#ind-retail

consumers’ mass adoption of AI tools has had a knock-on effect on attitudes towards robotics, said Sonali Fenner of management consultancy Slalom. This has enabled companies to consider using robots in public-facing settings. Fenner used the example of a large retail client who deployed Spot, a Boston Dynamics robot dog powered by Google’s Gemini Pro model, in its stores to assess inventory. “[The hype] has opened the door a little bit to what is expected in particular environments and, even if you don’t want Spot walking around your retail store, you might accept a slightly less intrusive robot,” Fenner added. Ahti Heinla, co-founder of Skype and chief executive of delivery bot start-up Starship Technologies, who has deployed the small grocery robots across more than 100 cities and towns in Europe and the UK, said he was surprised at how easily people “perceive the robots to be normal participants in public space, and accept them as natural”.

Leading retailers are monitoring the in-store movements of customers, as well as how they interact with products. These retailers combine such rich data feeds with transaction records and conduct experiments to guide choices about which products to carry, where to place them, and how and when to adjust prices. Methods such as these helped one leading retailer to reduce the number of items it stocked by 17 percent, while raising the mix of higher-margin private-label goods—with no loss of market share.

Asos held an hour long 'shop-along' earlier this month where Asos US editor Indigo Clarke & 'New York girl-about-town Cory Kennedy' answered fashion queries on G hangout

The European home ware and furniture market online is worth £130bn but only 10% of this sector is bought online versus 30% to 40% in women’s fashion. Fab will happily cater to that growing market.

Amazon is offering consumers up to $5 off on purchases if they compare prices using the online giant’s mobile phone application in a store. The promotion goes live Saturday and will serve as a way for Amazon to increase usage of its bar-code-scanning application, while also collecting intelligence on prices in the stores.

IKEA has posted a popular interactive app on YouTube that creates a personalized 3D mockup of a bedroom based on your personal details. The advert starts off with an ordinary YouTube video before the whole page is taken over by a unique app which the user can then login to Facebook with. Based on the user’s Facebook data and living situation, the tool then generates a 3D bedroom fitted with clickable IKEA items. Each personalized bedroom is tailored to the smallest details, such as photos from the user’s Facebook album hanging on the walls

Major retailers are working with a new smartphone application that tracks and offers promotions to shoppers as they move from outside the store, to counters, to cash registers — even inside the dressing room (now that’s persistence). The app, called Shopkick, will be available on Tuesday

Zynga, the game’s developer, is running a promotional campaign for Farmville and has tied with the 7-Eleven chain to stock its Farmville line of pre-packaged food in the stores that will earn you codes for items you would need to play the game online. So, a cup of fruit will fetch you a virtual FarmVille Chocolate Persimmon Tree, while an ice cream gets you a FarmVille Neapolitan Cow in your account