updated at the endpoint tablets within ten or 15 seconds, helping ensure sales efficiency and accurate inventory management on the fly, Surman says. If the internet goes down or devices can't talk to central systems, the setup itself "flips over" to offline mode. 

Staff can still transact business as usual, using 4G SIM-enabled card machines, he says. He warns that Crew was not "completely sold" on the idea initially, however. But Surman knew he could showcase it at various Crew-sponsored summer sporting events, such as Henley Regatta and with the Lawn Tennis Association.

"It was really successful at those events. No failures, no issues, store staff at the events loved it, as did our directors that went along," he explains. "So we moved on, broadening the remit to ensure we could deliver it to our store environment."

Dodging curveballs

Other "curveballs" did occur, Surman admits. The company's card payment provider pulled out, which meant deploying an entirely new card payment solution as well as building out their promotion engine for faster product scanning and access to the customer database.

"PMC, again working with Couchbase, delivered quick, seamless integration with our existing systems and a great store-staff experience," Surman says.

Integrating with the existing, legacy ERP platform was the biggest tech challenge. Surman now says he wishes he'd invested more time on that interface before go-live, even with relatively clean, easy-to-load data.

"We spent three months manually loading sales into the system," he says. "We devised a slick process for doing it but obviously that time could have been better spent doing something else."

Hardware costs are now "a hell of a lot cheaper", Surman reveals, noting that physical cash registers and equipment have long been costly and time-consuming to manage and maintain. "We no longer need a hardware support function for store staff, and the IT cost of setting up a new store is about 65% lower. "Transactions are about 45% faster than our old till system."

Store staff and IT now free to innovate

Customers now rarely need to queue except at "crazy" times like Black Friday or Christmas, meaning fewer lost sales when customers can't or don't wish to wait in line to make their purchases. Surman says. "This gives us a lot more time with the customers as well."

That includes his 13 IT staff who, freed from laborious hardware management, have time to work proactively with other departments, visiting stores or coming up with innovations. 

In April 2023, Crew is in a final testing phase for the full omnichannel or "phygital" customer experience, integrating the tablet solution to the website so stock displayed online better matches inventory. 

There's also a new product information system that's been introduced for merchandisers and buyers, loading data to the mobile solution overnight. Real-time is possible but could prove more disruptive to staff physically working on the sales floor each day, says Surman.

"Now, we're just in the final throes of integrating a new gift card solution with the tablet, so that we can completely get rid of the tills," he confirms. "And a slicker version 2.0 is coming this summer."

When you see a phrase like the Internet of Behaviors (IoB), it immediately draws connotations with the similar sounding Internet of Things (IoT). Fear not, though, because IoB isn’t a network in its own right. Rather, it’s a targeted business tool that piggybacks on existing IoT networks. 

With the advent of IoT and a flood of internet-facing devices hitting the market, organizations have been excited to take advantage of these entirely new avenues for data collection. Whether it’s using IoT networks in smart cities, such as projects happening in UK cities like Leeds or Edinburgh, or retail giants using sensors to assess customer behavior, the potential for IoT has been widely hyped. But only by applying the principles of IoB can organizations truly understand why customers make purchasing decisions. 

What is the Internet of Behaviors (IoB)?

IoB is a field of research that vies to understand how people use technology to make purchasing decisions. It combines IoT – the idea of using smart sensors and appliances to collect data – with behavioral science and edge analytics. This blend illuminates the ways in which your customers reach buying decisions. 

These platforms aggregate and analyze data generated from many different sources – including online activity as well as physical sensors. IoB systems analyze behavior to seek patterns that marketers and sales staff can then use to influence behavior in the future. Marketers can utilize IoB to monetize vast volumes of data that are collected, and under-used, by the many sensors deployed as part of a wider IoT network.

Is IoB ethical?

The principles of IoB might be interpreted as nudging customers towards profitable behaviors. While data-driven behavioral science must be handed with care, this particular mash-up of economics, psychology, statistics, and technology is actually quite respectful of the customer. Rather than trying to manipulate people’s desires, or push them into behaving in a particular way, it’s more about collecting and analyzing low-level information to come up with an offering that better matches their needs.

It’s understandable if you’re suspicious of any type of customer targeting, of course. It’s impossible to surf the web nowadays without being pestered with unwanted promotions and customized clickbait. Social media sites tend to exploit data to bring out the worst in human nature too. But an anonymized overview of typical customer behavior can help you tailor your offering and boost revenues without compromising anyone’s privacy.

How do IoB systems collect and use data?

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that valuable data has to be complex or expensive to obtain. There’s a huge variety of IoT devices out there that are perfectly simple and cheap enough for anyone to deploy at will – and when I say simple, I mean as basic as a pressure pad or a door sensor to track people coming in and out of your cake shop. 

Depending on the nature of your business, there may be a huge amount of priceless information already sitting in your web server logs, telling you when people visit your website, where they’re located, and so forth. The magic isn’t in the technology, but in the patterns of behavior that emerges once you sit down with your collected data and work out what it’s really telling you.

What’s the difference between IoB and big data?

Big data isn’t too far apart from IoB. But as the name implies, big-data approaches tend to work best with very large data repositories, unearthing connections that a human eye might miss because they’re lost in the mass of data – or because they involve data points that seem, at first glance, wholly unconnected. 

IoB conversely benefits from an expert eye, because a human can intentionally collect and correlate a small selection of data points to draw specific inferences. Beyond just being a large spreadsheet, though, IoB also incorporates edge analytics. This is where technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) come into their own. For example, imagine a CCTV camera that can identify faces and track whether someone entering your shop is a new or returning customer. It’s not a particularly difficult feat for a contemporary AI engine, and it adds a whole new dimension of meaning to all your other collected data. 

Don’t expect too much, though. While smart technologies can greatly increase the speed and range of data capture for your IoB analyses, this isn’t a field where a black box can do all the work for you. Some parts of the ideal, theoretical behavioral analysis toolbox are still a good few years into the future.

Technology touches every part of retail, and in addition to customer-facing points of weakness online and in the real world, retailers also need to ensure their own business operations and internal data are not breached.

The threat posed by ransomware attacks is extremely damaging for retailers, both in terms of immediate financial loss and also with regards to customer data. Yet many retailers are running outdated and fragmented IT infrastructures supported by overstretched IT teams.

Learn how retailers can keep things up and running, ensuring safety for staff and customers, by having a Sophos Managed Detection & Response team in their corner at all times.

Provided by

Security researchers have discovered a Linux-based remote access trojan (RAT) that uses an unusual stealth technique to remain out of sight from security products.

The malware, dubbed CronRat, hides in the calendar subsystem of Linux servers (“cron”) on a non-existent day, 31 February, according to a blog post by security researchers at Sansec.

The researchers said that CronRat “enables server-side Magecart data theft which bypasses browser-based security solutions”. The malware was discovered on several eCommerce websites injecting Magecart payment skimmers in server-side code.

Sansec director of threat research Willem de Groot said that digital skimming is moving from the browser to the server, and this is yet another example.

“Most online stores have only implemented browser-based defenses, and criminals capitalize on the unprotected back-end. Security professionals should really consider the full attack surface,” he added.

The malware uses Linux’s cron job scheduling utility to hide from discovery. It adds several tasks to crontab with a curious date specification: 52 23 31 2 3. These lines are syntactically valid but would generate a run time error when executed.

“However, this will never happen as they are scheduled to run on February 31st. Instead, the actual malware code is hidden in the task names and is constructed using several layers of compression and base64 decoding,” said researchers.

According to researchers, the malware is a sophisticated Bash program that features self-destruction, timing modulation, and a custom binary protocol to communicate with a foreign control server. Upon launch, it contacts the control server using an exotic feature of the Linux kernel that enables TCP communication via a file using a fake banner for the Dropbear SSH service. This also helps to keep the malware hidden.

It also contacts a server hosted on Alibaba in China, and uses a custom binary protocol with random checksums, to avoid detection by firewalls and packet inspectors.

Once contact with a C2 server is established, it drops its disguise and sends and receives numerous commands, and downloads a malicious dynamic library. Afterwards, the malware is ready to run any command on a compromised system.

While investigating this RAT, the researchers wrote another specially crafted RAT client to intercept commands. This led to the discovery of yet another RAT that researchers hope to study in-depth later.

Download now

Approx. read time: 16 minutes

Retailers are still transitioning after the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and with the virus still around for some time yet, the need to socially-distance in shops is still apparent. But this isn’t the only way shopping has changed for many consumers.

We’re shifting towards online shopping and cashless transactions and more retailers are turning to technology to support this and increasing their omni channel presence.

Download this guide to learn more about how shopping in a post-COVID world is going to be safer, more convenient, more personalised and more mobile through technology.

Fill out the form below to download this resource

Sabre Corporation, a software and technology company involved in the global travel industry, is working with Google to launch its first product powered by proprietary Sabre Travel AI technology.

The travel-based Sabre Smart Retail Engine will launch in early 2021 and will be powered by artificial intelligence (AI) technology and advanced machine learning (ML) capabilities. The development of Sabre’s Smart Retail Engine came together through its relationship with Google.

"We are excited to bring this intelligent retail engine to market as part of our offer management strategy, marking another step towards achieving our 2025 vision of delivering truly personalized travel," said Wade Jones, chief product officer at Sabre. "By bringing together some of the brightest minds from Google and Sabre, we are accelerating the delivery of this smart and scalable retailing engine that we believe will enable customers to deliver personalized offers to their customers, better serving the needs of today's traveler, while unlocking more value per passenger boarded."

The Sabre Smart Retail Engine combines Sabre's offer management and customer segmentation abilities with Google's powerful merchandising solution. It’ll use real-time shopping data, content and AI/ML-based decision support models to create personalized offer bundles.

The Smart Retail Engine technology will dynamically price travel offers using customer segmentation techniques. Its bundles can include seats, baggage, and other ancillaries. It’ll eventually also include rental cars, hotel stays and other third-party offers.

Sabre Travel AI works with Google Cloud AI solutions and automated ML tools to identify, analyze and predict consumer behaviors, which are based on real-time shopping and travel-specific business insights. This will help travel clients quickly create relevant and personalized content, meet traveler demands and create more revenue opportunities.

"We are pleased to be working side-by-side with Sabre to bring innovative, industry-first technologies to the travel space," said Ravi Simhambhatla, managing director, digital transformation officer – travel & transportation, Google Cloud. "Today's announcement, as well as Sabre Travel AI, are what we hope will be the first of many concepts generated from our partnership."

