Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: New Digital River payment solution offers B2B buyers more flexibility and ease of purchase in the online checkout experience. MoneeMint selects TruNarrative, RegTech platform to facilitate a smooth digital-first experience for their customers. Leading independent mobile phone repair retailer teams up with eCommerce innovator. MobileBitz has signed a new eCommerce and app-commerce partnership with Vendi.
Adobe releases a new Composer Plugin with Magento 2.4.3 Release. Avionos’ new report demonstrates the acceleration of B2B buyer expectations. The report highlights the desire for consistent and quick innovation from suppliers to win customer loyalty post-pandemic. The UK has 100 UK tech companies valued at $1bn or more, according to data from Dealroom and Tech Nation. Elavon is offering a Transaction Risk Analysis (TRA) solution to help eCommerce businesses thrive by reducing online cart abandonment while preventing fraud. Copado expands its Salesforce DevOps solution to any SaaS platform, including a new low-code experience, additional security, and open connectivity. Invisibly launched a data control platform that lets people license and monetize personal data
Digital River and TreviPay partner with Lenovo to offer with new payment options
Digital River has announced its innovative payment solution with TreviPay is now live on Lenovo in the UK, Ireland, Germany and France. The solution gives Lenovo’s B2B customers a new, flexible purchasing experience to better manage cashflow and reduce friction with buyers.
TreviPay is enabled through Digital River’s Global Seller Services. It provides B2B brands with a competitive edge by offering seamless eCommerce check-out options for buyers to pay on their preferred terms. With TreviPay, buyers receive an extension of net terms and invoicing at checkout on Lenovo’s online stores. The technology gives Lenovo’s B2B customers a streamlined, consumer-like purchasing experience proven to increase conversion rates and cement brand loyalty.
Ethical bank selects TruNarrative to facilitate digital-first experience for customers
TruNarrative announced a partnership with the UK’s first ethical digital banking platform, MoneeMint. The company is a London based FinTech. It provides customer onboarding and transaction monitoring solution with a focus on providing socially responsible finance to millennials in the UK and Europe.
MoneeMint aims to be Europe’s first ethical digital bank, MoneeMint will provide their customers with transparent, fair, mobile banking, through a digital-first experience. Initially delivering range of prepaid products and services, MoneeMint’s relationship with Railsbank allows them to issue pre-paid Mastercard, providing a digital pre-paid account, international money transfer services and many more products that MoneeMint will launch in the future.
The TruNarrative platform will enable MoneeMint to deliver a smooth and compliant onboarding and transactional risk strategy. TruNarrative will deliver MoneeMint access to a full suite of customer onboarding and verification technology, including automated; identity verification, fraud prevention and ongoing risk monitoring.
Within the TruNarrative platform’s no-code interface, MoneeMint will be able to adapt its onboarding and transactional risk monitoring strategies to quickly react to market, regulatory & fraud trend changes, mitigating risk and streamlining its customer’s experience.
TruNarrative will provide MoneeMint with customer behaviour and transactional monitoring, delivering visibility over every transaction and interaction. This gives MoneeMint the ability to efficiently make customer acquisition and business risk decisions.
Through the TruNarrative platform, MoneeMint will gain access to a full case management system for manual review and referrals. Providing a single view of customers whilst facilitating customer acquisition and relieving pressure on referral management teams.
Mobileblitz gets eCommerce powerup with Vendi deal
MobileBitz, an 80-shop UK tech repair specialist and accessories retailer, has signed a new eCommerce and app-commerce partnership with Vendi. The partnership will give it access to new online consumers and enable it to transact through Vendi’s online platforms. There has been a severe drop in UK High Street footfall and a shift to online shopping. In February 2021 more than one in three UK retail sales took place online, a record high. Vendi has seen online demand soar for buying and selling new and used mobile phones, tablets and more on its peer-to-peer digital marketplace. Now MobileBitz offers Vendi shoppers a way to restore their damaged gadgets to their former glory for sale or to keep for longer, as well as access to the retailer’s vast accessories range.
