Adobe-Omniture brings e-retail solutions

Adobe Systems' acquisition of Omniture, the provider of analytics to Top 500 retailers, could raise the ability of e-retailers to quickly judge the effect on consumers of online content in retail merchandising displays and online ads, experts say, according to Internet retailer.

Adobe, whose digital content development and design tools are widely used among retailers, said when announcing the approximately $1.8 billion acquisition that it would integrate its technology with Omniture's to help clients produce more effective and revenue-producing content in online merchandising and marketing campaigns.

“This optimisation will enable advertisers, advertising agencies, publishers and e-tailers to achieve greater return on investment from their digital media investments and improve their end users' experiences,” the companies said in a joint statement.

myPhotopipe.com has completed a suite of online digital photo tools that will allow retailers and other vendors to seamlessly integrate with the company's photo print lab and purchase print processing services, says Reuters.

"This is huge for us and for our customers," stated Darren Schiff, COO of myPhotopipe.com. “There are hundreds of Web sites and retailers that offer prints to their customers. Until now, they had few, if any, options for high quality print fulfilment and were literally forced to work with high-volume, low-end processors.”

Schiff estimated that the company's new application programming interface will allow myPhotopipe.com to compete for the tens of millions of dollars that are currently funnelled to print processors through independent front-end retailers and photo hosting sites

A new report from Planet Retail says Ikea, the furniture retailer with nearly $29 billion in annual revenue, is taking a risky approach when it comes to preventing theft at self-checkout kiosks at some European stores, states StoreFront BackTalk.

Although most other retailers heavily rely on weight-testing technology, Ikea doesn't; instead it relies on spot-checking orders. A big headache for retailers with self-checkout kiosks has always been dealing with theft prevention in a way that isn't cumbersome and doesn't alienate consumers.

But Ikea, one of the few non-food retailers in Europe to install self-checkout kiosks, “refuses to invest in weigh scales like other stationary self-checkouts have,” said Planet Retail's research director, retail technology, Bjorn Weber.