Leanpath, a tech company focused on reducing food waste, has launched Impact Suite, a set of tools that gives food service kitchens actionable suggestions to help track and reduce food waste.

Impact Suite’s Goals feature scans food waste data to determine where a kitchen can reduce its food waste based on cost, frequency and other factors. It then creates action plans to help the kitchen deal with the waste and provides chefs with daily and weekly reports on progress. Beta testing data indicates these reports helped to increase savings by 3% of cost of goods sold as a percent of revenue.

The Shared Goals feature is similar to Goals, but is designed for multi-site managers. It enables them to assign action plans to groups of kitchens and provide common objectives for large teams. For example, if the cost of chicken will increase, the corporate food buyer can create a shared goal of reducing chicken waste for all the kitchens.

The Alerts feature provides chefs and managers real-time notifications when Goal items are wasted or other key waste items are recorded with Leanpath Trackers. This feature can work on its own or as part of the Goals process.

"Leanpath pioneered automated food waste tracking and analytics, allowing kitchens to quickly 'see' what they are wasting and why," said Leanpath CEO Andrew Shakman. "Now our Impact Suite automates the next step in preventing food waste: turning that data into action."

COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the food service industry. With kitchens reopening, it’s important to improve their efficiency by integrating food waste tracking and prevention. Impact Suite enables kitchens to quickly and effectively manage food waste problems. Since 2014, Leanpath has prevented more than 55 million pounds of food waste.

Spring 2020 marked the 145th birthday of the iconic department store and retail brand Liberty, and the company had some big plans to celebrate the event. It was decided to coordinate its ambitious rebranding project with a much-needed relaunch of Liberty’s website, collaborating with data and e-commerce experts Threepipe Reply.

What Liberty couldn’t have known was that relaunch would also coincide with the global COVID-19 pandemic, which precipitated a near-complete lockdown across the UK and most of the globe. IT Pro spoke to Liberty’s e-commerce director Eric Fergusson about the challenges – and opportunities – presented by the pandemic to his organisation and other retailers looking to refine their online offering at this time, and how the company was able to achieve a successful website relaunch.

The case for change

The previous Liberty website launched in 2015, and had grown complicated and difficult to manage over the years. “We had been making monthly updates to that site’s codebase,” Fergusson tells us. “Over five years it had ended up quite messy.” This led to excess page weight that was harming the user experience, as well as unintended interdependencies. “So you add a new feature or you make a tweak and then something in a completely different area of the site which you thought was completely interdependent goes awry,” he continues. “Which meant that we had this heavy site which took longer to make improvements to and to QA.”

Coinciding with the Liberty rebranding and the sunsetting of critical third-party infrastructure, early 2020 became the ideal time to move ahead with a wholly new website. “What we were trying to achieve commercially was a faster site with an exciting new UI and a codebase that was easier to change, easier to monitor and easier to do QA on,” says Fergusson. Liberty is one of the many online retailers that have seen a huge uptick in e-commerce in recent years, which has only been accelerated by lockdown conditions. Streamlining operations, ensuring clear metrics and reporting, and smoothing and simplifying the user experience are all essential if a business wants to take full advantage of the online boom.

The relaunch allowed Liberty to diversify, moving from one website serving the whole world, to operating a second US subfolder domain enabling some localised functionality for customers across the Atlantic.

“Threepipe Reply has worked with us for over three years, and they are a key partner for a number of reasons,” says Fergusson. “They provide analytics insight and other kinds of mechanical and advisory expertise, which for any digital business is absolutely critical. You need reliable numbers. You need to be able to understand as best as you can the causes of what you observe – orders, visits, conversion, whether that's coming through channel, through device, through product category – to then be able to know how to respond.

“Threepipe Reply also helped us in the early days by setting up sophisticated web funnel reporting at category level, which helps us track on an ongoing basis whenever we made enhancements to the site and see whether they were driving improvements in the key stage of the journey. We now work through a monthly cycle of releases and improvements to the site.”

A chief concern for Liberty’s e-commerce team was that moving to a new site would herald a potential loss of insight and a lack of perfect mapping. But working with Threepipe Reply, the team was able to maintain “robust, comparable and continuous insight” throughout the transition. “The main thing is that we've made the structure of our data more complicated by moving from one site to effectively two,” says Fergusson. “And we haven't lost any of the richness or detail compared to what we had before. It's remarkably common for insight and analytics to be a bit wonky at launch, and if you've got a week of dud data you're stuck with that forever. Avoiding that is really valuable.”

Navigating the pandemic

It goes without saying that coronavirus wasn’t in the original plans for Liberty’s site relaunch, and has had a huge impact on the rollout, as well as the focus and importance placed on its success. The transition between websites had been planned for a period that was expected to be quiet for online sales – when the proportion of web mix in the overall retail mix would be relatively low. Instead, the new site went live at a time when – as was the case for many businesses operating a combination of digital and bricks-and-mortar stores – web accounted for 100% of sales. “So, the consequence of web being offbeat for a couple of weeks would suddenly become more sizable,” says Fergusson.

There were benefits, too. With the flagship store on London’s Regent Street closed, “IT was able to deploy more resource onto this project because they didn't need to support as much across the business as normal. The risk was greater, but we had more resource to be able to deploy against it,” notes Fergusson.

E-commerce is inevitably going to come under increased scrutiny from the wider business for any retailer during the pandemic, and even more so during a full site relaunch. Stakeholders had many questions for Fergusson’s team. There was a strong incentive to come to grips with the changes and understand which would prove temporary and which were likely to become lasting. The initial data coming in from a new website can be unpredictable, and not all of it is statistically significant. “We've got a really broad product catalogue,” says Fergusson. “The performance on any given product can be quite volatile. In those high energy moments post-launch, it's very common for senior stakeholders and retailers to want to know the answer immediately as to what's worked, what hasn't worked, what we need to fix.” As a partner, Threepipe Reply was able to urge caution and give a steer on which data were relevant and which were likely to be anomalous, and in doing so back up the e-commerce team and reassure other stakeholders.

That data is of ever-increasing importance to online retailers is impossible to overstate. Fergusson points out a shift in the traditional focus on budgets thanks to the volatility and unpredictability caused by COVID-19. “Normally retailers love budgets. You need a budget because you have to buy stock in advance. Many of our categories were committing stocks 6-12 months ahead of time, so budgets are really important, and often very rigid. But the activities of this year have meant that budgets for most businesses have been more out than they've ever been.” Instead, trend data and the insights supplied by Threepipe Reply have proven a more accurate and reactive tool for planning and predicting how Liberty will perform, putting less emphasis on budgets than had been previously. “It's been really important for us to have robust and comparable and continuous insight,” says Fergusson.

For retailers considering a similar site relaunch at this time, Fergusson emphasises the need for capital investment. “If you're in a category where customers are increasingly shopping online, and therefore have that customer supporting wave behind you, you need to try and get the finances to support you to catch it. Businesses are going to find themselves in one of a couple of situations. They've either got a good tailwind driven by this unforeseeable year, and they need to go out and get cash to take advantage of it. For someone like ASOS, online is not new for them. They're experts in this, but they went out and purposely fundraised to make sure that they could catch the behaviour and storm ahead. And then you've got companies like H&M, who have been later to the e-commerce world, but are investing and driving change at a rate that's outstanding. You want to try and be someone like them. But we can't be blind to the fact that a lot of businesses are really going to struggle to find that money, and that doesn't mean they're bad businesses that don't know what they're doing.”

For those in the position to bolster their e-commerce offering, a strong grasp of the data is essential. Since working with Threepipe Reply on the website relaunch, Liberty is reporting a 16% increase in its conversion rate, a 13% increase in add-to-cart and a 7% increase in tracking accuracy (from 93% to 98%). “The whole process of working with Threepipe Reply was pain-free,” says Fergusson. “They are a trusted partner that you can rely on to deliver it. It's been a great relationship.”

Discover how Threepipe Reply can help transform your retail business

Looking back at my shopping habits, the London Lidls have seen me at my worst. Only a few days ago, I struggled to choose between a £25 drying rack and a £11 potted Yucca plant, attempted to carry both, failed, incited enough sympathy from the people queuing behind me to help me drag the two oversized products to the till before ultimately abandoning the drying rack in a random aisle and settling for the plant. Yes, my flatmate specifically asked me to pick up a new drying rack. However, choices were made and I stand by my actions.

According to Tony Blair, “people give a lot more information to their supermarkets than they do to the government”.

The former prime minister made the comment while speaking to BBC’s Newscast while expressing his support for the idea of digital IDs as a way of tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

I cannot deny that when I read this, I immediately thought about how Lidl not only caught my struggles and deliberations on CCTV (Sophie’s Choice, 2020 retail edition) as well as cemented my purchase decision in the form of the proof of payment. That same Lidl will probably also be able to deduce some simple facts about me based on my spending habits, such as dietary requirements, grocery budget, or my taste in £4 wine.

Nevertheless, I still believe that Blair’s comment is a massive overstatement. Not because supermarkets don’t collect data, but because one cannot compare the local Lidl to the UK government.

One thing which is worth considering is that a lot of information provided to supermarkets is on an opt-in basis. Loyalty cards, which often provide customers with personalised deals based on their previous shopping experience, are not mandatory. One does not need to have a ClubCard in order to enter a Tesco, but a passport is a necessary document when travelling overseas - especially after Brexit.

If you don’t have a loyalty card but choose to pay with plastic, the few final digits of your debit card will probably be known to the supermarket. However, this data is anonymised, meaning that your supermarket will likely not know your name unless you actively introduce yourself. What is more, if you don’t feel like sharing this information either, you can also pay by cash, which is probably not the healthiest option nowadays, but at least it provides you with an additional layer of anonymity. Moreover, in contrast to pubs or cafes, supermarkets don’t even require customers to provide COVID-19 contact-tracing information.

I mention COVID-19 because that is, more or less, the basis for this whole issue. By supporting the implementation of digital IDs as well as letting the government keep records of who is vaccinated against the coronavirus, Blair is essentially a spokesperson for immunity passports, which I wrote a feature on back in June.

While I am not against exploring options which would help the UK, as well as the rest of the world, put this pandemic to an end, I find it worrying that a person who used to run this country has no problem with making potentially misleading assertions in order to try to get people to be comfortable with sharing their highly-personal information.

If Blair would really like to make a case for immunity passports, he could try addressing the multitude of problems which arise from the lack of legislation essential to maintaining the safety of personal data kept by the government. He could also maybe provide some solutions on how to avoid discriminatory treatment based on citizens’ diagnosis.

