This holiday season, Amazon's little helper is an orange, 320-pound robot called Kiva.

With the meteoric rise of both e-commerce and express shipping across China, a distribution relationship between Alibaba and SF Express seems to be a natural fit. However, with SF Express recently showing interest in developing its own e-commerce businesses, Alibaba may consider SF Express as more of a competitor, making China Postal Airlines a more comfortable distribution option.

Online sales are predicted to be about $300bn this year, rise to $335bn next year and be worth $512bn by 2020, according to research from FTI Consulting Inc.

In which we hear more insightful predictions about the coming year and beyond from Bay Area supply-chain executives.

Returned merchandise, which retailers have to discount or even dump, end up costing U.S. merchants as much as $20bn a year, and are a "ticking time bomb" that threatens retailers' profitability. To avoid that blowup, merchants are turning to new technologies.

JDA Software Group Inc. has developed new capabilities for its Intelligent Fulfillment Suite, formerly known as Distribution Centric Supply Chain.

Deliv, a provider of same-day delivery on behalf of retailers, is expanding its service area with the addition of four urban centers: Seattle, Houston, northern New Jersey and Washington, D.C.

Retail is still under attack and consequently the security effectiveness of retail organizations as a whole has continued to decline over the past year. However, almost 75 percent of retailers that experienced a data breach in the last year have improved their security effectiveness since the point of their breach, while a third of the breached retailers link back to compromises via third-party vendors.