Fifty-two percent of luxury travelers say they are likely to book a trip on a smartphone within the next year, compared to the average 29 percent across all segments of travelers, according to a new report by Expedia Media Solutions and comScore. Even with the proliferation of mobile usage, travel brands can’t discount other forms of digital marketing, including desktop Web sites and placement on publications.

Mobile is driving the need for consumer packaged goods brands to have a deeper understanding of different consumer groups, as some are clamoring to engage directly while others are open to the possibility if approached correctly, according to a new report from IBM Business Value. With mobile driving the desire of consumers to interact with consumer packaged goods brands directly and making it easier to enable such direct interactions, these marketers must recognize that not all mobile consumers are created equal, according to a new report from IBM Business Values.  

In a reflection of the growing importance of mobile-powered in-store shopping experiences, Target has acquired Powered Analytics, a startup that focuses on personalizing in-store shopping through mobile technology, location data and predictive analytics. The Pittsburgh, PA-based Powered Analytics offers a platform called Fabric that promises to bring an Amazon-like shopping experience into physical stores.

Asda is trialling beacon technology at a handful of stores in the UK, as it experiments with new formats to keep shoppers engaged. Beacons are small transmitters – often the size of a postage stamp – that use Bluetooth or other connectivity to detect a nearby smartphone or device. They can trigger push notifications that, for example, could send information about discounted bin bags to shoppers walking past a beacon hidden in the household cleaning isle.

This might be a good time for us to define millennials, or generation Y.  While it may sound like anyone born as of the year 2000, according to multiple sources, this group actually was born in the 1980's and the term came to the market as of 1991. In August 2014, Autotrader.com released a study, the 2014 Automotive Buyer Influence Study, which shows how consumers shop for cars online, offline and across multiple devices.  The study demonstrated how the consumer shopping process is rapidly changing with millennials, the age into the largest car-buying market.

Consumers are becoming surgical with their time in stores and online, making slip-ups by retailers reverberate further than they once did, according to a new report by L2. Mobile is becoming the preferred channel for consumers scouting out purchases, but few of them actually convert on smartphones. Despite this tendency, retailers are making it difficult for consumers to leverage mobile the way they want, which can end up diverting sales elsewhere.

Old Navy is leveraging social media and a text-to-win game to entice Black Friday shoppers hoping to win a $1 million jackpot or a $200 shopping spree from the retailer. Old Navy claims that consumers have up to five times better odds of winning the second annual “Overnight Millionaire” sweepstakes than last year. 

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which previously said it is in discussions with Apple about working with its Apple Pay digital payment service, is now reportedly also open to working with EBay’s PayPal digital payment service.  According to Bloomberg, Joseph Tsai, vice chairman of Alibaba, said in an interview that PayPal’s position as a payment service both in the U.S. and internationally may offer a good footprint to Alibaba.

Forrester Research has published a new report concerning online sales throughout Europe. A growing number of consumers in European countries are beginning to favor shopping online, purchasing products and having them delivered directly to their homes. The report predicts that online shopping will continue to gain momentum throughout Europe in the coming years. Mobile commerce is expected to play a major role in the digital space as well, especially as more people become comfortable with using mobile-centric services offered by retailers and other businesses.

Macy’s is the first United States retailer to use visual search technology from Cortexica, promising to reduce the number of clicks between inspiration and purchase to make it easy for young fashionistas to shop from their phones. Macy’s use of Cortexica’s findSimilar image recognition technology could help the retail attract a younger, up-and-coming generation of consumers that thrives on the use of imagery.