Today on Total Retail

H&M launched on Tuesday on Nordstrom Marketplace, expanding the brand's reach and marking its first launch on a curated retail marketplace in the U.S. H&M is making its marketplace debut with a curated selection of womenswear, menswear and childrenswear, alongside the brand’s activewear line, H&M Move. The offering is expected to be refreshed regularly with new seasonal…

Today’s marketers are integrating generative artificial intelligence solutions across workflows, automating key components of campaign creation and orchestration. And they're seeing results in record time. However, the next era of AI-enabled marketing strategies will not be centered on automation. Tomorrow’s marketing leaders will be focused on building agentic AI solutions that can handle complex workflows…

Consolidation has long been a key growth strategy across retail and CPG. Big companies have spent decades buying up competitors, acquiring niche brands, and expanding into new categories. Why? Ideally, a large, varied portfolio would drive scale, diversification, market share, consumer trend alignment, and business growth. But as the industry evolves, are portfolio cracks starting…

For years, the conversation around commerce media has been dominated by technology and data. The industry has obsessed over the fixtures, including the API integrations, first-party audiences, closed-loop measurement capabilities, and the algorithmic precision of retail media networks. Yet, as we enter a more complex economic landscape, many organizations are finding that the most sophisticated…

Something strange is happening in e-commerce. Consumer spending is up. Online time is up. Yet traffic to major retail websites is declining. The answer is actually quite simple: shoppers are changing how they research and where they buy. Their starting point, which used to be about discovery, is now where they're making decisions. Many may…

Ace Hardware, the world's largest hardware cooperative, has launched Hey ARMA, an artificial intelligence-powered assistant designed to support its nationwide in-store associates with real-time information and guidance. Operated through a handheld device, Hey ARMA provides associates with quick access to product knowledge, project advice, and recommendations, helping them to focus on solving customer problems and…

In the early days of retail media, retailers were told all they needed was to get an on-site ad server and the advertisers would come. “Build it and they will come.” However, they didn’t come in the waves promised. Now retailers are being told to plug in demand channels and the revenue will flow —…

Managing inventory is challenging across all industries, but retailers face the added challenge of scale. While a standard company may need to plan for 100,000 products in a single warehouse, a major retailer needs to manage that same volume across thousands of different store locations. This makes even basic data collection difficult. For example, even…

When bad actors take advantage of retailers, abusing a returns policy or conspiring with an associate to steal from the register, they might be tempted to look the other way. Culturally, the organization doesn’t want to think a consumer could be sneaky — someone capable of wearing a dress to prom with the intention of…

Retailers are moving fast on artificial intelligence. Research from Eversheds Sutherland and Retail Economics suggests that around nine in 10 retail decision-makers are exploring AI agents, and roughly a third are already deploying them in areas like chatbots, forecasting, and personalization. Yet the majority of leaders still report limited returns from those efforts. The issue…