Forge Retail Pulse: A sneak peek into e-commerce APIs, enterprise marketplace, influencer marketing, and pre-purchase
Greetings Pulse Subscribers!
We’re fast approaching the holiday season, but before it gets too hectic, let’s break a few things down. Here’s the agenda:
“Pipeline” vs. “platform” e-commerce models
The origins and future of livestream shopping
How best to communicate with consumers? Don’t call, text
Why raising the minimum wage isn’t winning back retail workers
Ready? Let's go.
Startup Deals
E-commerce APIs | APIs, application programming interfaces, are the glue that holds e-commerce sites together by connecting data across different systems in a site. As e-commerce has become an integral piece of every retailer's strategy, companies with the API’s to help them compete are growing quickly. Commercetools, a 15-year-old Munich based developer of over 300 e-commerce APIs, allows users to build customized-payment, checkout, social commerce, marketplace and other solutions. With a focus on larger retailers (generally over $100 million a year in sales) and their specific needs in building digital commerce solutions, Commercetools raised $140 million in Series C financing led by Accel and leaped from a valuation of $300 million in October 2019 to a valuation of $1.9 billion earlier this month.
Enterprise Marketplace Platform | We all know e-commerce has changed the face of retail in the last decade, but less well-known is how e-commerce itself has changed. E-commerce was once dominated by the “pipeline” model, in which retailers simply set up shop and sold their goods to consumers. Today, the “platform” model has taken over. The platform model enables the creation of enterprise marketplaces where sellers and buyers are connected to find everything they need, not just what’s in the warehouse. These marketplaces accounted for 62% of global e-commerce sales in 2020. Mirakl offers the only software-as-a-service platform that empowers both B2B and B2C organizations to launch and grow an enterprise marketplace at scale within their online stores. Powering 300-plus marketplaces for clients including Best Buy, HPE, and Kroger, Mirakl shared their marketplace insights in our Showcase earlier this year. Mirakl raised $555 million in a Series E funding round for a $3.5 billion post-money valuation.
Influencer Marketing Platform | As the creator economy has boomed and made stars out of influencers, brands and retailers have become eager to partner with these new celebrities and the audiences they captivate. CreatorIQ offers a software solution that takes a modern and scalable approach to influencer marketing. By connecting brands with the right influencers and allowing teams to collaborate on a single system of record, CreatorIQ streamlines influencer campaign creation. With analytics and reporting to prove ROI with a complete view of campaign performance, businesses can easily see if their products are connecting with audiences in real time. Trusted by brands including Disney, Mattel, Bang & Olufsen, AB InBev, Unilever, and Ipsy, CreatorIQ raised $40 million in a Series D funding round, bringing their total capital to over $80 million.
Theme Exploration: Pre-purchase
The online shopping journey is much bigger than the moment of sale. Improving the pre-purchase experience not only helps boost online conversion, but can influence offline sales as well. By making the online shopping experience more social and interactive, retailers can maximize pre-purchase. Through livestreaming, optimization, intuitive search, AI-powered discovery, personalized recommendations, and communication on the customers' terms, these startups are helping retailers transform the pre-purchase experience.
Livestream Shopping | Remember how addictive watching the Home Shopping Network could be? Well, the idea of shopping live has gone digital and is more captivating than ever before. With roots in mid-2010’s China, livestream shopping began when influencers would take their fans to far-flung boutiques and livestream their experience. However, more than just showing exotic locations, they gave their audience the opportunity to buy products not available in China. Since then, livestream shopping has exploded, with Fortune calling it “the next big thing in retail.” Two startups making waves in this new space are NTWRK and Whatnot. NTWRKoffers daily livestream episodes with creators, exclusive product drops from big-name brands and artists, digital events, musical performances and more. Whatnot is a crowd-sourced livestream shopping platform where anyone with great items, from baseball cards to collectibles to comics and more, can host live sales or even conduct auctions for unique products. Giving a global audience unprecedented access to otherwise unobtainable goods, livestream shopping is online shopping, reinvented.
Search, Discovery, and Personalization | Fast and easy search is crucial for any online retailer. Making it intuitive and personalized takes the customer experience to another level. Syteoffers a product discovery platform that uses visual AI and real-time behavioral data to predict the products most likely to convert for each shopper. The Syte visual AI can “see” and catalog every part of an image, so shoppers can select and explore anything that catches their eye, not just what they searched for. It can also understand the details of an individual shopper's aesthetic, allowing for hyper-personalized search results, helping to boost conversion and increase average order value by ensuring shoppers find exactly what they’re looking for. Current clients include Galeries Lafayette, Prada, C&A, De Beers, Shane Co, and Tommy Hilfiger.
SMS Marketing | How do most of us communicate these days? We don’t call, we text. Now, Attentive is getting businesses to do the same. By meeting consumers where they live, on their phones, and how they want, through text, Attentive creates a comprehensive text message marketing solution for modern e-commerce brands. Through timely, relevant, and immersive two-way texts, Attentive creates engaging touchpoints at every stage in the customer journey. With customers that include CB2, Urban Outfitters, Michaels, and Supergoop!, Attentive claims a 99% open rate to drive an average of 20.5% of total online revenue. With personalized interactions through text, Attentive could represent the future of B2C communications.
Essential Industry Reads
In early 2021, with a new face in the White House, the government promoting an economic rebound, and vaccines on the way, it seemed as if COVID-19 would soon be a distant memory and retail would come roaring back. However, things have not gone according to plan. With vaccine hesitancy, resistance to mask wearing, and the Delta variant surging through the country, what might have been a great comeback story for the industry is still extremely uncertain. Over at Retail Dive's The Backroom podcast, senior reporters Ben Unglesbee and Daphne Howland discuss what these developments mean for the industry today and how they’ll affect us all as we roll into the holiday season.
With US retail staff levels down 300,000 people from before the pandemic and the holiday season fast approaching, retailers across the board are increasingly desperate to hire additional staff. Many, like CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart, have raised their minimum wage to attract new employees, but workers are simply not responding. At Retail Dive, David Ritter and Conor Gaffney look into why a simple bump in pay isn’t enough to bring modern employees back to work. They also explore how retailers can adopt a more holistic approach to the employee value proposition to find success in recruiting and hiring the next generation of talent.
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See you in two weeks!