TrueCommerce has announced the integration of its unified commerce solutions with Shopify, a cloud-based, multichannel commerce platform. Shopify powered more than 600,000 merchants across 175 countries as of last August. The new offering will give Shopify merchants a unified scheme for greater integration across all commerce channels within a business' systems and supply chain network.

MaritzCX has unveiled preconfigured B2B CX templates that monitor key financial indicators; metrics for customer touchpoints, including NPS and OSAT; business-specific outcomes; and overall account performance. Integrated into the MaritzCX Technology Platform, "the dashboards become a hub that aggregates all of the data being monitored," said Jennifer Rubin, MaritzCX associate practice leader.

"There's a gap in performance across B2B selling, because buyers are innovating faster than sellers are getting better at selling," said Miller Heiman Group CEO Byron Matthews. "Sales enablement's function is to try to close that gap. It's not sales operation ... . It's more strategic, in terms of trying to drive sales performance by getting better content and coaching services for salespeople."

Flipping assets is nothing new -- just turn on HGTV to find countless house-flipping shows. The concept is simple: You buy an underperforming property, make some upgrades, and sell it for more than what you put in. Flipping real estate is no easy venture, though, and investors regularly lose money. The good news is that you can apply the flipping concept to much simpler fields.

It's interesting to compare Google and Amazon -- two of the most incredibly powerful companies in the world. Amazon brings out product after product, with more successes than failures. Google largely buys companies and then loses interest in what they do. Profit is built into Amazon's retail efforts, while Google largely lives off selling users' information and providing access to content.

The close of Q2 ends the first wave of vendor customer events. Still to come this fall are Salesforce Dreamforce and Oracle OpenWorld -- and others -- but mercifully, we have the summer to digest all the information absorbed this spring and re-sync with our native time zones.For starters, CRM doesn't appear to be slowing down. As an industry, it's rated at about $35 billion in revenues.

Before I was a parent, I was a youth leader. As individuals, teens had unique personalities, skills and stories, but one thing that was universal was the effect that parental communication had on them. Whether it was a criticism, a suggestion, or merely a bit of helpful information, the teens tended to look down on it, or even become hostile toward the messenger.

Retailers' biggest worry is increasing e-commerce fraud -- including data breaches, targeted attacks and card-not-present fraud -- according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Online fraud is one of the biggest challenges facing retailers, with CNP fraud being one of their top worries. CNP fraud will hit $71 billion over the next five years, Juniper Research has forecast.

B2B customer support firm TeamSupport has added sentiment analysis technology, powered by IBM's Watson, to its customer relationship platform. The new tech provides automatic text analysis of email or chat responses to assess how a customer feels, so customer support teams can prioritize and personalize their outreach efforts. It includes predefined categories such as "satisfied" and "frustrated."

E-commerce SMBs are likely to be hit hard by the United States Federal Communications Commission's repeal of Net neutrality earlier this month. The move will let Internet service providers block and manipulate Internet usage and discriminate against users at will, according to critics. Various public interest groups have challenged the FCC's repeal of Net neutrality in the U.S. Court of Appeals.

If you operate an e-commerce company, the world is at your fingertips, and global markets offer the enticing promise of increased visibility and sales. "International expansion is a great way to mitigate risk and reliance on a single market for all your sales," noted Chris Vincent, global CEO of Practicology. How to get started may seem murky, though.

Amazon has opened Prime Wardrobe to all Prime members, after beta-testing the service on an invitation-only basis for a year. Prime Wardrobe is included in Amazon Prime memberships at no additional charge. "This is going to be an immensely valuable service for Amazon which will increase consumers' confidence in buying apparel from the company," said Nikki Baird, VP for retail innovation at Aptos.

The European Union's Legal Affairs Committee has voted in favor of a directive on copyright in the digital single market, a proposal it has been wrestling with since its introduction in 2015. News of the vote kicked off a storm, as Article 13 of the directive effectively requires online content-sharing service providers evaluate all submissions to ensure they don't breach copyright.

Large corporations are not the only businesses governed by the European General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which became effective last month. Small and mid-sized businesses also are subject to its provisions. The regulation applies to the processing of personal data of individuals in the EU by an individual, a company or an organization engaged in professional or commercial activities.

A good way to understand what Salesforce articulated at Connections 2018 is to recall the direction it set a few years ago, when CEO Marc Benioff said the company would develop most apps for the small screen first. Translated, that was a concession that handheld devices -- phones and tablets -- would become the primary devices we'd all use in business. So far that's been a good bet.