Adobe releases new Composer plugin with Magento 2.4.3 release
To minimise a security vulnerability known as dependency confusion, the Adobe Commerce 2.4.3 release package will include a new composer plugin to perform integrity checks during installation.
Adobe and extension developers frequently use private and public composer package repositories to deliver code to Adobe Commerce and Magento open-source merchants. While Composer allows for a convenient experience, it can introduce certain limitations and occasional risks.
Adobe audits the private composer package repository at repo.magento.com, including performing a malware scan and package upload validation. However, it is possible for a malicious user to claim an unused namespace on the public package repository at packagist.org and upload a malicious code package. This code can then be delivered to merchants’ Commerce instances using a method referred to as “dependency confusion.” The plugin is currently available to both Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source merchants on the Magento GitHub.
The plugin performs two checks and throws an exception when:
- Private repos cannot be reached. The plugin sends a request for the repo that is being referenced to see if it can be reached.
- A package is present in private repos and Packagist (public repository) simultaneously, and the version of the package that satisfies the requirement from the public repo is higher.
Adobe will release the new composer plugin in Adobe Commerce 2.4.3 on August 10. The plugin will also be integrated into the Extension Quality Program checks. EQP checks run after the 2.4.3 release will require that no exception be generated by the composer plugin conditions to avoid EQP failure.
Avionos publishes B2B commerce report
90% of B2B buyers will turn to a competitor if a supplier’s digital channel does not meet its needs. Avionos has released its fourth annual B2B commerce report, “No More Excuses: The Time for B2B Digital Transformation is Now.” The report highlights the impact of the pandemic on the acceleration of B2B organisations’ digital transformation. It also explores how it raised buyer expectations for eCommerce experiences.
The report was based on a survey of 150 B2B buyers. These came from manufacturing, financial services and consumer packaged goods (CPG) with over $250 million in annual revenue. The study revealed 90% of B2B buyers would turn to a competitor if a supplier’s digital channel couldn’t keep up with their needs. This is up from 88% in 2020. Suppliers cannot afford to deliver inferior eCommerce experiences, especially when it comes to frustrations around product specifications and configurations.
The 2021 B2B Buyer Report uncovered buyers’ own digital transformations in their personal lives over the course of the pandemic heightened their expectations for B2B digital experiences. Almost all (96%) buyers have made a purchase for their company online since March 2020, and 63% plan to make more than half of their purchases online in 2021. With no slow down in sight for online B2B buying, suppliers need to be strategic about how they build relationships and create experiences to stay competitive.
Key findings from the report include:
- B2B buyers will pay a premium for great eCommerce experiences: 87% of buyers would pay more for a supplier with an excellent eCommerce portal, up from 81% in 2020 and 74% in 2019.
- Finding up-to-date product information is increasingly challenging: 48% of buyers said finding up-to-date product or service information was a top challenge when researching purchases, up from 19% in 2020.
- B2B suppliers’ technology doesn’t always integrate well with buyers’ technology: 42% of buyers said difficulty integrating suppliers’ tech solutions with their own solutions was a top pain point with supplier technology.
- B2B companies should embrace ongoing change: 68% of buyers strongly agree that B2B companies must become more comfortable with change to thrive in the post-pandemic era.
The UK hits milestone of 100 UK tech companies valued at $1bn+
The UK tech sector has 100 UK tech companies valued at $1bn or more, according to new data from Dealroom and Tech Nation.
The UK’s 100th tech unicorn, Tractable, an AI startup building computer vision tools, and a member of Tech Nation’s late-stage Future Fifty programme, recently announced a $60 million Series D raise, that takes the company’s valuation to $1 billion.
UK tech unicorn creation reflects the growth of the tech sector. In 2021, 13 UK tech unicorns have already been created, compared to 7 in the whole of 2020, and UK tech unicorn creation has increased by 127% since 2017, when the UK was home to 44 tech unicorns.
Collectively, the UK’s 100 tech unicorns have raised almost $32bn (€28.9bn) in VC investment, across multiple tech sub-sectors, including eCommerce, insurtech, and cyber security and energy. 34% of UK tech unicorns are fintech companies, 14% healthtech, 8% travel and transport tech, 5% foodtech and 4% gaming.