At the end of the day, despite the UK government surely having more data about me, I do feel like my local Lidl still knows me better.

If the UK government wants me to give it the same amount of information than Blair seems to think I give my local supermarket, it’s going to have to make it worth my while; stopping the spread of COVID-19 is all very well, but can it really beat red wine and the cheapest Yucca plant in north London?

The Christmas holiday season, like Easter, Halloween and Black Friday, is one of the busiest periods for web retailers, who must prepare in advance to ensure they are able to meet customer demands.

Retail ecommerce in the UK is set to reach a total of almost 70 billion this year, according to eMarketer, and this number is expected to grow to almost 100 billion by 2020. This is a huge increase compared to 2012, when the figure was less than 40 billion.

Bill Fisher, senior analyst at eMarketer, said: "Retail ecommerce will account for 17% of total retail sales in 2016. This outstrips all other countries we cover by this measure, except China. For example, retail ecommerce in the US will account for 8.2% of total retail sales in 2016, less than half the proportion in the UK."

Although shopping online has huge advantages, such as avoiding cues and busy stores, customers might experience other issues, including websites crashing, low product availability, poor customer service or late deliveries.

IT Pro spoke to online gift store Prezzybox and electronic goods retailer Ebuyer to find out about how they cope with the demands of the holiday season.

How do you prepare for Christmas and holiday season sales?

Andy Roberts, head of business intelligence at Ebuyer: "The success of a holiday season is usually down to the planning. The more time we have the better chance we have of delivering across the business. We have overarching legacy plans that give us an idea of when to begin ordering stock. This can vary from weeks to months, especially if it's a product that is in high demand or comes from overseas."

Francesca Prince, PR and marketing executive at Prezzybox: "From ensuring we are stocked up, to dealing with customers and being flexible in our marketing, there's a lot that we do to prepare for holiday season sales. We also make sure delivery dates are achievable and prepare for a rise in customer enquiries."

How do you ensure that your website supports the large amounts of traffic during the Christmas period?

Roberts: "As a company we run a number of load balancing tests over the year to check that our systems are up for the larger workloads required. These are stress tests for both the website and the warehouse system that allow us to handle huge amounts of traffic, while effectively fulfilling the orders."

Prince: "We research and develop technology to make sure the website runs efficiently and can scale itself when under load. This means that the site will grow as needed and stay fast for users."

Do you take any extra precautions online to protect yourself from phishing campaigns or malware during the Christmas period?

Roberts: "We take security very seriously throughout the year and are constantly testing and improving our defences, especially when it comes to malware, protecting customer data or dispersing and preventing DDOS attacks."

What do marketing and analytics experts suggest?

IT Pro spoke to Clicktale, acompany providing marketing and analytics solutions for digital businesses, about how web retailers can best cope during the holiday period.

Yossi Harel, senior project manager and UX consultant at Clicktale, said: "Especially during the holidays, retailers depend on round-the-clock situation rooms to monitor and quickly catch technology glitches to keep sites cruising at peak performance, and many smart retailers are adding customer experience monitoring to their situation room mix."

Customer experience analytics can help web retailers diagnose and address glitches on their website, allowing them to observe the behaviour that led customers to leave feedback.

Harel said: "This way, you can determine what visitors were trying to do when their journey went sour, better diagnose the source of the problem, and - most importantly - quantify business impact of leaving it unfixed, and get IT the exact data they need to fix things fast."

In order to ensure that customer experience does not suffer due to the high requests during peak periods, Clicktale puts forward a series of suggestions.

Eliza Savov, customer experience analyst at Clicktale, said: "A web retailer can take technical precautions in terms of scalability and coping with increased traffic to make sure the site doesn't slow down or crash due to higher demand."

Many major online retailers often introduce a "code freeze", a period during which no new non-essential code changes are introduced. However, this might need to be overridden if a serious problem arises.

Clicktale also suggests trying to minimise the 'out of stock experience' by allowing visitors to reserve items for when they are back in stock.

The "surge" in contactless payments has been boosted by mobile payment services, which are set to influence the how payments are made in future, members of the UK consumer finance sector told IT Pro.

"The use of contactless payments has surged over the past year, with monthly spending now at 1.5 billion more than three times what it was last year," a spokesman for The UK Cards Association told IT Pro. "On the high street, one in six card transactions is now contactless as consumers increasingly use cards instead of cash for lower value payments."

Digital wallets, such as Apple Pay and the newly launched Android Pay, are expected to have a significant impact on how consumers pay for goods at retail, Adrian Buckle, chief economist for Payments UK told IT Pro.

"Payments via mobile phones, whether through an app, browser, or as part of a contactless payment will undoubtedly help to shape the way we pay in coming years," said Buckle.

"These new mobile payment technologies are expected to be embraced in particular by younger people and with the exception of banking app payments the majority, such as Android Pay and Apple Pay, are methods used to initiate card payments.

"By using near field communication (NFC) technology similar to contactless cards at the point-of-sale, these types of mobile payments may further increase the volume of contactless card payments."

Spending above the current contactless payment limit is one factor that may become more common as a result of demand for retailers to support mobile payment services.

The national limit for transactions on contactless cards is 30 increased from 20 on September 1, 2015.

However, both Android Pay and Apple Pay, support contactless payments over 30. Banks contacted by IT Pro, including the Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, HSBC and credit card provider MBNA, all said they already have the infrastructure in place to support larger contactless payments, which require further user verification.

For contactless payments over 30 on Android Pay and Apple Pay, additional verification such as entering a pin code or fingerprint sensor approval is needed from the user.

All of banks we spoke to said it was up to the merchant's appetite to accept payments over 30. IT Pro has contacted some UK retailers for a response.

Google launched Android Pay in the UK last Wednesday. It is planning on adding further mobile web support to the service in coming months.

With Christmas around the corner, retailers are working hard to make sure their websites are prepared for the volume of traffic they expect to experience.

But the festive season is also a busy time for hackers, who will be targeting shops and shoppers in a bid to steal customer data whether online or in brick and mortar stores.

The bad news for retailers is that 64 per cent of consumers are unlikely to shop with a company that has experienced a financial information breach, according to a new survey from Gemalto, published this week.

With 59 per cent of consumers also saying they think threats to personal information increase during the festive season, and 20 per cent that they will become a victim this year, it's time for online retailers to prove them wrong.

This could, of course, be easier said than done. That same survey shows that confidence in the ability to protect data is fairly low, with only 25 per cent of people saying their data security is taken seriously.

The Accenture UK Holiday Shopping Survey suggests that these fears won't stop the seasonal sales though, with 53 per cent of respondents saying they will do the majority of their Christmas shopping online despite 39 per cent being concerned about privacy or security issues.

But with 45 million attacks on online retailers detected by the ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network in the last quarter, retail is clearly in the cross hairs of the bad guys, and more so at this time of year than any other.

So what can online retailers do to mitigate the fraud and breach risk, and raise consumer confidence in their ability to secure these seasonal transactions?

Logins

Well, for a start, they could get to grips with where the real risk sits. Looking at the ThreatMetrix numbers, it would appear that the vast majority (some 78 per cent) of transactional attack attempts took place during account logins, with payments themselves a distant second (21 per cent) and account creations (one per cent) hardly registering on the radar.

This is hardly surprising as payments security is, generally speaking, tied down pretty tight, and compliance requirements for the payment industry are set pretty high.

It does suggest that logins remain a weak spot, however, and more focus on user authentication would be a good idea. Unfortunately, this goes against the grain in the retail sector where a 'get them in the doors and through the checkout' mentality has moved to clicks from brick-and-mortar stores. This mindset has to change, and an understanding that online footfall will decline if security isn't seen to be taken seriously must be adopted.

Hacker accounts

Retailers can also invest in behavioral analytics, looking out for dormant or never used accounts that become active in the seasonal period. Sleeper accounts are a mainstay of the cybercriminal arsenal, as are long forgotten genuine accounts that get hijacked courtesy of the stupidly guessable passwords that tend to 'protect' them. Simply adding an additional layer of authentication required for any such accounts springing to seasonal life could prevent fraud.

Mobile devices

Talking of layers, Whitehat Security research suggests that insufficient transport layer protection is the most commonly occurring (64 per cent) critical vulnerability class for retail. And with stats showing the seasonal shopping trend has shifted to mobile devices, it's more important than ever that mobile applications take the appropriate measures to authenticate and encrypt sensitive network traffic.

Point of sale

Although the ThreatMetrix figures mentioned earlier showed that payments were not the point where most transactional attacks are attempted, that doesn't mean you can afford to ignore the threat. The emergence of sophisticated Point of Sale (PoS) malware such as ModPos proves this point nicely.

Speaking to IT Security Thing Mark Bower from the Enterprise Data Security arm of HPE Security summed PoS systems up as being "the weak link in the chain" because "a checkout terminal in constant use is usually less frequently patched and updated, and is thus vulnerable to all manner of malware compromising the system to gain access to cardholder data." So ensure yours ARE patched, updated and malware checked!

Sticking with PoS threats, the recent breach of point of sale systems in some Hilton hotels points us in another direction: the supply chain. The Hilton Worldwide breach appears to have targeted PoS terminals within franchised restaurants, bars and shops in hotel properties. No matter how well you lock down your in-house security, if you ignore third party suppliers you are asking for trouble. It's not an easy dilemma to solve, but at the very least you should be checking that your suppliers meet your own standards of security compliance.

Never be too focused on sales

Also filed under 'asking for trouble' at this time of year is the fact that many retail organisations go into a tunnel vision mode whereby sales are everything. This is understandable at the busiest time of year, a time when sales figures can literally make or break the business. However, when those organisations stop updating payment and order fulfillment systems lest such maintenance interrupts or slows down the sales loop, they really are asking for trouble.

In the rush to ensure that 'everything works fine' for the big sales push, enforcing a configuration and update freeze may seem like a good idea but it could also open the door to the bad guys. The takeaway has to be that, at this time of year the same as any other, don't let your convenience trump the security of your customers...

Some of the internet's biggest retailers have started their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales early to avoid the outages experienced last year.

The American tradition of reducing items before Christmas wasn't as popular in the UK until a few years ago (despite the first official Black Friday event happening in 2003) but last year, the sheer volume of sales resulted in some of the world's biggest retailers experiencing technical issues on the Friday after Thanksgiving - around the 27th of November.

Customers were forced to queue virtually at some retailers, such as Currys when services were unable to take the load of customers flocking to buy cut-price items a month ahead of Christmas. Argos and Game also had problems serving online customers.

