Discount retailer Target is driving product sales through colorful images on Twitter and Instagram with a high engagement rate. The retailer’s social media accounts are full of aesthetically pleasing pictures featuring products it sells with a focus on color, especially on Instagram. The Target products are photographed in a unique way with bright hued backgrounds or text and shared on applications with links to shop items. “At Target, we’re always looking for fun ways to engage with guests and deliver great design, newness and innovation, [and] that’s true in stores, online and in social media,” said Eddie Baeb, spokesman for …

Facebook hopes to transform the way  customers communicate with retailers by re-inventing the customer service platform. Facebook and its partner Zendesk, a customer service platform firm, are teaming up to allow businesses to provide scalable and responsive customer service to the more than 600 million people worldwide who use Facebook's popular Messenger app. The social media giant is inviting retailers and other companies to develop software that allows customers to communicate instantly with them through Messenger. “Messenger has changed the way people communicate with their friends, and now it’s opening new opportunities for businesses to interact with their customers,” said Adrian …

Rumors are ripe that Apple has reached common ground with China UnionPay, and we might witness an Apple Pay rollout in China within the next month. As reported by kapron ASIA, Bank of China has cited in a Weibo post that April 15th could be the day of the official announcement, while April 28th could be the official launch day. China’s mobile payment market presents a positive opportunity for Apple Pay. Substantial NFC infrastructure is already present in China. There are over 4 million POS terminals in China that support UnionPay’s NFC enabled Quickpass technology. There has been an explosive growth in mobile payments …

Fujitsu Laboratories announced the development of a thin, light-weight beacon, weighing 3 grams with a thickness of 2.5 millimeters, that does not require battery replacement or other maintenance and is flexible enough for installation on round objects, corners, and curves. Previously, beacons that did not require battery replacement needed power-supply components, such as power-management ICs and secondary batteries, as control circuits to ensure adequate power on activation. These components, which are relatively thick and occupy a large area, make the beacons themselves rigid and large, limiting locations to which they can be attached.

Google’s mission to organize the world’s information is now targeting your physical mailbox. The company is currently working on a project that will allow Gmail users to more easily receive bills in their email inbox instead of their mailbox. Called Pony Express, the service also is designed to let people pay their bills within Gmail, rather than having to go to a telecom or utility company’s website to complete a payment. Those details are outlined in a lengthy document viewed by Re/code. The new service is scheduled to start in the fourth quarter, according to the document. It’s not clear whether …

The service is a big step towards m-Commerce in the local market, where customers would be able to purchase and receive goods and services from their wallets. The service was being launched with National Foods, and would in future be rolled out further to include other suppliers, Econet said. EcoShopper will allow EcoCash subscribers to choose from a wide selection of grocery hampers from the EcoCash menu to be sent directly to the recipient, the company said at the launch. The service was available via the normal USSD menu, a mobile website and an Android application downloadable for free from …

Supermarket chain Kroger is tightening the integration between the planning and in-store stages of grocery shopping through new upgrades to the shopping list feature in its mobile application that make it easier to find products. Users of the updated app for iOS and Android can now find even more specific products for their shopping list thanks to the addition of popular items to the predictive text search capability. In addition, shoppers can now sort their shopping list by aisle location in their preferred store.

The mobile payments space continues to heat up, with Opentabs integrating PayPal within its mobile payment system to meet consumer demand for order-ahead services. Stoked by Apple’s and Google’s appearing to be the ones to beat, Opentabs, which lets users order ahead by registering a debit card or credit card with a mobile application, is teaming up with PayPal to meet accelerated customer demand for convenience. Mobile ordering is a hot topic so far in 2015, with numerous restaurants chains announcing their own mobile ordering services or plans for them.

ASEAN is home to some of the biggest smartphone markets in the world – a key advantage given mobile devices account for 40 percent of global e-commerce transactions, according to a February report from Criteo. In Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous country, smartphone penetration is around 23 percent, compared with 18 percent in India, Nielson data shows. In more developed economies like Singapore, that figure jumps to 85 percent – the highest rate in the world.

Tokenization is a leading driver behind the adoption of mobile payments, according to Visa. The company’s global head of mobile products, Bill Gajda, believes that the introduction of tokenization is making the mobile payments space more secure. As such, consumers are more likely to participate in mobile commerce and businesses are feeling more comfortable about protecting the information of these consumers. More platforms are expected to adopt tokenization in the coming years, with the newSamsung Pay service supporting digital tokens when it launches later this year. Tokenization is a relatively new practice in the mobile commerce space. The process involves attributing …