Feed Items
Amazon is moving quickly to contain a new threat to its eCommerce dominance as AI-powered shopping bots begin to reshape how consumers discover and buy products online.
The company is blocking third-party artificial intelligence (AI) shopping tools from accessing its site even as it explores partnerships and builds its own AI-driven buying experiences, underscoring the high stakes for...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly embedding itself into the core decision-making systems of modern businesses, from pricing and marketing to supply chain management and customer targeting. As AI tools move from experimental add-ons to operational infrastructure, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are focusing on how algorithmic decision-making could reshape competition, sometimes in...
By year-end, one conclusion from PYMNTS Intelligence’s The Certainty Project series is hard to miss: Uncertainty rarely arrives as a single shock.
It compounds, as we saw this year, jumping from cyber risk to payment fraud to shifting trade rules. Then it shows up in the most practical places, like delayed tech rollouts, higher supplier prices, thinner margins and consumers trading...
If 2025 felt like the year the future stopped “arriving” and started showing up in production, you are not imagining it. In payments and commerce, the most important shifts rarely announce themselves with a single product launch. They surface in how executives describe their constraints, their adversaries and their non-negotiables. What follows is a guided tour through some of those moments...
The holiday shopping period compresses weeks of spending into days, multiplies the number of online interactions, and makes consumers and companies vulnerable to fraudsters.
That anxiety is not theoretical. PYMNTS reported in early December that 78% of shoppers worry about a holiday fraud surge. When the majority of consumers already expect trouble, it is a signal of how much seasonal...
For cryptocurrency markets, 2025 was a year that went full circle.
Digital assets are ending the year with nearly all of their gains over the past 12 months having been erased by market volatility.
However, focusing on crypto’s cyclical booms and busts misses the broader picture of the past year. The narrative of 2025 wasn’t one of out-and-out bullish price action or retail mania, or...
Retail in 2025 was defined less by a single breakthrough than by a set of pressures that forced retailers to get practical. Consumers kept shopping. But they did it with a sharper pencil, trading down where it made sense, leaning into promotions, and treating credit, rewards and installments as tools to manage budgets rather than as a blank check.
Across PYMNTS’ retail coverage this...
Looking for a travel-related business that’s actually booming during the year of COVID-19? It’s out on the water, in rented boats of every shape and size from kayaks to luxury yachts.
“We had our drop-off in April, and then come May we saw a very quick rebound, Bryan Petro, chief operating officer of boat rental and charter marketplace GetMyBoat, told PYMNTS. “From April [to August], we are...
In China, crypto over-the-counter (OTC) traders are being arrested in an attempt to crack down on illegal transactions, according to a report from CoinDesk.
Prominent OTC trader Zhao Dong, of crypto lending platform RenrenBit, was held up by police in the city of Hangzhou, the report says. Zhao has a prominent status among the community, and rumors online began to circulate. One poster relayed...
Two innovators approached a well-heeled investor asking for money. Their sales pitch was very convincing. They told this investor that their innovation was so incredibly cutting-edge that only the hopelessly uninformed would fail to recognize its value. The innovators said that they had picked him because he was smart and forward-thinking enough to see the potential. The investor, who prided...