The real scuffles happened in brick and mortar stores, where customers were trampled and abused as they tried to get super savings on large-value goods.

This year, many companies including Amazon, Argos, Currys, Boots, Debenhams, House of Fraser, River Island, Asos, Very.co.uk, Maplin and Game have learnt from the mistakes of 2014 and started posting deals days - if not weeks in advance to capture the bargain-seekers.

Supermarkets including Tesco and Sainsbury's have also got in on the game and will be offering electricals including TVs and laptops at rock-bottom prices, showing it's not only online retailers celebrating the start of the festive season with bargain goods.

"The terms Black Friday and Cyber Monday suggest that there is a neat divide between physical and online sales, but this is nonsense. Although relatively new, these terms are already retail relics, just like Woolworths or paying by cheque," said George Skaff, CMO of TouchCommerce.

"For a lot of customers, Cyber Monday plans started many months ago. Having already saved their cash, identified their chosen product and potential retailers, many are just lying in wait for the sales now. The same is true for Black [Monday], you can't just open your store and hope people come flooding through. Only with online and social media contact will shoppers know what you have to offer and come to you over a more vocal competitor."

Amazon's drone delivery service will find a customer by monitoring their smartphone's location data, a recent patent has revealed.

Amazon's patent also details how its drones will be able to make calls on whether it's safe to deliver parcels by monitoring weather conditions. They will also communicate with each other about traffic to judge the best way to get to their target.

The routes will be monitored in real time, using sensors and data feeds built into each flying device. A customer can decide upon the kind of service they wish to receive (such as delivering to their person, to their home, their car or even their boat) when they make an order.

Sensors built into the drones will include radar, sonar, cameras and infrared help keep track of the full range of weather and routing conditions. They will also pack in-flight monitors for advanced measurements and can detect humans and animals in their paths, ensuring they can deal with obstacles safely.

The delivery system is expected to come under a lot of scrutiny from human rights groups that believe tracking such metrics are against a person's freedom. Additionally, it's expected there will be extensive regulatory considerations before such delivery vehicles will be in mainstream use.

A major barrier to Amazon's plans could be local legislation around the commercial use of drones. The company is one of the leading campaigners in an attempt to convince the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) to allow such use of unmanned drones.

The online retailer has been testing its delivery drones in Canada, where regulations are more relaxed. But two months ago, the FAA said it could undertake some testing in the US, although they must keep a low flight path, not flying any higher than 400ft (122m).

The prospect of Amazon and Google drones delivering packages to your door is looking unlikely after a US aviation body set out its proposed rules governing drone flight.

Drones must be within sight of their operators at all times, as the technology is not advanced enough to avoid crashes without human intervention, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has ruled.

And while they can reach speeds of 100mph and climb up to 500 feet in altitude, they cannot fly over crowds and cannot fly at night dramatically limiting their potential for commercial operation in cities.

FAA administrator Michael Huerta said: "We have tried to be flexible in writing these rules. We want to maintain today's outstanding level of aviation safety without placing an undue regulatory burden on an emerging industry."

The news follows attempts by the FAA to ban drone activity in June 2014.

However, the body still believes drones can play a huge role in advancing several industries including farming, search and rescue and urban planning.

It sees use cases for drones in aerial photography and mapping, crop monitoring and inspecting infrastructure like bridges and tall buildings.

Despite these roles, the FAA's proposed rules pour cold water on Amazon's ambitions of using drones to deliver packages to people's doors by around 2018.

Google is also innovating in this area, but wants to be able to operate drones in disaster zones.

Astro Teller, captain of moonshots at Google, told the BBC last summer: "Even just a few of these, being able to shuttle nearly continuously, could service a very large number of people in an emergency situation."

Amazon has expressed disappointed with the FAA's plans, according to the Guardian.

Paul Misener, VP of global public policy for the company, told the publication: "The FAA needs to begin and expeditiously complete the formal process to address the needs of our business, and ultimately our customers."

However, the FAA predicts that within three years of the rules being passed, more than 7,000 businesses will get drone permits.

It is not likely that the rules will be finalised for another two or three years.

Frozen foods retailer Cook is using visual analytics to react more quickly to customer demand over Christmas.

The high street firm, which cooks then freezes homemade' meals, is using data discovery firm Qlik's QlikView tool to provide the latest information on its stock inventory.

By seeing which products are selling, it hopes to better anticipate festive demand.

Cook is using the QlikView Christmas Stock Tracker App to check which frozen food is selling well, so they can make more of it, and which isn't, so they can reduce its price.

The company had been doing this previously, but was poring through spreadsheets to make decisions, taking days to react to trends.

With QlikView, Cook said it gains visibility into its entire business, pulling in data from its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to make decisions almost immediately.

The stock tracker app, developed by Qlik with partner Informance, lets staff see how Cook's Christmas range is selling against targets, assess daily stock levels and if stores are ordering it correctly.

Jeff Turner, head of IT for Cook, said: "As all of the products we sell are prepared by hand in our kitchen, it's vital that we're able to effectively manage our stock.

"QlikView has provided us with the ability to make incredibly timely decisions about production during one of our key trading periods.

"It has been a massive leap for the company and we can see no shortage of opportunities for the future."

Cook now plans to introduce QlikView dashboards for manufacturing across the business to support its long-term IT strategy.

Target is to blame for a data breach that saw 70 million customer records stolen a year ago, a judge has ruled, paving the way for a flurry of lawsuits from banks seeking to recover their losses.

The retailer suffered a huge data hack over November and December 2013, in which the details of 40 million credit cards were stolen by cyber criminals who infected store payment systems with malware.

A year on, Minnesota district court judge Paul Magnuson has ruled that Target was negligent in the holiday breach.

He referred to the fact the retailer had ignored alerts from its $1.6 million early-warning system provided by FireEye, as well as referring to the company purposefully disabling security software that could have thwarted the attack.

He said: "Although the third-party hackers' activities caused harm, Target played a key role in allowing the harm to occur.

"Plaintiffs' allegation that Target purposely disabled one of the security features that would have prevented the harm is itself sufficient to plead a direct negligence case.

"Target held itself out as having secure data systems when Target knew that it did not have secure systems and had taken affirmative steps to make its systems more vulnerable to attack."

Target was also guilty of having inadequate network sequestration, which enabled hackers to access the point-of-sale network using an external contractor's details.

The ruling clears the way for banks to sue the retailer for their losses in the $30 million incident, following heated debates between unions representing retailers and banks.

The National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association claims data breach costs should be shared between retailers and banks because retailers spend an alleged $6 billion a year on data security.

This was rebutted by Credit Union National Association CEO, Jim Nussle, who said: "In our most recent survey, released just yesterday, credit unions told us that - to date - they have received no reimbursements for the Target breach, now more than 10 months after the breach occurred. "In short, we'll back off highlighting the costs of data breaches on credit unions when merchants step up and take responsibility, adopt the same data standards, and stop making consumers vulnerable."

Black Friday has proven too much for some online retailers, with overwhelming demand causing websites to crash.

Online shoppers hoping to bypass anarchy on the high street during the shopping event, which originated in America, have experienced just as many problems attempting to grab discounted tellies or half-price electric toothbrushes from retailer's sites.

Curry's greeted online shoppers with a seemingly endless queue before they could even browse items, causing many to take to Twitter and complain at its ill-preparedness.

Some savvy customers found a way to jump the queue by disabling their javascript and finding they could bypass the page.

At the time of writing, Game had yet to recover from the influx of traffic, and Argos was forced to tweet out to frustrated consumers, apologising for the problems they were experiencing and asking people to "bear with us."

Experian's figures for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2013 revealed that UK shoppers spent 15.3 million hours shopping online on 2 December 2013. That figure is set to be eclipsed in 2014, however, with research suggesting that shoppers will spend around 1.32 billion this weekend.

Information taken from mobile devices such as wearables is expected to have a significant impact on customer experience and ultimately the success of businesses, according to Teradata.

"Retail is in a reinvention," Lisa Arthur, applications CMO at Teradata said during a roundtable at the firm's Partners Conference and Expo.

"Big data will enhance the retail experience... Every shopper is different, every retail experience is different. When I go to buy a television, it's a very different experience to when I go buy a suit, but I'm still the same buyer."

An individualised consumer experience has begun to manifest via the use of smartphones, specifically with showrooming,' but this has the potential to grow in conjunction with the expected popularity of wearable devices such as the Apple Watch.

Outside of the retail industry, there is also plenty of scope for big data and wearables to make an impact in healthcare, Arthur continued.

This could come about with health apps sending data based on exercise and other activity back to the user's doctor, Arthur pointed out, thus creating a more honest and informed dialogue between them.

"Eventually we're going to see maps integrated into carts and we're going to see interactive experiences," she said, while acknowledging the privacy issues and concerns raised by the technology.

"That's the other barter in here there has to be the opt-in and the value exchange. There has to be a handshake and it can't be creepy, it has to be used for value."

Regent Street's on-going Beacon Project has successfully reached 120 retailers and is ready to expand later this year.

The project, which began this summer, saw Regent Street become the first high street in Europe to send real-time personalised shopping content to consumers via smartphone alerts.

Beacon devices were placed in stores to push personalised messages and offers to consumers' smartphones as they walked past.

However, the messages only appear if the smartphone has downloaded a particular app designed to receive the signals.

Adam Bray is the senior corporate affairs manager for The Crown Estate, which owns Regent Street. He has championed the project since its inception.

"A key part of the success of Regent Street's Beacon Project is the fact that it is designed not to be intrusive for consumers."

For instance, The Regent Street app creates a personal profile based on consumer preferences so customers only receive information about things they specifically said they were interested in.

"We also understand that consumers are increasingly concerned about data security, which is why our app is purposefully designed so that it doesn't track or retain any personal data."

The Crown Estate said the project's next step will be a wider marketing campaign designed to drive downloads of the app.

Bray said: "Through our planned marketing activities we'll now be looking to promote the app more widely to shoppers and once we're a bit further down this road, we'll have more information on things like download stats."

Other vendors such as Tesco, Waitrose and Eat are also trialling similar technology, but many brands have been reluctant to get involved because of data privacy concerns.

Inside the enterprise: In July, Britons spent a staggering 8.1bn online 14 per cent more than they spent in July 2013.

The data, from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, show that online spending is continuing to grow, and in some cases, grow rapidly.

The research, which takes information from more than 100 online only and offline and online stores, found that consumers are increasingly willing to pay for the more expensive goods and services over the internet.

