BorderX Lab, which was founded in 2014 by three former Google computer scientists, has raised $20 million in a financing round led by Kleiner Perkins. BorderX Lab offers the Beyond App mobile marketplace solution to facilitate cross-border e-commerce for global brands and merchants seeking access to the burgeoning Chinese consumer market. Beyond App is available for Android and iOS.

Google has launched Subscribe with Google and several other journalism initiatives. Subscribe with Google lets consumers store credit card information with Google, which can be used to access participating publishers' subscription services. Google takes care of billing, payment security and account management. Subscribe with Google soon will be available for use with several launch partners.

Checking out is the heart and soul of the e-commerce experience. When it goes well, you've got happy customers who are likely to return. "Checkout is not only key to driving revenue -- it's key to user satisfaction, order size and retention," said Zephrin Lasker, head of ecommerce at Viber. "A good process can allow for optimal conversion, data collection and speed."

Google Pay launched last week, becoming the latest entry in the world of master-brand confusion. The new Google Pay combines features of Android Pay and Google Wallet, brands that each had different brand relationships with customers. That means the master brand message, which should be simple and clean, and which Google should have been building all along, is shaky at best.

FutureProof Retail aims to redefine the in-store checkout experience. "From the consumer point of view, when you go shopping you have people who help you and service you, and you walk away happy," said President Di Di Chan. "What we're doing is bringing the online offline, to centralize that service. It's not just the top VIP shopper who can enjoy that experience -- everyone can."

Google has launched its long-anticipated Google Pay app, which combines the features of the former Android Pay and Google Wallet into one platform, with new benefits designed to accelerate mobile payment use and retailer participation. The change, first announced last month, represents a bid to expand the use of Google's growing ecosystem to take on both Apple and Amazon in the e-commerce space.

Amazon has begun offering same-day delivery of grocery items from Whole Foods Market to Prime members in four select markets. For a minimum order of $35, Prime members get free two-hour delivery between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. One-hour delivery is available for a $7.99 fee. Among the items customers can order for delivery are fresh produce, meat and seafood; flowers; and some alcoholic beverages.

When all goes well, the customer journey "ends with buying a product," said Chemi Katz, CEO of Namogoo. "Hijacking interferes with the customer's journey. It can be a pop-up that the company didn't put there, or something that will lead a customer out of the website. It's any interference that doesn't come from the e-commerce business itself, but from a third party."

Google believes that all the important consumer buying decisions happen in a brief flash of time. Understanding and responding to customer needs in those all-important, tiny moments is key to successful marketing, the company says. Specifically, they are the exact moments when people turn to a device because they want one or more of four things: to know, do, go or buy. Google has built a new marketing model around "micro-moments."

Product photos are a vital part of e-commerce. Because they provide the central connection between customers and products, photos can make or break an e-commerce business. "You can have a great looking website and user interface, but if you don't have great product photos it is like driving a Mercedes with a flat," said Sam Werkmeister, CEO of ProductPhoto.com.

The mushrooming popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home will fuel e-commerce in the coming year. "You're going to have a whole new frontier of commerce space driven through voice and brand recognition," said Michael Levine, marketing vice president at Photon. "It's going to be a different type of playing field for these brands.

Moves that allowed major e-commerce players to jockey for position both off and on the Internet made headlines in 2017. "The year was a triumph for market leaders," said Mike Comstock, a senior adviser at GrandCanals. "Leading companies like Amazon, Target and Walmart just got stronger, as they have the resources to either build or buy whatever they need to win."

One thing the latest holiday sales season made crystal clear is that mobile commerce is on the rise. On Cyber Monday, mobile shopping totaled 47.4 percent of visits to retailers' websites, according to Adobe. However, etailers could do much more to milk the mobile shopping cow. "Traditional mobile sites aren't designed for the way people want to discover new products," said Qubit CEO Graham Cooke.

Let's face it: Your website is central to your e-commerce business. Upgrading your website is one of the most important things you can do to bring in new customers and sell more products. Sometimes, though, it's difficult to know exactly how to improve your site. To help you out with that dilemma, here are three ways to refresh your website and boost your business without breaking the bank.

Online sales hit a new record of $6.59 billion on Cyber Monday -- a 17 percent increase from last year's sales for the day -- making it the largest online shopping day in history, based on Adobe Analytics data. Mobile shopping also broke records, starting with the channel's first-ever $2 billion sales day. Smartphone shopping accounted for more than 21 percent of e-commerce revenue.

