Forge Retail Pulse: A sneak peek into circular shopping, headless commerce, donation-driven marketing, and at-purchase moment
Forge Retail Pulse: A sneak peek into circular shopping, headless commerce, donation-driven marketing, and at-purchase moment
Greetings Pulse subscribers!
So much to know, so little time. Here’s the agenda:
The rapid growth of the circular economy
Getting paid from anywhere in the world
Turning discounts into donations to increase profits and help charities
Buy-now-pay-later is having a moment
Why customer success is as important as customer acquisition
Let’s dive right in.
Startup Deals
Branded Recommerce | Circular shopping is becoming a big business. Instead of clothes going from - store, to consumer, to landfill, - items get a second (or third) life by circling back into use on the resale market, increasing sustainability and helping the environment, all while saving consumers money. Luxury consignment sites like The Real Real and Poshmark are a growing business, but brands have no control over what happens inside, make no money off those resales, gain no consumer data, and can’t guarantee the articles offered are genuine. With new funding and a growing customer base, Trove continues to create and run branded recommerce sites, where brands buy and sell used items to consumers. By letting brands own their trade-in and resale channels, Trove enables them to stay closer to their customers, find new customers without sacrificing premium positioning, and control their brand while helping the environment and giving consumers a discount. Powering circular shopping through branded recommerce sites for lululemon, Patagonia, REI, Nordstrom, and Levi’s among others, Trove recently secured $77.5 million in Series D funding. Trove also presented at our Sustainability showcase, click here to hear how the startup is using environmentally conscious solutions to help meet global needs and consumer demands.
Headless Commerce | Headless commerce disconnects the front end of a website - (aka the storefront)- from the back end, where all the data lives. Right now, most commerce platforms are all-in-one, one-size-fits-all monoliths with limited customization available. Since everything is connected, customization and updates are difficult and extensive testing is needed before any changes can go live. By separating the front and back ends with headless commerce, retailers have more flexibility in content delivery, personalization, and the ability to change the front end quickly without compromising essential commerce components like checkout or security. Decoupling the two parts of a store implementation enables users to develop new features such as 1-click checkout rather than making cosmetic changes. Nacelle, a two-year-old L.A.-based startup offers headless commerce to help retailers deliver a superior online shopping experience. By giving retailers the power to update and maintain the back end without changing the front end, or vice versa, Nacelle improves the online shopping experience with sites that load faster, convert higher, and perform better across devices. Having grown its revenue 690% in the past year, Nacelle raised $50 million in Series B funding from Tiger Global.
Donation-Driven Marketing | As consumers become more socially conscious, retailers need to deliver more than great products and services to keep them coming back. What if retailers could show real purpose and impact in their communities, instead of just offering customers a discount? That’s the idea behind Givz, a four-year-old New York-based startup. This API-powered platform gives retailers a way to convert discounts into donations. Offering shoppers the option to pay full price and give their discount to a favorite charity, Givz has found a new way to target socially conscious consumers and help retailers move more product. According to Givz, the platform helps increase average order value by 25% and has the potential to earn up to 75% cost savings versus discount campaigns, all while sending thousands of dollars to charities. Givz has accumulated more than 40,000 individual users and driven more than $1 million to 1,100 charities through customers like H&M, MaxMara, Tom Brady’s TB12, and Seedlip. Givz recently raised $3 million in seed funding.
Theme Exploration: At-Purchase Moment
The checkout flow is where items in a cart cross the finish line and become actual purchases. Considering how crucial this step is, it’s surprising the experience today is still highly manual and full of friction (e.g. account creation requirements, payment security concerns). It’s estimated that 70% of shoppers drop out at checkout, and cart abandonment represents a $4 trillion problem globally. For merchants, losing a customer at the final checkout step is tragic, considering all the marketing dollars already spent to not only attract the customer but also in building up the intent to purchase.
1-Click Checkout | When it comes to accelerating the checkout process, it doesn’t get much faster than 1-click. While many sites offer an in-house 1-click checkout option, Fast gives consumers the same utility on sites across the web. Fast eliminates the need for consumers to enter a username or password by tracking users across sites and devices using cookies, IP addresses, and their email addresses, eliminating hurdles between buyers and what they want. For sellers, Fast helps increase sales, boost conversions, and protect against fraud chargebacks with its Zero Fraud Guarantee. With $124 million in funding, Fast has started rolling out to the 60,000 merchants on Stripe’s platform and hopes to spread 1-click checkout all the way across the web.
Payments | With online shopping, anyone, anywhere in the world, can find your store and potentially make a purchase as long as you accept their currency. Checkout.com provides the fastest, most reliable payments in more than 150 currencies from around the world. With in-country acquiring, world-class fraud filters, and reporting, all through one API, payments are streamlined and can evolve with your business. In addition, Checkout.com increases conversions, creates a frictionless customer experience, and lowers costs by reducing fees on its unified API. Accepting all major international credit and debit cards, as well as popular alternative and local payments, Checkout.com ensures retailers get paid, wherever their customers may be.
POS Financing | Buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) is having a serious moment right now. While each platform has a unique spin on the concept, the basic idea is that, instead of the customer paying for a purchase upfront in one lump sum, these startups break the payments up over weeks or months, with no hidden fees and 0% financing for many purchases. For retailers, BNPL platforms can help increase customer awareness, consideration, and conversion. Affirm just had its IPO and announced a partnership with Amazon to let customers pay for products that cost more than $50 in monthly installments. Afterpay was recently purchased by Square for $29 billion in one of the biggest fintech stories of the year. Additionally, Klarna has partnered with retailers like Macy’s, H&M, and Sephora to offer BNPL online and in their brick-and-mortar stores. How this plays out in the long term remains to be seen, but giving consumers the option to budget for purchases of any size is suddenly everywhere.
Essential Industry Reads
While the toolbox for drawing in customers has exploded in recent years, the same can’t be said for keeping current customers. In this article, Cathy Gao at Sapphire Ventures shows how customer success tracks with company growth -- in theory and in practice -- and makes the case that new technologies are needed to improve this critical, but often overlooked, side of the business.
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