E-Commerce Minute: Tuesday -- November 5, 2019
The E-Commerce Times -- E-Business Means Business
https://www.ecommercetimes.com
Part of the ECT News Network
Headline Scan Voice Commerce: It's a Natural Retailers: Prepare Now for Holiday Outages DevOps for Salesforce Lightning The Force May Be With Microsoft Fresh Funds Brighten Faire Marketplace Facebook Employees Blast Company's Political Ads Policy 5 Things Retailers Can Do Now to Avoid a Cyber Monday Disaster Do Your Customer Journeys Have Dead Ends or Dead Spots? The Ultimate E-Commerce Guide to Black Friday Harnessing Visual AI to Boost E-Commerce Sales Message From Our Sponsor The State of Customer Service Automation Report
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Today's Story Highlights
Voice Commerce: It's a Natural 
Consumers increasingly are shopping by voice rather than typing on a
keyboard or searching on a phone. People are growing more comfortable
with voice assistants, as the tech becomes smarter and more
conversational every day. "Consumers appreciate the simplicity of using
voice to shop," said Shilp Agarwal, CEO of Blutag. "Users can express
their purchasing intent much more quickly over voice."
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/86339.html Retailers: Prepare Now for Holiday Outages 
In the age of fast shipping and one-click ordering, a single technical
glitch can be detrimental to retail sales. A server outage during the
holiday season could be a critical issue. Target is a prime example. Its
in-store registers and online services were down for a few hours as
recently as September. Target's payment-processing system was down for
more than a day in June.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/86337.html DevOps for Salesforce Lightning 
The tools you work with have a lot of impact on what you can accomplish,
and the more sophisticated the tools the better -- especially in
software. Beagle Research just completed a study into the use of a
DevOps strategy with the Salesforce Lightning Platform. DevOps is a
strategy for building, changing and deploying enterprise software that
can be used with Scrum, Agile, and other methodologies.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/86338.html The Force May Be With Microsoft 
The Pentagon has awarded its $10 billion contract for cloud computing to
Microsoft. The program -- which goes by the acronym "JEDI" for "Joint
Enterprise Defense Infrastructure" -- has been attracting vendors like a
dog attracts fleas for several years. It has been marked by fierce
litigation too, so the award may not be the end of it. Oracle sued over
the process, claiming it was unfair.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/86335.html Fresh Funds Brighten Faire Marketplace 
Faire has raised $150 million in venture capital, which it will use to
expand into new markets, improve the Faire marketplace, and build more
tools for its customers. The latest round brings Faire's total funding
to date to $266 million and gives the company a valuation of $1 billion.
Faire is an online wholesale marketplace that lets retailers shop for
new products to carry.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/86331.html Facebook Employees Blast Company's Political Ads Policy 
At least 250 Facebook employees signed a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg
criticizing the company's hands-off policy against fact-checking
political ads. "We strongly object to this policy as it stands," says
the letter. "It doesn't protect voices, but instead allows politicians
to weaponize our platform by targeting people who believe that content
posted by political figures is trustworthy."
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/86328.html 5 Things Retailers Can Do Now to Avoid a Cyber Monday Disaster 
We may just be turning the calendar to November, but if you're like most
retailers, you're already deep into planning for the gift-giving season.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are circled and starred as you anticipate,
with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, the spike in sales and
massive increase in traffic to your website and mobile app -- with good
reason.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/86325.html Do Your Customer Journeys Have Dead Ends or Dead Spots? 
It's easy to take things you see every day for granted. We take the sun
rising and setting for granted, for instance, and that's a good thing,
because it helps us organize our lives. However, in business taking
things for granted is a hazard. Change is everything these days, and
that means the concepts you take as constants may not be as constant as
they seem.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/86326.html The Ultimate E-Commerce Guide to Black Friday 
The shopping season is fast approaching. Black Friday -- the kickoff of
Christmas consumerism -- falls on November 29 this year, six days later
than last year. However, e-commerce stores easily will compensate for
this shorter shopping season: Last year consumers broke records with
$6.22 billion spent online, but this year Black Friday is set to surpass
$12 billion in online sales.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/86323.html Harnessing Visual AI to Boost E-Commerce Sales 
Each person interprets an image in countless subjective ways, based on
individual biases. However, when searching for a product on the
Internet, most people prefer accuracy over multiple interpretations of a
single object. Putting the appropriate tags on images ensures better
searchability for users. Doing this manually, though, can be inefficient
and prone to errors.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/86322.html News Alerts From ECT News Network Get the day's top business and technology news delivered
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