“One customer can shop with us in so many different ways — in stores, on their phones, at home, we’ll win one customer at a time.”

– Doug McMillon, CEO of Wal-Mart, announcing a $1 billion investment in e-commerce

E-Commerce today is the fastest growing segment of the Retail industry. In Q1 2015, online sales accounted for 7% of total retail sales but grew by 14.5% per year over 2014. Meanwhile total retail sales grew by just 1.6 % a year.1 To put this in perspective, in the fiscal

“We make some of the best known brands in the world, and those brands are used by 2 billion people every day.”

– Unilever

Few industries reach out to and impact the lives of more consumers every day than the Consumer and Retail Industries. Yet the industry’s transformation from Mass Marketing to 1:1 Marketing is mostly all hype with dramatically negative bottom line results. Let’s begin by considering the current state of the Consumer and Retail industries:

• Despite billions of dollars

“Nordstrom kicks its omnichannel strategy to the curb” – George Anderson, RetailWire

Few topics are as hyped up as omnichannel in Retail – or as difficult to execute successfully. Part of the problem depends on where you sit within the organization. Marketers view this as a consumer issue, in-store this is a merchandising and fulfillment issue, online this is a website design and e-commerce execution issue, and of course there is also a supply chain and fulfillment angle. Next is your

Donald Soares is CTO of Retail and Consumer at MarkLogic and is based out of our Chicago office. With over 20 years of experience working with Retail, Consumer and E-Commerce clients, Donald has a deep understanding of the unique needs of this vertical. That’s why he is so passionate about championing MarkLogic’s value proposition as the only Enterprise NoSQL database – a technology specifically designed to surmount the Big Data obstacles currently hindering the Retail and