Forge Retail Pulse: A sneak peek into business intelligence search, customer marketing platform, branded payments, and e-commerce infrastructure
Greetings, Pulse Subscribers!
With the holiday season in full swing, we want to press pause and give you a rundown of how the 2021 season is shaping up. But first, let’s look at:
Creating a more fact-driven world with data
The end of branded credit cards?
The importance of infrastructure
Is TBYB the next BNPL?
And as promised, our 2021 Holiday Forecast, including how to grow this year, and beyond.
Ready? Let’s go!
Startup Deals
Business Intelligence Search | Recently, the analytics ecosystem has undergone a major shift as more companies move their data to the cloud. The modern data stack lets businesses extract more insight and value from their data than ever before, and ThoughtSpot, a Palo Alto-based startup, is leading the way. ThoughtSpot offers companies an easy way to leverage cloud data by allowing anyone in a company to simply search, access, and analyze billions of rows of data, from any source, in seconds. With tools to unify and leverage data from online sales, social media conversations, inventory sales, in-store sensors, and more, ThoughtSpot helps businesses to create actionable insights based on facts. That’s even their mission statement: “To create a more fact-driven world.” For example, Walmart is using ThoughSpot to gain visibility into SKU-level insights across tens of billions of rows, enabling the retailers to improve dynamic pricing, optimize markdowns, and increase inventory turns. With other customers including Daimler, Hulu, and Nasdaq, ThoughtSpot raised $100 million in a Series F funding round for a valuation of $4.2 billion.
Customer Marketing Platform | Advances in customer relationship management (CRM) promise personalization for every customer, but what shows up in their inbox often falls short of expectations. Ometria, an eight-year-old London-based startup, is hoping to close that gap. By combining the capabilities of a customer data platform with a cross-channel marketing platform and algorithms trained on over 20 billion retail customer touchpoints, Ometria allows businesses to elevate the customer journey. With unified, comprehensive customer profiles, Ometria uses AI to build sophisticated audience segments and leverage predictive customer insight for personalized cross-channel campaigns. The startup also designs, executes, and optimizes the entire customer journey across email, mobile, on-site, social, direct mail, and more, claiming a 2x CRM growth rate and an 82% annual increase in CRM revenue. With clients including Steve Madden, Aden + Anais, Olivela, and Pangaia, Ometria raised $40 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total funding to over $75 million.
Branded Payments and Rewards | Branded credit cards are great for encouraging repeat business and rewarding customer loyalty. However, they’re still credit cards, which means that businesses lose up to 2.9% plus $0.30 for every transaction, and that’s not great. Imprint offers a smarter way. With branded cards that link directly to a customer's bank (much like Venmo), Imprint allows businesses to power instant payments at a fraction of the cost of credit cards. In addition, consumers don’t have to undergo a credit check or pay interest and fees. To incentivize customers to use this lower-cost option, Imprint offers an easy-integration rewards product that powers store credit, early access, and cause-based giving. These incentives are clearly working, as Imprint claims +43% annual spend per customer, +28% more frequent shopping, and +15% average order value. Imprint raised $38 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Stripe.
Theme Exploration: E-commerce Infrastructure
Infrastructure is what makes e-commerce function. The most beautiful website in the world won’t do a business any good if it doesn’t work the way it should. Luckily, the startups below offer elegant UI and stable and scalable infrastructure that lets retailers update their websites without compromising the backend, take payments in nearly any form, and unify strategy and management in one simple platform.
Drag-and-Drop Headless E-commerce | Headless e-commerce separates the user storefront, aka the website, from the database that drives it. This allows for easy storefront edits and seamless updates without interfering with back-end architecture. Fabric is the only headless commerce platform that combines this utility with the simplicity of drag-and-drop configuration, giving businesses the power to create rich, modern customer experiences without the need for a large dev team. Offering out-of-the-box functionality and limitless customization, along with built-in SEO and analytics, Fabric helps customers like GNC, Restoration Hardware, and Crate&Barrel ship new storefronts as fast as they ship their products.
Payments Platform | If there’s one thing all retailers have in common, it’s that they need to get paid. Making it as easy as possible for customers to make payments smooths out the checkout process and creates more satisfied customers. With Mollie, businesses can begin accepting online payments in 15 minutes via all the leading payment methods including credit cards, ApplePay, PayPal, Klarna, crypto, and more. Thanks to its easy-to-implement process for integrating payments into a site or app, over 110,000 businesses across Europe trust Mollie to offer customers the ability to pay how they want to pay, so the business can get paid.
Digital Commerce Platform | As much as digital commerce has been a boon for retail over the past few years, it’s also presented unexpected growing pains. Traditional distribution channels have shifted, and with the rise of social networks, where anything can go viral, marketing no longer sticks to regional boundaries. Businesses are having to rethink how they can most effectively sell their products, and VTEX is here to help. Offering the ability to build or migrate online stores, integrate orders from all channels, or expand product offering by adding third-party sellers, VTEX combines commerce, marketplace, and order management in a single platform to unlock new revenue streams. With its all-in-one enterprise digital commerce platform, VTEX provides strategies and solutions that help businesses like Walmart, AB InBev, Sony, Coca-Cola, and Nestlé get the most out of e-commerce while managing their strategy in a single platform.
Essential Industry Reads
Just a few years ago, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) was an option few companies offered and many considered beneath them. Now, it's everywhere with three $15 billion+ companies (Affirm, Afterpay, and Klarna) leading the charge. Since BNPL has become a must for most businesses, Jason Bornstein at Forerunner Ventures asks: Could try-before-you-buy (TBYB) be the next BNPL? Looking at the shift to digital commerce and the success of companies like Warby Parker that pioneered online TBYB, Bornstein makes a strong case for what could be the next major innovation in retail.
Our 2021 Holiday Forecast is here! With all the news of supply chain disruptions and labor issues, retailers might think this holiday season is shaping up to be a bust, but happily, the data doesn’t bear that out. Bain's Aaron Cheris, Darrell Rigby, Julia Saxonov, and Suzanne Tager look at figures across the industry to give their forecast for the fourth quarter. They also take a deep dive into one sector poised to do particularly well: marketplaces. With specialty marketplaces gaining steam and category specialists making a splash, the team at Bain discusses the winning formula that makes these companies successful and offers insight on what other businesses can do to grow this season, and beyond.
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