Online shopping has the potential to be so much smarter. If you stumble across a rug or lamp you like in a photo, shouldn't it be easier to track down where to buy it? One home design website is aiming to do just that, with the help of artificial intelligence. Palo Alto-based Houzz is a platform for people who want to remodel or redesign their homes and they're looking for inspiration. Consumers and design professionals alike can upload photos of their completed projects, where they can then tag specific furniture and accessories offered by merchants Houzz partners with--letting other users easily buy any product they see and love.

Is putting carts on robots enough to save retail in physical stores? A shopping cart is mostly empty space. At the end of a shopping run, when the cart is brimming with groceries and goods, it becomes fully useful, but it isn't until that point, and once it's full, it doesn't help the person trying to buy two cartfulls of stuff on their own. Walmart, the physical retail giant, doesn't want people to worry about the inadequacies of carts while shopping. So they filed a patent for a self-driving robot cart. Other routine tasks also are difficult to keep up with, particularly during peak hours.

Imagine if you could easily add voice recognition to your app or service even if you have no experience with voice-based sevices. Amazon hopes you'll do just that with the new Alexa Skills Kit, a collection of self-service APIs, tools, and code samples that make it a snap to add skills to Alexa. Alexa is the voice service that powers Amazon's Echo device. The Echo is a small, internet-connected speaker that responds to voice requests and can do things like manage calendar appointments and shopping lists. The Echo had been available in limited fashion to Amazon Prime subscribers until this week, when the online retailer made Echo available to anyone for 179.

Retail sales fell in August, during what is traditionally back-to-school shopping season, as shoppers continued to rein in their spending. It was the first drop since March. U.S. retail sales fell 0.3% last month compared with July, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. July sales, however, were revised up slightly to 0.1% growth from an estimate of no growth. A drop in auto sales was expected to drag down overall August retail sales.

Echo has seven microphones and beam-forming technology so it can hear you from across the room--even in noisy environments or while playing music. Echo is also an expertly tuned speaker that can fill any room with 360 immersive sound. When you want to use Echo, just say the wake word "Alexa" and Echo responds. If you have more than one Echo or Echo Dot, Alexa responds intelligently from the device you're closest to with ESP (Echo Spatial Perception). ESP works best when Echo devices are at least 6 metres apart.

Lounge apparel retailer FlyPolar uses a new service from vendor Sentient Technologies to test many elements quickly across multiple pages and is on track to double sales this month. Artificial intelligence can lead to real sales increases--and fast ones, too. Just ask loungewear retailer ShopFlyPolar.com. The web only merchant had hit a sales downturn, generating about 277,000 in web sales in February 2015 to about 50,000 in July 2016 says, says Shawn Broadus founder and CEO of FlyPolar. "We hit a slump," Broadus say.

Don't say Walmart hasn't been an innovator. It's mastered the retail market, managing massive profits while keeping prices low.

UserReplay announced today the addition of a machine learning feature to its existing solution in order to better assist companies with gaining insight into their customers' online experiences and resolve issues in real time. UserReplay machine learning uncovers hard-to-discover revenue opportunities hidden in the powerful data set captured by UserReplay. The biggest benefit of UserReplay machine learning is its systematic and automatic uncovering of pain points that requires no human intervention. Analysts and consultants can now spend their time on more valuable endeavors while still gleaning comprehensive insights from mining customer experience data. For example, a leading national retailer's website was causing customers to see the error message "Sorry, some of the items in your basket just sold out." However, there was no indication of which item was sold out and none of the items when checked individually showed a stock warning.

Imagine wanting a cup of coffee and suddenly finding it before you, freshly prepared to your exacting standards. In the not-so-distant future, this will be reality for Muggles, too. In fact, thanks to a surge in consumer data, brands and marketers can already make better inferences about consumer wants and needs, but as AI and machine learning are more deftly integrated, insights will only get better, as will the ability to anticipate consumer needs – and to even make decisions on behalf of consumers without any input from them whatsoever. Like, say, ordering a cup of coffee. As it stands, digital enables brands to customize offers for specific users rather than provide generic solutions.

While driverless cars may be a few years away, it appears self-driving shopping carts are right around the corner. Walmart has been awarded a patent illustrating'disc-shaped' robots that use sensors and cameras to transport and navigate shopping carts throughout stores. This application comes two months after reports surfaced that the firm was developing driverless carts that scan a customer's shopping list and then guide them to the aisles and shelves. Walmart has been awarded a patent illustrating'disc-shaped' robots that use sensors and cameras to navigate shopping carts for customers throughout shopping centers. Walmart was awarded a patent called'Shopping Facility Assistance Systems, Devices and Methods' is the patents title which was filed on March 4, 2016.