So-called "big ticket" items, including holidays and electricals including white goods and TVs reported the strongest increases. Travel was up 13 per cent year-on-year, and electricals were up 19 per cent.

This, though, will hardly surprise any business that sells online. Over the last few years, spending has continued to move from the store to the internet, with even venerable brands such as John Lewis seeing significant sales through their online channels. Mobile commerce being able to shop on a smartphone will only speed up the trend.

According to Tina Spooner, chief information officer at IMRG, this means that UK online spending is on track to reach 100bn a year, for the first time, later this year. This means it is something businesses cannot ignore.

This will have implications for IT teams. Larger companies have been investing steadily in online commerce, and the infrastructure to support it. Being able to hold stock and then sell it online and offline known as "multi channel" in the trade is important for enabling companies to bolster their online sales.

Initiatives such as "click and collect", where consumers order online but pick up goods from stores, have helped to boost sales of more expensive items. So have consumer-friendly returns policies, something online-only retailers such as ASOS have used to good effect to build up their reputations and sales.

Tying warehousing and distribution in to online sales is not always easy. It needs robust systems, which can track stock levels in real-time. Internal stock movements need to be slick: unless a retailer can move items between stores and the warehouses quickly, they can end up having to hold more stock than they need, eating into profits. And it goes without saying the e-commerce website needs to be well designed, easy-to-use and secure.

For smaller businesses, the challenges may be smaller, but it's also likely that there will be fewer experts on hand to help build a multi-channel retail system. But, against this, there are plenty of easy to use, easy to configure online storefront systems. Smaller companies, especially those selling to other businesses, could well take advantage of these.

Customers, both consumers and business buyers, are increasingly likely to be frustrated if they can't deal with a company online. And, with a potential prize of 100bn in sales to go after, any sales-focused company should be looking carefully at how well it is set up online retailing.

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT Pro.

York based Varlink has announced that is has completed the integration of its EPoS sales division, EPoS Distributor into its existing product portfolio, meaning that for the first time resellers will be able to view and order the full portfolio of products online.

Since its launch in 2009, EPoS Distributor has operated as a separate brand entity while sharing back office resources such as marketing and finance with Varlink.

The EPoS Distributor brand will now be retired, according to Mike Pullon, Varlink CEO, who comments: “When the EPoS Distribution division was established there was a clear separation between the products purchased by EPoS specialists and those taken by our established Varlink customer base. Over time, whilst there remains some fundamental differences, there are many product sets that are of interest to both segments of our customer base. We have therefore moved from two websites to a single Varlink branded site which carries all mobile computing, label printing, data capture, networking and EPoS brands.”

Resellers can now access everything online on EPOS terminals, receipts printers, touch screens and other EPOS peripherals online alongside Varlink’s mobile computing and data capture product set. Including products from Honeywell, Casio, Datalogic and Zebra technologies.

According to Varlink, the integration of EPoS Distributor will provide resellers with the choice needed to support technology trends around tablets and mobility in the workplace.

IBM has been showing off the commercial applications of its Watson assistant at MWC.

Having sold its x86 server business, Big Blue is pushing to commercialise the cloud-based Watson service and make it a premier revenue generator.

Watson has been primarily used in healthcare environments up to now, but with the establishment of an $1bn division, IBM is looking to bring the technology to other verticals.

Watson can be used by retailers or banks to interact with customers in real-time via online chat boxes and provide them information or answer queries. IBM believes there is a massive opportunity for retailers, as it claims that 70 per cent of shopping baskets are abandoned because customers don't have enough information to make the purchase. This is something Watson can address.

We were shown a personalised shopping experience, which is being developed for the North Face website:

Retailers today are faced with unprecedented challenges as any visit to the high street will confirm. Empty outlets are common and many will often only be occupied by charity shops or the same old familiar coffee shops as buyers turn to the internet for lowest-possible prices or out-of-town megastores for maximum convenience. Stores that don't have a strong online presence or app struggle against rivals that have a more advanced virtual store-front. Big-name stores have entered bankruptcy or are desperately reinventing themselves to stay relevant. It's a bleak picture but one that is redeemed by opportunity. Supply chains and distribution are now global and the web makes it possible to market and sell to a global audience and scale in line with demand. There are more channels than ever before for consumers and the old virtues of delivering value and great service are as relevant as ever before. Brand and marketing excellence remain powerful differentiators, operational efficiency is a necessity and understanding the dynamics of store layout is persuasive.

It's a buyer's market: armed with product information, pricing comparisons and even knowledge of inventory levels and product refresh cycles, a new breed of super-consumer is emerging. The retailer has to adapt to meet this keen-eyed buyer and somehow resist the race to the bottom' of competing on price alone. Joining up multiple channels to address different types of buyer will be critical and the ultimate aim of delighting consumers remains as relevant as ever.

Click the link below to download the full case study.

Inside the Enterprise: The decline of the high street is not a new phenomenon. The growth of out of town retailing - a process that's been ongoing since the 1980s - combined with the recent economic downturn has left some high streets in a desperate state.

Even where town centres are doing better, experts talk of a "hollowing out", with the centre of towns dominated by nail bars, coffee shops and charity stores on short-term leases, while the brand-name retailers focus on larger, more profitable sites on the edge of town.

Some retailers, and some town councillors, have been quick to blame the internet for contributing to their woes. Online retailers, especially Amazon, have edged out shops in some markets, especially books and music. In high-cost retail environments, where margins can be slender, online only operations can offer discounts and convenience in one package.

But technology, for once, is not the villain of the piece; it could even be part of the high street's rescue plan.

According to a recent report by management consultants at Deloitte, combining technology with physical retailing the so-called "omnichannel" strategy could yet revive high street locations.

The idea behind omnichannel retailing is simple enough, even if it is not simple to carry out. By combining websites and increasingly, apps with physical stores and smart supply chains and logistics, customers can visit a store to order goods for home delivery or order online to pick up later from a shop: "click and collect" services.

This means attractive stores and helpful sales staff, but it also means very efficient technology: apps that are easy to navigate, and tight integration between store-level stock control, warehouse and delivery, and financial systems.

This represents an opportunity for the IT industry: retailers have tended to be among the lower spenders on technology one to two per cent of turnover at most and this may well need to increase. But it also represents an opportunity for new businesses.

Pop-up shops, for example, are made possible not just by cheap, vacant retail space but the type of IT that lets an entrepreneur replace a till and credit card machine with an iPad, and mobile data connection.

Deloitte also sees another opportunity here. The firm believes that as big-name retailers reduce their city centre presence, either directly, by closing stores, or indirectly, by using more efficient supply chains and technology to reduce stores' warehouse space, there could be an opportunity for independent shops or start-ups to gain a foothold on the high street. These start-ups could be more aggressive in their use of IT than established retailers, and again, force the established brands to invest.

But there is also an opportunity for retailers to tap into technology, to turn the visits we do make to city centres to their advantage.

"The role of the high street as a service destination rings true, as there are certain services that require physical presence such as hair and beauty, more complex financial transactions that require documentation or personal entertainment, says Alea Fairchild, director at the Brussels-based Constantia Institute.

"Shops that focus on products, however, need to address a compelling service element to get the foot fall to the store. Given the recent weather, as well as traffic, parking and location issues, there has to be a driving rationale for the consumer to come into the city. One option is m-commerce and location-based marketing to catch them while they are already out in the city, and entice them to visit the store."

And if you can click to order a coffee as you wait to collect, so much the better.

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT Pro.

RSA researchers have uncovered a global malware operation targeting several dozen retailers in 11 countries that relies on a private, key-logging Trojan called ChewBacca.

The discovery was announced in a blog post late last week by Yotam Gottesman, senior security researcher at RSA Firstwatch, where he confirmed payment and personal data may have been compromised by the scam.

"RSA researchers uncovered the server infrastructure used in a global Point-of-Sale (PoS) malware operation responsible for the electronic theft of payment car and personal data from several dozen retailers, mostly based in the US," he wrote.

"Infection activity has also been detected in 10 other countries including Russia, Canada and Australia."

The malware used to power the scheme is a Tor-based example known as ChewBacca. Its existence was first flagged in December by a Kaspersky Lab researcher and it allows key strokes to be recorded and memory scanning to take place.

The Tor-based element of the malware conceals the IP addresses of the command and control severs ChewBacca's data is sent back to.

"RSA researchers discovered that, beginning October 25, it had logged track one and two data of payment cards it had scraped from infected PoS systems," the RSA blog post continued.

"RSA anti-fraud researchers have been in contact with victim companies at the centre of this operation, sharing key forensics information gathered in this investigation."

The malware is a "simple" construct, the researchers said, that belies its ability to steal payment data, and retailers need to be on their guard against it.

"Retailers have few choices against these attackers. They can increase staffing levels and develop leading-edge capabilities to detect and stop attackers," the blog post states.

"They can encrypt or tokenise data at the point of capture and ensure that it is not in plaintext view on their networks, thereby shifting the risk and burden of protection to the card issuers and their payment processors."

Amazon chief Jeff Bezos recently revealed the online retail giant is trialing the use of unmanned drones to deliver packages weighing up to 5lbs to customers.

The delivery method, dubbed Prime Air, is not expected to be introduced for another four-to-five years, but to be brutally honest - I think it's probably one of the dumbest ideas I've heard in years.

It's clearly been a great marketing ploy for Amazon because so many people have been talking about it. However, from a practical point of view, it's completely unworkable.

For a start, how will the drones be powered? In these modern times you have to assume it will use some sort of battery, but how long will that last?

Anyone who's ever had a radio controlled helicopter for Christmas will tell you that you're lucky to get 15 minutes of flying time. And that's without any payload.

As soon as you try to add attach Lego figures, for example, the device's time in the air will drop even further. How on earth will it cope with a DVD or even Amazon's original raison d'etre, a chunky book?

The reason Amazon can do what they do is because they have huge warehouses in the middle of nowhere. Are these drones really going to be able to carry their payload hundreds of miles to be delivered?

While economies of scale make their business plan work, they're forgetting postal delivery is a natural monopoly that only works because of economies of scale.

Furthermore, how is delivery going to be accomplished? Where will the drones drop the parcels? How will people sign for them? How will it work in flats, or if the recipient isn't home?

All of these questions make the idea a non-starter for me. I'd gladly take a 50 pence wager with Bezos that it doesn't happen within 10 years.

That being said, talking about ideas like this may lead to innovation. How about using something along the lines of Google's automated car? This would obviously be driverless but also allow more than one package to be carried at once.

If you had a keypad, for instance, on the car for the recipient to enter a code on and get it released. This would be akin to signing for the package.

