Believe it or not, there are still folks out there in the World Wide Web that are relying on old, ancient browsers. These dinosaurs, the older versions of Internet Explorer and the NetScapes of an Internet gone by, are still out there today, and they’re still roaming the information highway, albeit slowly and with a skewed image of the online world of 2014. Even harder to grasp perhaps is the fact that your site visitors might possibly be entering through one...

Back in the days when the Hare Khrishna were spreading the Hindu word at airports and other public places, single-stem flowers could be found in the nearby trash cans. For anyone who was paying attention, the Hare Khrishna would, from time to time, fish those flowers straight out of the garbage. This odd behavior was described in the book "Influence: The Power of Persuasion," written by Robert Cialdini. In it, Cialdini described the rule of reciprocity, which the Hare Krishna leveraged...

As it turns out, Jaron Lanier, a leading computer scientist, author and scholar, has the ability to see into the future. Well, not really. But as the man who coined the term virtual reality, he’s pretty good at making educated guesses. In his new book, “Who Owns the Future?,” Lanier predicts a future that is led by those who own the biggest and most effective computers that are able to gather and analyze data better than anyone else, thereby calculating...

Minus the chore of finding a good parking spot and lugging around multiple shopping bags, online retailers are trying to replicate in-store experiences for their customers in the digital world. And other than a few snags, they’re getting much better at it. One of the snags tripping up many retailers, however, is the big task of inventory management. More often than shoppers would like, an item is placed into an online shopping cart – maybe even purchased – before finding out...

On average, shoppers switch retailers when they cross channels – talk about customer disloyalty. But can we really blame the consumer class for their shopping habits? Probably not, considering how difficult it is to draw a line in the sand between one retailer and another. Let’s face it; most big companies are just too similar in the type of goods they offer, the price structure they deliver and the purchasing experience they create. As a result, there is little differentiation between...

Since the dawn of the Internet, magazine publishers have had to rethink the way they connect with their readership. As they watched the consumers who were once giddy about their glossy pages begin to favor digitized editions, they scrambled to follow the curve and stay relevant. Lucky for most magazine publishers, print subscriptions were never their bread and butter. Print advertising, however, was. “It wasn’t so long ago that almost every magazine chased ever larger circulation, even if it meant losing...

When business professionals travel overseas, there are plenty of new experiences awaiting their arrival. There are new foods to try, new languages to stumble over and cultural differences to be aware of. For U.S. professionals heading to Russia to conduct business, for example, punctuality to meetings is essential. But when the start time for a meeting has come and gone, don’t be too surprised if the Russian team hasn’t arrived. It’s not uncommon for them to show up several hours late...

If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a thousand times: the user experience is one of the most integral elements of an eCommerce site. And while this mantra is essential when developing an online store, the problem with the ever-repeated declaration is that there are so many elements that make up a good user experience. Take for example the differing characteristics of a B2C site and a B2B site. They are reason enough to go beyond blanketed statements and start...

Economic indicators range from reports about the GDP to housing starts to unemployment. They also include information pertaining to consumer sentiment, manufacturing output and retail sales. To retrieve the reports, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York created its economic indicators calendar, a valuable tool for investors and business leaders alike. For decision makers in the retail sector, economic indicators to make note of include but aren’t limited to advanced retail sales, consumer confidence and consumer credit. Each month, these indices...

When Goldman Sachs first coined the BRIC acronym to group together the world’s biggest emerging economies, Brazil, Russia, India and China were the only countries to make the cut. It wasn’t until 2011 that South Africa was added to the list, seemingly pluralizing the acronym. Since that time, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey have been lumped together under the acronym MIST as have countries in the Middle East and North Africa under the term MENA. But because of a quickly...