A popular technique used by website operators to observe the keystrokes, mouse movements and scrolling behavior of visitors on Web pages is fraught with risk. The technique offered by a number of service providers uses scripts to capture the activity of a visitor on a Web page, store it on the provider's servers, and play it back on demand for a website's operators.

U.S. retailers crossed a historic new threshold over Thanksgiving weekend as consumers set new records for e-commerce activity and embraced mobile shopping like never before. The record-breaking $5.03 billion spent online on Black Friday -- a 17 percent increase -- was in line with expectations. Consumers spent about $43.42 billion on e-commerce holiday shopping from Nov. 1 to Nov. 26.

A total of 164 million Americans, or 69 percent of the U.S. population, plan to shop Thanksgiving weekend, according to a new survey by the National Retail Federation. Upwards of 115 million people, or about 70 percent, plan to shop on Black Friday, the report shows, while 78 million plan to shop on Cyber Monday, 71 million on Small Business Saturday, and 32 million on Thanksgiving Day.

At least 145 million Americans were impacted by a data breach at Equifax that netted thieves personal information such as names, addresses, birthdates, Social Security Numbers and driver's license numbers. That pales in comparison to the earlier Yahoo breaches, which affected more than 1 billion accounts. However, those incidents may be just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Amazon recently began reducing prices on merchandise sold by third-party sellers, ratcheting up its market share competition with discount stores, including Walmart. The company has started to display a new tag, "Discount Provided by Amazon." Price cuts so far have been a little less than 10 percent on goods sold by independent retailers. Amazon has been absorbing the losses itself.

Black Friday falls on Nov. 23 this year, but retailers already have begun to promote the huge discounts they plan to offer in its name. Some deals already are available to shoppers. Although Cyber Monday has grown in significance, Black Friday "is still significant as the kickoff to the holiday season," said Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Google on Monday rolled out an online payment service that's designed to accelerate the online checkout process. While the new offering isn't quite Amazon One-Click, it will eliminate many of the annoying steps that can slow down the online purchase process and often result in abandoned shopping carts. Pay with Google uses address and credit or debit card information users provide to Google to speed them through checkout.

PayPal has announced the immediate availability of its peer-to-peer payment service on Facebook Messenger, making it easy to exchange money between friends and family. PayPal also introduced its first-ever customer service bot. Payments can be made in Messenger by pressing the blue plus icon when composing a message and then tapping the green payments button.

Most retailers don't have the in-store technology to view customer information across various touchpoints, suggests a new study from Kibo. Fifty-eight percent of retailers who participated in the study, released last Thursday, acknowledged they did not have that capability. The study was based on questions posed to 115 retail executives during the Future Stores 2017 conference.

Shopping online can feel a bit impersonal. It's all about looking at screens and filling virtual carts, and not so much about having a rich experience. Many consumers long for just that kind of experience -- one that's similar to walking into a store, looking at products, talking with an associate, and perhaps ultimately making a purchase. This is where e-commerce personalization tech comes in.

Omnichannel support and communications are becoming essential for brands, as consumers' increasing use of mobile devices to make purchases and access content fuels their demand to be able to connect with companies when and how they want. However, brands lack the necessary expertise and infrastructure, and are turning to mobile network operators, or MNOs, to acquire omnichannel capabilities.

Walmart and Google, two of Amazon's biggest rivals, on Wednesday announced a partnership that will let customers use Google's Home speaker and a number of voice-assisted mobile devices to shop online at Walmart. Their mutual goal is to eat away at Amazon's dominant share in the e-commerce shopping space and the smart speaker space, in order to curb the growth of its giant ecosystem.

The omnichannel approach has become a byword in customer service, but retailers need to do more to make it happen, based on a recent study. Researchers tested 57 metrics across desktop, mobile and in-store buying touchpoints to evaluate the end-to-end omnichannel experience at 30 popular and growing retailers. Here's the problem: E-commerce absolutely is killing brick-and-mortar stores.

Voice computing is replacing the graphical user interface, Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association, said early this year at CES. Digital assistants will be integrated into many household objects, he noted. About 5 million voice-activated digital voice products had been sold as of January, and Bravac estimated 5 million more would be sold this year.

Retailers have been focusing on technologies to measure and assess customer response, and have been using the data they produce to drive e-commerce decisions, suggests a study of 136 enterprise retailers. Enterprise retailers with at least $500 million in annual revenues participated in the study, which was a joint effort of Adam Software, an Aprimo company; WBR Digital; and ChannelAdvisor.