Much attention these days is on omnichannel support, where sellers can offer their products and services online or in their shops, and customers—businesses or consumers—may either buy or pick up orders in stores or have purchases delivered to homes or offices. Much of this trend is driven by the ability to use smartphones and tablets to shop online anywhere, and at any time. But while mobile devices are capturing an increasing share of merchant site traffic, online sale-conversion rates remain much lower on smartphones and tablets than on traditional PC and laptop computers, recent research has found. And this suggests …

Taxi app company Uber introduced a trial service on Tuesday, offering on-demand delivery of medicine, toiletries and other drugstore products. Uber is testing the "Uber Corner Store" over the next few weeks in parts of Washington, DC. The service works like this: after toggling to the "Corner Store" option in the Uber app and requesting a driver, Uber sends you a text message with a link to a list of items available for purchase. An Uber driver then calls you to take your order, and upon delivery, the purchase is charged to your Uber account.

Shop Direct’s in-house UX Lab has opened its doors to rival retailers as the brand encourages shared learning to acheive greater standardisation of m-commerce. The retailer – which owns online brands including Very.co.uk, Littlewoods, and Isme – ploughed £100,000 into creating its own UX Lab earlier this year.

PayPal is moving to take a bigger piece of the mobile commerce pie with the launch Tuesday of One Touch, a feature designed to streamline purchasing in the mobile applications of its business partners. The move marks a significant advancement for eBay-owned PayPal in the increasingly competitive mobile-payments space, where players like Amazon and the major banking companies are also seeking to gain traction.

Retailers must meet the needs of task-oriented mobile shoppers by streamlining the shopping experience with easy checkout, more user-friendly search/navigation systems and supporting the decision-making process with timely and pertinent information, according to the e-tailing group’s annual mobile shopping report.

EBags, an online retailer of handbags, luggage, backpacks and accessories, has created an engaging, innovative way to find the essential handbag on mobile devices by letting users swipe right if they “Love it” and left to “Leave it,” ultimately delivering a better way for shoppers to sort through its vast array of over 12,000 products.

JetBlue Airways announced that it will provide each inflight crewmember with an iPad mini for use as a point of sale and document management device, as the acceleration of WiFi installations on aircraft combined with the large number of passengers carrying one or more digital devices is creating momentum for inflight innovations focusing on digital developments. Crewmembers who will be working Mint flights, JetBlue's new premium service offering flights between New York, Los Angeles and soon San Francisco, will be among the first to use this new technology onboard, and by April 2015, every inflight crewmember will have a device …

Juniper Research predicts that the value of the mobile context and location-based services (LBS) market will more than triple in the next five years, thanks in large part to the adoption of highly targeted and context-aware ad-supported apps, which will account for over two-thirds of revenues. The research firm said context-aware and location services will generate $43.3 billion in revenue by 2019, up from just $12.2 billion this year. Social apps, such as Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), will be the primary driver of growth in ad-supported revenues related to apps.

Thirty-two percent of merchants see mobile as riskier than standard e-commerce, up from 24 percent last year, recent statistics show. As retail foot traffic steadily declines and more consumers opt to make purchases via mobile device, online fraud is quickly becoming a standard practice – and presumably one to fear. Businesses therefore need to be able to detect and prevent such attacks on native mobile apps, which rarely have the infrastructure to enable proper security measures. A recent ThreatMetrix white paper highlights mobile app fraud methodologies and detection techniques to keep app users’ trust and businesses’ ROI high. When transactions …

China’s e-commerce space may soon see a significant shift in power. Alibaba, one of the largest e-commerce and Internet organizations in the world, is preparing to launch an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. This has taken a significant degree of the company’s focus, and created an opportunity for its competitors to make moves to establish their own dominance in the digital commerce field. JD.com, Alibaba’s chief rival in China, is making moves to work more closely with Tencent, another of Alibaba’s competitors.