Mobile sales and business-to-business e-commerce platform Handshake has teamed up with Square to provide easy B2B ordering and payments via an app that enables a seamless workflow between the two companies' products. Using the app, B2B sellers can accept all major credit cards and see their money deposited in their bank accounts in one to two business days.

Newsletters are one of the primary means of communicating with both existing and potential customers. For small e-commerce business owners, however, putting together a regular newsletter may seem daunting. It might seem that creating and sending out a newsletter would involve spending more time and energy than you have, taking valuable resources away from sales and marketing.

The expanding world of Internet commerce likely will generate a corresponding expansion of data breaches, resulting in more e-commerce businesses becoming the targets of consumer class action lawsuits. Breach litigation has become more prevalent as a result of a perceptible legal trend favoring consumers. Courts have tended to allow lawsuits based on a lower threshold for establishing injury.

Salesforce has announced integrations between its Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics 360 that equip marketers with a broad range of new capabilities. Marketers now can view consumer insights from both Marketing Cloud and Analytics 360 in a single journey analytics dashboard. If they see a high rate of browse abandons, they can create a tailored journey to re-engage them, for example.

A couple of years ago, one of the hottest new technologies was Google Fiber. Everyone wanted access to it. Every city wanted to be the next on the list to get it, because it would attract new citizens and encourage existing residents to stay. It was thought there would be an advantage to early cities -- my home town Atlanta was one of them. Google Fiber is an ultra-fast Internet service.

A group of data, technology, digital services and other organizations have launched the AI Global Marketplace, an app store that will host more than 2,000 high-value AI assets focused on customer engagement and process intelligence problems for the banking, insurance, healthcare and digital commerce markets. Software assets will be based on the Cognitive Agent Modeling and Execution Language.

The gap between B2B buyers and sellers has been growing. More than 70 percent of B2B buyers preferred to wait to engage a seller until the latter demonstrated a clear understanding of its needs, a CSO Insights survey found. Nearly 58 percent of buyers saw little difference among sellers, and more than 10 percent saw no difference at all among sellers.

No-fee mobile bank Chime recently announced a $70 million Series C funding round led by Menlo Ventures. With the Series C funding, the company has raised more than $100 million in total funding. Investors seem to have confidence in Chime's business model because "it's very clean with extremely low overhead," remarked Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

With all the talk about cryptocurrencies, you might be wondering whether your e-commerce business should start accepting them as a form of payment. There is no simple answer to that question. It all depends on the type of business you have and your tolerance for volatility and risk. In any case, it's a good idea to understand what cryptocurrencies are and how they work.

Cien this week released its AI-based Data Enhancement Services to help companies manage CRM records in Salesforce Sales Cloud implementations. Data Enhancement Services "is an optional standalone Cien offering for companies that aren't ready to start tackling their sales productivity traps and feel a more urgent need to augment their CRM data," noted Cien CEO Rob Käll.

The DoJ and the CFTC have opened a joint criminal investigation into price manipulation of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, according to a report. The illicit tactics reportedly being investigated include spoofing and wash trading. Bitcoin's share prices have been fluctuating wildly over the past year, ranging from $1,800 to almost $20,000, leading to rumors of price manipulation.

"There's this notion that software is primarily something you have to work for," said Jon Lee, CEO of ProsperWorks. "There's a lot of data entry, a lot of navigating screens and moving between different windows. Software as it was designed in the 1980s was a database for recording information. The trend you're seeing today is ... what if my software works for me?"

It was once common knowledge that Apttus was the next big acquisition target on Salesforce's radar, until Salesforce decided to acquire another CPQ vendor to augment its Sales Cloud. In the two-ish years since, Apttus has nicely pivoted, diversifying its partner base and justifying its existence with a new strategy and nomenclature around what it calls the "middle office."

Hundreds of millions of dollars soon could start flowing into online betting emporiums due to a U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing states to regulate sports wagering. "Right now there's a tremendous black market for illegal, offshore sports book being offered to U.S. citizens," said Matthew Kalish, CRO of DraftKings. "We think it's in the range of $150 billion being waged that way right now."

Oracle -- or could we say "Autoracle"? -- has introduced more autonomous products, generally in keeping with what I see as a build-out of an information utility. The products include Autonomous Analytics, Autonomous Integrations, Autonomous Builder code generation and free premium service. The autonomous products broadly leverage a variety of analytics and machine learning tools.