This doesn't solve every problem, but is possibly a more workable solution in the long term.

Intel showcased a range of technology at its Future of Retail event in central London today.

Products on display ranged from automated Costa Coffee machines to 3D printers and holographic displays, but the most intriguing prototype on show was the Mobi - an automated robot designed specifically for supermarkets.

Powered by Intel's next gen Core architecture, the five foot prototype is developed by Bossa Nova Robotics.

The robot utilises ballbot locomotive technology, which was developed by the Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh. This allows virtually a 360 degree range of motion and tricks the eye into thinking the robot is floating along as it has just a single 2cm2 point of contact with the floor.

Mobi prototype without casing

The Mobi is cylindrical in shape, and due to the way it moves the design is referred to as the reverse pendulum. There are two advantages of building units in this way, explained Martin Hitch, CEO of Bossa Nova, during a demonstration.

"If you think about the complexity of an aisle [there are] shopping carts, people, packages on the floor. If the Mobi bumps into anything it will bounce out of the way, which makes it inherently safe. Secondly, the inverse pendulum design means we can make the Mobi tall and remain narrow," he said.

"In every other robotic platform, the taller we go, the broader you need to be for stability, which means you can't move around shopping carts and packages. If we need to have a 6 foot tall robot, we can do this but the 25cm diameter remains."

The layout of an entire supermarket or any retail store - known as a planogram - can be uploaded onto the Mobi allowing it to follow a designated path. Too "see" where it is going, the Mobi utilises HD cameras and 3D sensors. Engineers incoporated Microsoft's Kinect motion sensing kit into the robot, and plan to upgrade to the latest version of Kinect when it ships with the Xbox One later this year.

Mobi with Kinect sensors

The primary purpose of the Mobi is to alert staff to low stock or out of stock items and alert them about misplaced items on shelves.

At present the Mobi is able to spot empty spaces on shelves, but it won't necessarily be able to detect how many items of a specific product are left. Future use of RFID tags would enable more accurate stock takes, but currently cost is a barrier. Hitch suggested that when the cost of RFID's is down to 2/3 cents per tag, more accurate stock taking can be deployed.

Steve Brown, a chief evangelist at Intel, claimed that in its current form, the Mobi will still reduce the workload of shop floor workers by up to 40 per cent.

"[The Mobi] allows human beings focus their time on stocking shelves, filling gaps and also to provide customer service," he said.

"It's going to get better and better as you put more processing power in the Mobi [and] will be able to process [1TB of store] data on-board without having to send it to the cloud."

Not only will the data gathered potentially help to increase sales, but retailers will be able to analyse customer shopping patterns in-store, and subsequently adjust the layout of aisles if necessary to provide a better experience.

The Mobi is not just going to be relegated to simple donkey work either. Hitch told IT Pro that he was hopeful the Mobi could be set up to interact with shoppers by acting as an interactive shopping assistant.

Once RFID has been put to widespread use, Mobi is also expected to be rolled out in clothing stores, he added.

Like any new technology, Mobi isn't going to be cheap.

"The cost of the prototype is around the price of a small car. However, the cost of deployment is likely to be the same it would be to have an employee. It's about 18 months away from deployment so we expect to roll it out at the end of 2014."

The Mobi is likely to be launched in the US first, but Mitch confirmed that UK supermarkets have taken receipt of trial units so we could see Mobi motoring up the aisles in stores in 2015 and beyond.

The UK is to be the testbed for a new augmented reality (AR) app that recognises goods in a supermarket simply by their packaging.

Developed in IBM Research's lab in Haifa, Israel, the Augmented Shopping Assistant uses an Android smartphone's camera plus advanced image recognition technology.

Once all the products on a shelf or rack have been recognised, the app retrieves information on them and augments the on-screen picture as requested by the shopper.

For example, it could add numbers to rank them by calorie content or price, pick out the ones that are gluten or lactose-free, or indicate which are on sale or covered by discount coupons. The shopper can also freeze the image and tap it to pull up full details on a product.

The Augmented Shopping Assistant aims to bridge the huge gap that exists today between the average shopper in the store and the wealth of product information available online, said IBM Research project manager, Amnon Ribak.

He stressed that it is all done without scanning barcodes or needing to touch or move the products. "The biggest challenge here is the image recognition it's not fancy AR," he said.

Ribak added that IBM will sell the technology to retailers; they can then offer it to shoppers for download as part of their customer loyalty programme.

He said that the app's first customer is a UK retailer, but stopped short of revealing which one.

Retailers could add other elements to the app, he suggested, such as cross-selling of related products, directions around the store, personalised recommendations or discounts, and links to social networks so people can read and leave comments on products.

Google moved to stem rumours that the search engine giant might follow Apple and Microsoft into the retail business during a roundtable discussion at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

"Google has no plans and we have nothing to announce," Android chief Andy Rubin said at the event, according to a report by AllThingsD.

Rubin said that the Google doesn't need to open any retail outlets as consumers find product information from friends and websites rather than going into shops. "They don't have to go in the store and feel it anymore," he said.

He added that the current line up of Nexus devices aren't quite popular enough to merit their own stores to showcase them. "I don't think the programme is far enough along" for stores to make sense, Rubin said.

Rumours of a possible Google store first emerged early in February. According to a blog post on 9to5Google, its sources speculated that Google's Project Glass would be more successful if customers could try them out in shops. Google currently has Chrome stores within stores at 50 PC World and Currys in the UK.

The blog said that it had an "extremely reliable source" who said Google was planning to launch stores in the US to flog its Nexus and Chromebook products in time for Christmas.

Microsoft began opening it own stores in 2009 across dozens of cities in the US and Canada. Apple opened its first retail outlets in May 2001 and currently has 390 stores worldwide.

Intel IDF has yet to kick off officially, but the firm previewed a handful of concepts at a tech showcase, with two items catching our attention.

Display without boundaries

The aim of this is to enable users to beam images and videos onto any surfaces within home and business environments.

The concept on show involved a images being projected on to touch-compatible glass bowl. Users can cycle through images and transfer them to another surface such as a wall with a quick tap or swipe using the cloud.

A projector is used to place the images on a touch screen bowl. However, in the future Intel is hoping to project images using smaller light sources

"So far images and videos have been limited to being viewed on displays such as TVs, PCs or mobile devices. We're looking to extend this to any surface and whilst retaining gesture based interaction too."

For the demo Intel had to set up a projector precariously facing downwards, but Marshall was confident that the technology can be incorporated into smaller light sources primarily fixtures such as light bulbs, which naturally point vertically onto surface and can be repositioned.

The technology would not just be limited to showing off images, but with other uses including sharing charts or PowerPoint slides during presentations or viewing and planning routes such as Google Maps.

Micro Digital Signage

Another eye catching concept on display was the Digital Program Manager, which aims to benefit consumers and retailers when it comes to shopping.

A mock up of what a supermarket shelf would look like with the Micro Digital Signage system

The concept has been built using 4in web-connected touch screen displays instead of traditional paper-price tags, explained Tom Birch, the Micro Digital Signage product manager.

The display will allow users to rate products, look at Twitter feeds, select coupons and even allow users to change languages so they can read ingredients. The devices come are built using a HTML5 webpage so retailers will be able to add as many panels as they require.

Users will be able to swipe through panels, to see information such as prices, rating and even comments from Twitter

For retailers benefits will include being able to spot consumer trends, and change pricing of goods from a central location. The screens will also come with front facing cameras, so retailers will be able to monitor stock levels of products on opposite shelves.

It remains to be seen when this concept is able to make it to market. Birch acknowledged that retailers have low margins, so the system will have to made as cheap as possible utilising lower-resolution touch screen that those that were on display.

Verdict

It remains to be seen whether these concepts will make it to market. They are in the early stages of conception, but the Digital Signage system could certainly be useful to both consumers and retailers. The only problem is whether Intel can make it cheap enough for mass production.

Microsoft has been waxing lyrical about the business benefits of its soon-to-be launched ARM-powered Windows 8 tablets, as the hype surrounding the release of its next operating system grows.

During a conference call with journalists yesterday, Erwin Visser, senior director of the Windows Commercial Business Group, repeatedly stressed the enterprise friendliness of Windows 8.

For every business need, there will be a Windows 8 device to support it.

"It's the only [operating system] platform in the world that gives [users] the large and unique choice their business requires," said Visser.

"For every business need, there will be a Windows 8 device to support it."

Turning his attention to the range of tablet devices Windows 8 will run on, Visser said the firm's OEM partners are working on a range of vertical-specific form factors.

These include devices that can be easily sanitised for use by hospital workers and ruggedised tablets for telco engineers to use in the field, for example.

"Customers have been telling us that Windows 8 tablets are the [ones] they've been waiting for...and they work very well with their existing [Windows 7] infrastructure," said Visser.

Despite analysts describing the ARM-powered Windows 8 tablet, Windows RT, as a consumer device, Visser insisted the product would be a good fit for business users.

The reason for this is because Windows RT tablets will be "thin, light and sleek" and also boast a long battery life," he claimed.

These features should make the devices appeal to airline staff, who need tablets to deliver in-flight services, as well as field-based engineers and retail store workers.

"Following our conversations with customers, we [also] believe these devices will be [a good choice] for companies that let employees bring their own devices to work," he added.

One of the reasons analysts have previously dismissed RT as a consumer product is because the devices are incompatible with x86 desktop applications. However, Microsoft has found a way round this, revealed Visser.

"Windows desktop apps and Windows 7 apps will not run natively [on Windows RT] but we will still offer customers the opportunity to get access to those apps...using remote desktop services," he said.

"We can also give Windows RT full and seamless access to a host of Windows instants running in the datacentre or a particular desktop application using a technology called Remote App.

"Relative to other ARM devices, Windows RT will be the most compatible ARM offering in the marketplace," he added.

The Southern Co-operative has implemented a cloud-based IT service and help desk system from Sunrise Software to support the organisation's point of sale system (POS).

Sunrise Software's Sostenuto has been used to complement the new POS linked to head office and 180 food stores across southern England. The IT service desk is hosted by Sunrise's datacentre partner Navisite, and is scheduled to go live in September 2012.

Initially, the cloud-based IT service desk will support the Southern Co-operative's POS system, to capture all store-related IT incidents including back office PCs and printers as well as new Retalix POS terminals. Incidents will then be routed automatically and intelligently to designated colleagues or groups for resolution within pre-defined timescales.

Sunrise Software expects to expand the capabilities of the IT service desk to manage all aspects of The Southern Co-operative's contact management activities and support the company's overall retail operations.

