By MERCEDES CARDONA, Daily Finance
At last year’s annual WWD Apparel & Retail CEO Summit, the talk was all about recession and inventory control. But at this year’s gathering in New York, the assembled execs buzzed about technology. Now that retailers seem to be moving out of crisis mode, they’re back to investing in new bells and whistles for their stores and websites. Merchants are dabbling in all kinds of in-store technology, from apps that send coupons to your cell phone when you walk in the door to digital cameras by fitting rooms that let you send a snapshot of that little number you just tried on to all your Facebook friends. The expansion of smartphones will affect the way people shop, points out John Donahoe, CEO of eBay (EBAY). Applications such as RedLaser that let smartphones scan a product bar code on the store shelf and comparison-shop for that product online are “blurring the lines between in-store and online,” he says.
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