Forge Retail Pulse: A sneak peek into fixing excess inventory
Greetings Pulse Subscribers!
Summer may be scorching, but nothing is as hot as the stories in this week's Pulse. Here’s the agenda:
Making excess inventory disappear
A newsletter with 10x the opens of an email
The “third cycle” of online resale
Spreadsheets! (Yes, spreadsheets!)
Let’s do this.
Startup Deals
Excess Inventory Solution | Retail loses $500 billion each year due to excess inventory, and it could be even worse this year due to over-ordering in response to supply chain issues. Keeping excess inventory on valuable shelf space while slashing prices (and margins) is hardly an ideal solution. What if retailers could just make that excess…disappear…and get paid for it? That’s the idea behind Ghost, a 1.5-year-old Los Angeles-based startup. Ghost offers a private marketplace where brands can discreetly sell their excess inventory to buyers worldwide. Allowing sellers to add restrictions on where their goods can be sold (not online or in certain countries, for example) and who can see the auction (excluding competitors), Ghost monetizes excess inventory without harming a brand’s reputation. In addition, Ghost provides retailers visibility into and data about where their goods are going, so they can order smarter in the future. Ghost recently closed a Series A funding round of $13 million, along with $7 million in debt, led by Union Square Ventures.
Social Commerce Marketplace | No one sells a product better than a satisfied customer, and that’s the whole idea behind Flip. Flip combines social discovery with e-commerce by helping users create 60-second videos about products they love, offering a TikTok-style solution many companies are moving toward. Viewers find these videos through a promoted feed or by searching for products or brands on the site. If a viewer wants to buy, Flip offers one-click checkout and same-day shipping to make for a seamless experience. Additionally, if a viewer wants to make videos of their own, they can monetize them via community engagement or shopper click-throughs. All partner brands have their own dashboards with insights into their brand performance, including sales data, order management, content engagement, content performance, and more, enabling them to receive instant feedback from a social community of shoppers reviewing their products. By connecting real consumers with each other, Flip is creating what CEO Noor Agha calls, “the beginning of the next era in e-commerce.” Flip recently raised $60 million in Series B funding for a valuation of $500 million.
Conversational Commerce | Most retailers are already familiar with conversational commerce: using live chats, messaging apps, chatbots, voice assistants, and more to help customers, win loyalty, and convert sales. Charles, a Berlin-based startup, offers a complete, end-to-end text-based conversational commerce product focused on the WhatsApp platform. What Charles has that other conversational commerce startups don’t is the ability to send newsletters through chat. While many branded email newsletters and promotions end up unopened or in a spam folder, Charles offers businesses a way to cut through to consumers. In fact, its WhatsApp newsletters have a 10x higher opening rate than email. With content designed for the world’s most popular messaging app, Charles helps retailers showcase discounts, special offers, product announcements, or video messages through newsletters that otherwise would be ignored. Charles recently raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Salesforce Ventures.
Digital Experience Analytics | There are a lot of startups out there that help companies capture every move a customer makes in the digital world. However, having that information is far from understanding it or putting it to good use. Using an AI-powered engine to analyze trillions of digital customer interactions, Contentsquare helps businesses uncover critical insights that provide the power to create better digital experiences for customers and drive greater business growth. By going beyond traditional analytics, Contentsquare empowers brands with an unprecedented understanding of their customers' experience on websites and apps. More than just stats, Contentsquare can identify user experience (UX) and tech issues that lower customer satisfaction (and cart size), help discover new areas for improving revenue, prioritize potential actions based on business impact, and more. With intuitive visual reporting and metrics anyone can understand, Contentsquare offers every business access to actionable data insights and a deeper understanding of their customers’ wants and needs. Contentsquare recently raised $400 million in Series F funding with a $5.6 billion valuation.
Essential Industry Reads
Online resale, aka re-commerce, has come a long way. What started as people selling their stuff on sites like Craigslist has grown into a sub-industry of its own. Now, re-commerce sites like ThredUp and Poshmark are household names, and brands as diverse as Apple, Joybird, Nike, and Farfetch all have re-commerce offerings. In addition, there are white-label re-commerce companies like Trove (featured in our Sustainable Retail Revolution webinar) that offer customers like Lululemon and Patagonia the ability to provide a re-commerce solution for their customers without having to do so in-house. In this insightful read, Jason Bornstein at Forerunner Ventures looks at the history of re-commerce, its current limits, and where it could go next.
Read more about the “third cycle” of online resale here: https://atbain.co/ThirdCycle
“You’re telling me there’s an essential read about spreadsheets? SPREADSHEETS?!?” Yes. Yes, we are. In this genuinely interesting piece, the team at Sapphire Ventures takes a quick dive into the history of spreadsheets and then goes deep into the next big thing: connected spreadsheets. In a nutshell, connected spreadsheets allow retailers to securely, simply, and smartly share data across a business, which allows for greater collaboration on analyses and reports, but that’s only the beginning. Exploring the incredible capabilities of these next-generation spreadsheets as well as providing a guide about how to know when a business might be ready to make the jump, this read is essential for anyone who uses spreadsheets. As a business item, you might think nothing is as boring as a spreadsheet, but when you learn what’s coming and how it could impact your business, not just in the future, but right now, you might just change your tune.
Read about connected spreadsheets here: https://atbain.co/ConnectedSpreadsheet
If you enjoyed reading this edition of Retail Pulse, please subscribe below to receive our future editions and early invitations to our Forge Retail Showcase events.
See you in two weeks!