The software company said that employees of the co-op will benefit from "fast and easy access" to the IT service desk through a single contact point to communicate their IT problems and keep updated with their progress either by telephone or email.

Based on version three of the ITIL best practice framework, the software will track the performance of the IT service desk against specific SLAs and Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) agreed with The Southern Co-operative. The real-time availability of meaningful management information will facilitate "faster, more accurate decision-making that tangibly improves the usage of IT support resources and increases the productivity of business personnel", according to the company.

"Our priority is ensuring our customers receive the same high level of service they have come to expect as we transition to a new POS platform," said Peter Lucas, service desk manager at The Southern Co-operative."

He added that the co-op was confident Sunrise would offer a smooth and seamless service to the organisation's IT users without adversely affecting performance or the customer experience.

"[It]guarantees the sophisticated functionality we need to grow with the changing demands of our business in the future," Lucas said.

One of the more interesting retail products unveiled at the HP Global Influencer Summit was the RP7 a touch screen system that can be used behind the counter or mounted on a wall.

The display is available in two sizes - 15in or 17in. We had a close up look at the 15in model, which was set up in a retail configuration.

This RP7 model has a webcam attached on the top, finger print reader on the left and card reader on the right.

In terms of specification, the RP7 is available with an Intel Celeron, Core i3 or i5 processor. The latter supports Intel's V-Pro technology, which provides enhanced maintenance and management features.

It is possible to upgrade to 16GB of RAM, and users are offered the choice of a 32GB Flash drive, 320GB HDD or 128/256GB SSD. Other key connectivity features include seven USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 port (which can be used with keyboard or mouse) and a DVI-I port.

The screen has three attachments connected via USB ports. A webcam for communicating with customers or technical support staff a biometric scanner to lock/unlock the till and a Magnetic Stripe Reader (MSR) to carry out transactions. HP said in countries, such as the UK, where chip-and-pin is used, the MSR would primarily be used to scan loyalty cards.

Users can access the inner working to make adjustments as and when required.

Like HP's Z1 Workstation, the RP7 is user-upgradeable and has a screwless chassis. The back clips off giving access to the hard drive and allowing attachments to be replaced if required.

The monitor itself comes with a 1024 x 768 resolution, 350 cd/m2 brightness and a 700:1 contrast ratio. HP has used resistive glass to help the device survive the bumps and spillages which may occur in retail environments such as restaurants.

The RP7 is very flexible and this makes it ideal for retail environments.

As it rests on a dual-hinge base, the RP7 is highly adjustable and you can tweak the height and orientation to make it more comfortable for your height. This could be useful feature for retailers as employees are not necessarily linked to one device.

Below the screen you'll find capacitive buttons similar to ones you would see on an Android handset such as the HTC One X. These buttons light up when touched and provide shortcuts to the settings menu. They're unlikely to be used regularly as the device automatically adjusts itself.

HP also has software pre-loaded onto the device through partners, depending on the needs of the retailer.

The customer-facing monitor can be used to show how the transaction is going or to run adverts.

Retailers can also purchase a 10.4in monitor, designed to be customer facing. This non-touch screen monitor could be used to show customers the items they have purchased or to stream advertisements. A HP RP7 Adjustable Stand (BOT02AV/AQ703AA)) can also be called into play to hold the two devices as demonstrated.

HP claims the product has a five-year lifespan and backs this up by bundling a support contract for the same period with the machine. Pricing is yet to be confirmed, but it could prove a valuable investment for retailers looking to modernise their POS systems.

Verdict

This flexible touch screen looks like just the ticket for retailers looking to upgrade ageing POS systems. The RP7 is available in a number of customisations and the five year support could also prove to be crucial.

COMMENT:Rather than present a reasoned argument on the potential success or failure of mobile shopping before coming to a conclusion about its future, I can tell you now no one knows.

No one knows if the increased activity and investment around mobile optimised e-commerce websites, mobile apps and the use of mobile devices in retail stores will increase sales, or just cannibalise them from other existing off or online channels.

Some advocate a mobile strategy that makes good use of SMS marketing, as well as the sexier smartphone-enabled development, to increase the scope of mobile retail penetration.

John Lewis is to offer customers free Wi-Fi in-store from The Cloud and House of Fraser is teaming up with O2 to do the same. This, coupled with the constant stream of retailer mobile app launches, can be taken as evidence that this hard-pressed sector is pulling out all the stops to accommodate the savvy smartphone shopper.

Yesterday, I heard experts suggest that mobile sales were accounting for some 10 to 15 per cent of all e-commerce sales. But whether that was at the expense of other channels is something the retailers and their IT vendors alike are presently keeping very quiet about. Despite this, it is the e-commerce giants, like eBay and PayPal, who are keen to talk up the potential for mobile to extend business.

eBay's recently published Mobile Manifesto found just under half (49 per cent) of 2,000 UK consumers surveyed had used their smartphone to compare product prices and more than a third (36 per cent) had used mobile internet to buy a product. But sobering data from Kantar Worldpanel also serves as timely reminder this week that over 50 per cent of the UK population do not own a smartphone.

Some advocate a mobile strategy that makes good use of SMS marketing, as well as the sexier smartphone-enabled development, to increase the scope of mobile retail penetration. But that hasn't stopped PayPal for one predicting that, not only will we be shopping on our mobiles, but also that near-field communications (NFC) and e-wallet technology will make the traditional wallet obsolete.

Only time and consumer appetites will tell.

Delegates gathered in London today to discuss the technology trends associated with direct-to-consumer commercial business models.

A number of ECMOD presentations and exhibitors were focused on helping businesses manage a proliferation of customer-facing channels, the newest of which are mobile and social media.

[iIT Pro spoke to Michael Ross, founder of e-commerce service provider and integrator eCommera who was also former chief executive at online lingerie retailer Figleaves, about the challenges of managing a business with multiple customer-facing challenges.

"We're in a world of so-called 'big data,' where we need to turn that data into meaningful insight," Ross said. "The problem with the big platform vendors is that they are trying to come up with generic approaches to managing this trend across industries."

But Ross said the emergence of multichannel retail and direct commerce businesses, driven particularly by continued growth online and new growth via mobile devices, presented very specific challenges.

"There are business intelligence and analytics packages out there," he added. "But I liken these to looking in a rear-view mirror, when what they want is a sat-nav that they programme with their destination, for it to use all that data to give them directions to get there."

While handling increased amounts of data from proliferating channels was the show's key theme when it came to optimising the customer proposition, cloud computing and hosted IT delivery models were hot topics insofar as new IT procurement plans were concerned.

Retail software firm Maginus was, for example, on hand to demonstrate its hosted multichannel and e-commerce software offerings.

"We're finding that people in this market are certainly looking to cloud so they don't have to manage back-office and customer-facing systems themselves," said Russell Dorset, Maginus sales and marketing director.

"Having to anticipate and manage seasonal demand, like now near to Christmas, means site hosting for example is also popular," he added.

"There are some retailers that are still reticent with their views on cloud, but that attitude is definitely changing, particularly on the e-commerce side." The company has been hosting the e-commerce website of fashion retailer French Connection UK on a "buy-as-you-go" basis for the last 18 months for instance.

Maginus, which resells and develops on the Microsoft Dynamics business management platform, said even here Microsoft's 2012 Dynamics update will be contain multichannel management improvements.

"Retailers want to be able to add new channels with greater flexibility and manage demand more dynamically," Dorset added. "Multichannel and cloud are becoming more and more to what we do."

Sales and metrics this year suggest that shopping via mobiles, or m-commerce, is about to reach its tipping point, according to retail technology experts.

This makes it imperative that customer-facing businesses get their m-commerce strategies and technologies in place to capitalise on one of the very few areas of retail sales growth.

Within the last year, there has been a 10 per cent increase in the numbers of UK mobile users who have used their smartphones to research a purchasing decision or make a purchase. And the average transaction has risen from 12.10 to 17.49.

According to figures compiled by the Internet Advertising Bureau, and shared with delegates to the direct commerce ECMOD trade show in London today by Mick Rigby founder of specialist agency Yodel Mobile, mobile is the only retail channel capable of double digit growth.

"Within the last year, there has been a 10 per cent increase in the numbers of UK mobile users who have used their smartphones to research a purchasing decision or make a purchase," he said. "And the average transaction has risen from 12.10 to 17.49."

Geoffrey Barraclough, director of strategy, marketing and propositions for BT's retail IT division BT Expedite, added that retail clients on its Fresca e-commerce platform were typically seeing 10 to 15 per cent of e-sales coming through their mobile site or app channels.

He said orders made via the Fresca platform peaked last year around the same time as they did earlier this week, for "Cyber Monday," the traditional kick-off to the festive online shopping season that follows the last pay day before Christmas, but with a 75 per cent year-on-year increase.

"Some people call it Cyber or Magic Monday," he said. "I don't think mobile has a huge role to play yet. But our retail clients made it magic by launching promotions on that day.

However, he added: "This channel is starting to become profitable. As soon as payment systems improve, I think it will become a key channel. I predict that, while some of our clients already have a mobile-optimised site, all of them will develop one next year."

Will Dymott, e-commerce director of fashion retailer Lyle & Scott, shared the successes of the mobile-optimised site it first developed with BT Expedite 18 months ago.

Dymott said the retailer opted for a mobile site as opposed to an app, as it "didn't want to restrict access to one or two platforms".

Since then, it has experienced a 115 per cent increase share of online traffic to Lyle & Scott online that comes via mobiles, 50 per cent of which were Apple iPhones.

"We direct tablet traffic to the full e-commerce site," he added. "As it's easier to access via their bigger screens. With the mobile-optimised site, we made sure we kept it simple. Remember that visitors scroll using their finger, not a mouse, so make sure you're buttons are nice and big.

"Search is also the best way of navigating the site and we don't relay too much on zoom functionality to be mindful of bandwidth considerations."

The revenue retailers make from smartphones is set to increase dramatically, according to research from several consultancy firms.

The research suggests income will increase from 3.3% to 6.6% in the next two years. A wider distribution of retail revenue is expected as mobile and social media platforms continue to play a big role in society.

Research also shows that retailers will make system replacement a top priority within the next two years.

"This is the most important piece of research we have undertaken to date, not least because it confirms our thoughts that actually, technology is the main constraining factor in allowing retailers to execute their multi-channel strategy," said Mark Adams, director at consultancy firm Portaltech.

The survey found that 82% of respondents have more than one technology application running their office operations, making it simple to communicate easily, but difficult to make all channels consistent to customers.

