August 24, 2017 - Today Amazon announced several initiatives it will begin to execute on when it closes on its deal to acquire Whole Foods Market this coming Monday. I blogged about this just two months ago and my vision closely matches the plans Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon Worldwide...
What Have We Done To Consumer Expectations?
Whatever you think of him, Steve Jobs was excellent at product development. Consumer friendly, intuitive design was the at the core of every product he introduced. He felt that the user should be able to effectively use a device or software without being told or shown how, and he did...
How Net Neutrality Affects Your E-commerce Business
What is Net Neutrality? Imagine that the websites you access most often suddenly begin to charge subscription fees. Some of these fees you may opt into— online news subscriptions, video streaming, etc. Other fees you may not even notice you are paying— the shoes you want become more expensive as...
Technology as An Accelerator: Petroleum C-Stores
Focusing on Moving Juice The Petroleum Industry has a tremendous amount of fragmentation, from Brand representation, to supply chain economics, to terminal locations, dealer contracts, trucking and delivery, to promotions and retail operations. Within this fragmentation loop, technology, and the appreciation of technology, has been traditionally absent. Distributors, or Jobbers,...
Click & Mortar
The following has been re-posted from C-Store Decisions. The original article can be found here. Amazon’s Whole Foods acquisition shows brick-and-mortar and online retailing can help strengthen each other when brought together. By Ed Collupy With what seems like the click of the mouse, Amazon has made its entry into...
What Happens When the Lights Go Out?
Background Driven by the high-profile data security breaches at global retail brands (Target, Michaels, etc.) over the past 10 years, directors across all retail verticals have elevated data security to a top priority of their organizations. As a result, maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of PCI, PII, and sensitive corporate...
Surviving the Next Retail Tech Revolution
How to Avoid Being a Casualty of the Digital Revolution Many retailers looking to differentiate their brand will tackle the risk of becoming early adopters of new in-store technology. Other retailers will play the more cautious angle of waiting to implement new in-store technology until the difficulties associated with launch...
ePOS Software Release Testing: How much is enough?
Recently, a customer asked me about the required level of testing to perform for a new build of ePOS software. My response was “It depends on what changes were made”. The response seemed to baffle some in the meeting because of the commonly held belief that every new software build...
What is Omnichannel Anyway?
Time to Reflect At first glance, Omnichannel appears to require a lot of costly, labor-intensive infrastructure work spanning your payment systems, retail network, loyalty program, etc. However, the hardest part is building something that customers will use and be attracted to. In order to make omnichannel less ominous, let's take...
Moving Forward With Payment Technology
The following has been re-posted from C-Store Decisions. The original article can be found here. As EMV implementation wraps up, retailers must consider where mobile payment solutions are headed. By Ed Collupy The baseball season is in full swing and I’m reminded as I continue to think about card payments...
EMV Hopes – An Implementation Update
The following has been re-posted from C-Store Decisions. The original article can be found here. As retailers struggle with compliance, chargebacks from the liability shift have been larger than anyone in the industry anticipated. By Ed Collupy The implementation of EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) chip card acceptance should be...
Where Do Fraudsters Go?
There are undoubtedly hundreds of cybersecurity and fraudulent attacks being committed at this very moment. While merchants have invested time, resources, technology, and hundreds of millions of dollars to protect sensitive company and customer data, fraud continues to rise at an exponential rate. Fraud is Migrating While the U.S. continues...