Marketers are the store managers of the online retail world: it's up to them to ensure that visitors are having a good time and finding what they need. The challenge is insight: online store managers find it much harder to see what's really going on in the shop, compared to their real world counterparts. It's not immediately obvious why a particular product isn't selling online, or how customers are getting lost or sidetracked on their way to the checkout. That's why, over the past few years, companies in a variety of sectors have focused their attention on enhancing their user experience (UX). Often seen as a qualitative measure of how users'feel' while on websites, UX has historically been difficult to measure.

Now, however, Android owners can finally ask Alexa about package shipping, to watch a show on Netflix, or even to pay their American Express bill from the Amazon shopping app on their Google-powered handsets. According to TechCrunch, who initially reported a Twitter user's discovery of the feature, Alexa should start to roll out to Android OS Amazon shopping app users this week. While Android users can already use voice search in Amazon's shopping app, it makes sense to upgrade that to something more robust like Alexa. It could also likely bring the voice assistant to the attention of even more folks out there on Android. We've reached out to Amazon for confirmation and will update this post when we hear back.

Hook has just rolled out what it is calling the first artificial intelligence generated fashion feed for consumers. The Hook Fashion Discovery is free and available at the App Store and on Google Play. Parent company Intelligence Node said the app features "user-friendly, editorial-style" content that aims to educate users "at a glance on trending styles and current bestsellers." The company said there are "millions of stockkeeping units featured" on the app, and that shoppers can search for "virtually any fashion item." The app is being positioned in the market to target Millennials.

Sears will begin selling its appliances on Amazon.com, The announcement Thursday sent shares of Sears soaring more than 18 percent at the opening bell. The tie-up with the internet behemoth could give shares of the storied retailer one of its biggest one-day percentage gains ever. Sears, which also owns Kmart, said that its Kenmore Smart appliances will be fully integrated with Amazon's Alexa, allowing users to control things like air conditioners through voice commands. "The launch of Kenmore products on Amazon.com will significantly expand the distribution and availability of the Kenmore brand in the U.S.," Chairman and CEO Edward Lampert said in a company release.

Sears will begin selling its appliances on Amazon.com, The announcement Thursday sent shares of Sears soaring more than 18% at the opening bell. The tie-up with the internet behemoth could give shares of the storied retailer one of its biggest one-day percentage gains ever. Sears, which also owns Kmart, said that its Kenmore Smart appliances will be fully integrated with Amazon's Alexa, allowing users to use voice commands for air conditioners and other controls. "The launch of Kenmore products on Amazon.com will significantly expand the distribution and availability of the Kenmore brand in the U.S.," Chairman and CEO Edward Lampert said in a company release. Sears has struggled with weak sales for years, and announced more store closings earlier this month, partly due to the emergence of Amazon and other Internet operators.

By the time Amazon finally gave up on its Fire Phone, it had $83 million worth of inventory gathering dust in its warehouses--even though at that point, the phones only cost a dollar on contract. It remains perhaps the biggest flub of Jeff Bezos' career, a missed shot at getting a foothold in smartphones, the most important new consumer product in generations. Not quite three years later, it's time to try again. Yes, Amazon got burned on smartphones the first time around. And yes, if anything, the market has become even more squeezed.

Walmart is embracing technology as it competes with Amazon. The company is reportedly developing a facial recognition system that identifies whether a customer is unhappy, according to a patent filed by Walmart. The patent application published this year shows the retailer is developing a facial recognition system that identifies a customer's dissatisfaction. The Wall Street Journal first reported the patent on Wednesday. Read: Amazon Could Launch Stand-Alone Messaging App'Anytime,' Here Are The Possible Features Included "It is easier to retain existing customers than acquire new ones through advertising," Walmart explained in the patent filed in 2012.

"Ryan Gosling is my favourite actor so I'm going to look like him," says the Asos chief executive, Nick Beighton. "Here's a picture of Ryan looking cool so I'd like something to make me look like just like him. There we go, a printed T-shirt, add it to bag and away we go." Beighton is not waving a magic wand, he's demonstrating new technology that promises to change the way we shop. From seeing something you like to having a parcel winging its way to your home is now possible within seconds as new technologies reboot retailers' websites for the smartphone age.

According to IDC, artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to become pervasive across customer journeys, supply networks, merchandizing, and marketing and commerce because it provides better insights to optimize retail execution. One thing is clear: new analytic technologies are expected to radically change analytics – and retail – as we know them. AI is defined broadly as the ability of computers to mimic human thinking and logic. Machine learning is a subset of AI that focuses on how computers can learn from data without being programmed through the use of algorithms that adapt to change; in other words, they can "learn" continuously in response to new data. We're seeing these breakthroughs now because of massive improvements in hardware (for example, GPUs and multicore processing) that can handle Big Data volumes and run deep learning algorithms needed to analyze and learn from the data. Ivano Ortis, vice president at IDC, recently shared with me how he believes, "Artificial intelligence will take analytics to the next level and will be the foundation for retail innovation, as reported by one out of every two retailers globally.

For more than 250 years the fundamental drivers of economic growth have been technological innovations. The most important of these are what economists call general-purpose technologies -- a category that includes the steam engine, electricity, and the internal combustion engine. The internal combustion engine, for example, gave rise to cars, trucks, airplanes, chain saws, and lawnmowers, along with big-box retailers, shopping centers, cross-docking warehouses, new supply chains, and, when you think about it, suburbs. Companies as diverse as Walmart, UPS, and Uber found ways to leverage the technology to create profitable new business models. The most important general-purpose technology of our era is artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning (ML) -- that is, the machine's ability to keep improving its performance without humans having to explain exactly how to accomplish all the tasks it's given. Within just the past few years machine learning has become far more effective and widely available. We can now build systems that learn how to perform tasks on their own. Why is this such a big deal? First, we humans know more than we can tell: We can't explain exactly how we're able to do a lot of things -- from recognizing a face to making a smart move in the ancient Asian strategy game of Go. Prior to ML, this inability to articulate our own knowledge meant that we couldn't automate many tasks. Second, ML systems are often excellent learners.