A new government report said China’s e-commerce markets racked up 13 trillion yuan ($2 trillion) in transactions in 2014, up 25 percent from 2013, Nikkei Asian Review reported. The numbers from China’s Ministry of Commerce include online B2B transactions along with sales from online retailers...
Giant coffee chains Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts may have rolled out their mobile payment and loyalty apps nationwide, but that’s no reason regional chains can’t get in on the action, too. East Coast convenience store chain Wawa has launched its own mobile app featuring gift-card-based...
Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency whose supporters like to think of it as anything but ordinary, may have just gained its best chance at widespread acceptance — by being just one of the boys. Braintree, eBay’s mobile-friendly payments-processing subsidiary, said on Thursday (Jan. 22) that it has...
Can a gift-card exchange be worth a billion dollars? That seems to be the case with Raise, which just pulled in another $56 million, barely two months after an $18 million round in November. The newly closed Series B round was led by New Enterprise...
On-demand commerce startup Button, which just launched in October, has now pulled in $12 million to build out its network of on-demand services and its recommendation capabilities, according to VentureBeat. The Series A round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Greycroft, DCM, VaynerRSE,...
Mobile commerce’s share will climb to 40 percent of all e-commerce transactions worldwide in 2015, and mobile will also push cross-device sales above its current 15-to-20-percent range, according to a new report from e-commerce marketing tech vendor Criteo. And while no one is about to...
Videogame retailer GameStop is fighting back against online shopping with beacons that stream game content directly to customers’ smartphones when they’re in a store, according to The Wall Street Journal. The chainwide store upgrade, which is expected to start rolling out in Q2 to the...
Customers really do appreciate free Wi-Fi, it seems. A new study by IHL Group found that 28 percent of retailers who added in-store Wi-Fi said they got a boost in customer loyalty. That may not qualify as a competitive advantage, though. The survey also found...
Beacon vendor ShopX is planning to give away a million beacons to U.S. retailers in hopes of grabbing a bigger share of the market for its software-as-a-service management platform. Why the big giveaway? “Beacons are going to get commoditized at some point anyway,” ShopX CEO...