Other priorities revealed by the survey include better integration of current systems, store-based system replacements or upgrades, and improving mobile sites and retail apps.

"The challenge for retailers is deciding which channels to focus on in order to engage their customer base and get the best return on investment. The key to getting this decision right is understanding the customer journey, which platforms they use and how they complement each other, to gain a true picture of the sale attribution," said David Smith, marketing and communications officer at e-retailing industry association IMRG.

"What this research highlights is that many retailers are finding it difficult to keep up with the pace of change in the industry and the influence that technology has on retail," Smith added.

Transversal has today launched its partner programme aimed at systems integrators, managed service providers, business process outsourcing, digital marketing agencies, value added resellers and independent software vendors.

Transversal’s self-service software is used across the enterprise on websites, by call centre agents and for HR purposes by employees to help resolve queries quickly. Its software that already enables clients such as the BBC, Mothercare, Tesco and Marks & Spencer to improve their customer service operations and reduce call volumes.

Capita was an early pioneer for the programme and partnered with Transversal to implement the automated self-help function for the BBC iPlayer site. It has since extended its partnership agreement for the next ten years across the breadth of BBC Audience Services. Jonathan Rush at Capita says: “To date, less than one per cent of customers using the iPlayer Help service have sought further help, demonstrating its value to the service we provide the BBC.”

Buoyed by its success with Capita, the firm has decided to build a bigger sales channel, and is now aiming to recruit a 40-50 new partners.

Ex-Autonomy channel head Marc Quantrill is now partner sales director at Transversal. He explains: “Partners will find our solutions very easy to implement with a minimal level of training required because our solutions are both managed and cloud-based. This will enable them to offer genuinely innovative solutions to their customers and enjoy a very quick return on investment with a margin that compares very favourably.

“Our patented natural language technology means that end users simply ‘ask’ questions using conversational language. Because our technology understands meaning in context, it finds answers a lot quicker than traditional search. Marketers can also view the questions their customers have been asking, this helps them build a picture of what customers are looking for in order to fully understand their customer needs,” he adds.

Online sales in January are never good after the December surge in web purchases, but this year they were particularly bad, according to the latest IMRG Capgemini e-retail sales index.

The annual growth for January sales was five per cent - a record low since the index began tracking - with consumers spending about 4.3 billion online last month.

Chris Webster, vice president of retail consulting and technology at Capgemini, had a theory on the change. "Last January, e-retailers' sales were buoyed up by heavy discounting and promotions that were necessary to sell stock left over from poor Christmas trading resulting from the impact of the recent move into recession," he said.

Others, such as IMRG director of information Tina Spooner, said the increase in VAT and well-stocked retailers without deep promotions or discounts were factors in the decline.

Sales fell by 22 per cent from December 2009 to January 2010, but Spooner added that December was a strong month for sales overall. In fact, 26 and 27 December produced the highest sales numbers for all of 2009.

When it came to particular markets, many sectors saw a steady annual growth with the exception of electricals purchased online. The accessories market was up 127 per cent since last January.

One in four UK consumers puts the blame for online fraud firmly on the retailer.

Online payment firm CyberSource's sixth annual Online Fraud Report reveals that 24 per cent of shoppers believe it is the retailer's responsibility to ensure their safety, with only half as many saying the consumer themselves should be responsible.

Banks (16 per cent) and ISPs (12 per cent) were also singled out as not doing enough to prevent fraud, while a further 12 per cent blamed the Government or card reader schemes.

"Consumers say they feel retailers are primarily accountable for making online shopping safer," said CyberSource managing director Simon Stokes. "But consumers themselves have a role in this effort, and they should be encouraged to play it."

Encouragingly though, of the 1,000-plus consumers questioned in the survey, 85 per cent said they looked for signs that a site was secure such as the green address bar before handing over their personal details.

More than two thirds said they used 3D Secure systems Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode, and a quarter card readers.

However, despite these measures half of UK consumers still do not buy online, a figure that has only dropped slightly since 2007. The most common reason given was a preference for the "high street experience", though 41 per cent also said they were concerned about online security.

Even among those who do regularly shop online, trust remains an issue in fact, more than ever. Of the total sample, the number of consumers who said they were concerned about the level of risk involved actually increased from 66 per cent last year to 71 per cent this time around.

And mistrust of mobile phone-based payments is even higher. Three our of every four questioned said they would never use a mobile phone for online shopping, with. Indeed, Stokes claimed that until mobile payment services were better understood the public was unlikely to embrace them wholesale.

"Mobile payments mean different things to different people both merchants and consumers," Stokes said. "This may have contributed to a lack of understanding about the whole area. It will be interesting to see how consumer perceptions evolve as we move out of the early adopter phase and mobile payments become more mainstream."

Stokes added: "The introduction of new smartphone devices and technologies should also help to drive consumer acceptance."

Amazon has denied plans to open high street stores in Britain.

The statement refutes a story by the The Sunday Times, which reported that the company had launched a search for physical stores to support the website.

The paper claimed that Amazon wanted to make money from click and collect' services, where shoppers would buy online and pick up goods from nearby stores.

It would have suited shoppers who would rather buy online and collect gifts instead of waiting at home for deliveries.

Argos, Tesco and John Lewis already offer similar services.

It was suggested that properties belonging to the closing Borders book chain were targets.

However, Amazon said in a statement: "We have no plans to open physical stores anywhere in the world."

Amazon recently predicted its busiest Christmas on record, with sales expected to increase by more than a third (35 per cent).

Almost three-quarters (70 per cent) of UK shoppers plan to spend an average of 220 online this Christmas, according to research from OpTier.

But despite the potential financial gains on offer for retailers, they have been warned that slow performing websites could harm e-retail profits. Indeed, one in six shoppers see this as a problem.

"Every year we talk about how online retail sales continue to be robust, but the number of etailers not getting it right is staggering," said Colin Rowland, OpTier's senior vice president of operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), in a statement

"If one retailer fails to deliver, shoppers will simply move on until they find one that can. In the online world, retailers can't afford to be caught with their pants down."

Last week, Carrenza chief executive Dan Sutherland said that a failure in the technology behind a retail website could be costly for profits as well as reputation.

The bigger online retailers didn't see problems ahead though, and looked forward to a shopping bonanza.

Collectively, online shoppers are expected to spend between 350 million and 400 million today, with IMRG's director of operations David Smith saying this was due to most people having just been paid.

Andy Street, managing director of John Lewis added in a statement: "Everyone decides what they are going to buy over the weekend then goes to work on Monday, gets on the computer, and makes their purchases."

Amazon expected its busiest Christmas on record, with sales tipped to increase by more than a third (35 per cent).

"We expect this to be our biggest Christmas to date," Brian McBride, chief executive of Amazon UK, said in a statement.

Click here for IT PRO's tips from the experts to help keep you safe while shopping online.

Online retailers face major traffic volumes on Monday 7 December, what e-retail body IMRG says will be the busiest online shopping day of the year for the UK.

Retailers like Amazon, Play.com, Tesco and Argos will be expected to deal with hoards of online shoppers looking to buy gifts for Christmas, with a prediction that 350 million will be spent on Monday alone.

To look at the challenges retailers face at this time of year, IT PRO spoke to Dan Sutherland, chief executive of web hosting company Carrenza, which hosts websites for eBay and Paypal.

He said retailers needed to get the fundamental elements of the site working in the background, before looking at the colouring in' at the front-end.

Sutherland said: "We see a lot of people who have really good marketing ideas about driving traffic for this very period, but have to deal with busy sites."

The back-end technology had to be absolutely stable, and retailers needed good understanding about how people came to their sites.

"Four or five years ago e-retailers would have web servers serving the website, with people going to them via Google or typing in the URL," he said.

"Now [traffic] would be coming from all manner of web 2.0 environments, and the performance they ultimately get will not be down to a single bit of infrastructure."

Sutherland said shoppers generally didn't understand or care about the technology behind websites, and it was simply down to the retailer to offer the right user experience to get them to spend.

"We also spend a lot of time working on the patterns of traffic that retailers are likely to get in particular point in time, so we can shape out response according to their needs," he said.

The worst-case scenario for a retailer would be to go completely offline, where it would lose profits due to lost sales.

"You're also going to lose an immense amount of reputation," added Sutherland.

Mobile web traffic to British retailer Argos increased by 395 per cent during Black Friday, according to research from Novarra.

Although the event marks the start of the Christmas holiday season in the US, British retailers got an average increase of 40 per cent on 27 November (Black Friday), and 23 per cent on 30 November (Cyber Monday).

Understandably, US retailers enjoyed a much bigger increase in mobile web traffic than European counterparts, with an average 388 per cent increase on Black Friday and 160 per cent on Cyber Monday.

The best performing US websites were bestbuy.com with a 792 per cent increase and walmart.com with 740 per cent.

The results were confirmation that shoppers were increasingly relying on the mobile internet, according to Scott Cotter, senior director of marketing for Novarra.

"For many shoppers, browsing special deals, comparing products, pricing and other information while they are on the run even at a retailer's location, has become second nature," he said in a statement.

In a recent interview with IT PRO, Douglas Orr of Cogenta revealed that 2010 could see a big breakthrough when it came to shoppers buying goods with mobile phones.

This would depend on mobile phones having the right controls in place to make mobile shopping safe, as well as shoppers accepting that it was possible to make purchases on a phone rather than the web.

He claimed that mobile phone could offer levels of security that you can't get online, as well as there being less of a threat when it came to malware.

Nearly one in four Britons are held back from shopping online over Christmas due to security fears, according to a YouGov survey.

Almost a quarter (22 per cent) of UK shoppers are holding back from online shopping due to fears over online identity theft and fraud, while 14 per cent do not trust e-commerce sites, according to the study.

The research, commissioned by Verisign, also said that UK consumers were only willing to spend a third of their shopping budget online, or 32 pence in every pound.

One of the issues for a third of consumers was the fact that you couldn't try goods before you bought them.

Fears about postal strikes also meant that 27 per cent feared that goods bought online would not arrive in time for Christmas.

Andrew McClelland, director at IMRG, said in a statement: "The research shows that fears over online safety are still holding consumers back this Christmas."

He added: "More and more people are browsing online but not necessarily spending a lot. If people don't trust the site they are browsing, they simply won't buy from it."

"If there is even a slightest hesitation the total amount spend will be dramatically reduced."

Although UK shoppers still have fears, some 86 per cent of them will be shopping online this Christmas, which is a six per cent increase from last year.

IT PRO offers guidance from security experts about how you can keep safe shopping online this Christmas.