The UK joins the US and China as the only nations to have triple-digit tech unicorns globally. It is the first European country to reach 100 tech unicorns, with more tech unicorns than Germany (42), France (22) and the Netherlands (18) combined.
These high levels of tech unicorn creation reflect the continued strength of the UK tech sector. It reached record highs in the first half of this year. UK tech startups have raised €13.2bn ($14.5bn) since the start of the year. This beat the previous record of €8.1B ($8.9bn) (H2 2020).
Elavon introduces solution to help businesses reduce online cart abandonment
Elavon is offering a new Transaction Risk Analysis (TRA) solution to help eCommerce businesses thrive by reducing online cart abandonment while preventing fraud.
According to the Payments Optimisation: Maximise conversion, minimise fraud white paper by Elavon, in 2020, eCommerce grew by 27.6% worldwide. At the same time, the online card fraud rate leapt 55% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cart abandonment, where consumers drop out of online transactions during or before the checkout process, also rose sharply. In October 2020, 88% of online shoppers dropped out at the checkout, leaving billions behind in lost revenue. Cart abandonment amplified as more people shopped online during the pandemic. Another factor was the implementation of additional security checks in the payments process, known as Strong Customer Authentication (SCA).
SCA is an integral part of the Second Payments Services Directive (PSD2) across the European Economic Area (EEA). Businesses with a high volume of online sales are often hit hardest by the additional security requirements, making approvals slower. This latency and low acceptance can see almost one in five (19%) of payments lost.
Transaction Risk Analysis by Elavon can reduce the impact of these factors. TRA optimises the payments process helping provide a frictionless payment experience for consumers while preventing fraud by using real-time risk analysis and scoring.
If a transaction is deemed low risk and the Payment Service Provider (PSP) fraud rate is within certain thresholds, it can be exempted from the SCA process. In these cases, Elavon’s TRA solution instantly analyses abnormal spending, location, device/software, malware and behavioural patterns. With TRA, cardholders can experience a frictionless checkout experience with exempted transactions sent straight to authorisation.
Copado delivers multi-cloud devOps platform for enterprise SaaS
Copado, a DevOps platform has updated its platform for multi-cloud DevOps for enterprise SaaS and low-code development. The Summer 21 release delivers open connectivity to any SaaS platform, a universal CI/CD engine. It will support more than 12 clouds by the end of 2021, including Mulesoft, SAP and Veeva.
Increasingly, Copado is being deployed by enterprises that engage their customers across multiple clouds. They also require DevOps automation and alignment across these disparate platforms. While DevOps has transformed the way software is delivered it has been slow to be adopted across the major SaaS platforms where most of digital transformation is happening. With Summer 21, Copado now brings the speed, quality and business value of traditional DevOps to any enterprise cloud.
Gartner forecasts that 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies by 2025. This is up from less than 25% in 2020. Forrester says that low-code platforms help developers to build and deliver custom apps up to 10 times faster than traditional coding does. Copado is the first low-code DevOps platform to address the needs of enterprise SaaS customers who need to optimize and secure the delivery of transformation projects across large, non-technical teams.
2020 accelerated the digital imperative for every company. CIOs are using multiple cloud platforms to transform their businesses to meet executive expectations on speed, quality and visibility. Copado enables large digital teams to move fast, at scale, with the quality and governance required to safely connect and master a multi-cloud network.
Invisibly launches data control platform that monetizes personal data
Invisibly has released the beta release launch of their new data platform which enables people to take back control of their personal data and make money from it. Jim McKelvey, Invisibly CEO sees the launch as a crucial step at a pivotal time. One where data privacy and control are at the forefront of people’s attention.
The advertising industry and large tech companies profit from massive amounts of data on people they collect. They rarely directly let people know what data they have on them or what data is shared. With Invisibly’s new platform, people will be able to opt-in and choose exactly which data of theirs is shared. They can then license this data for advertisers to use while making a profit from it. Invisibly hopes to reshape data collection to a 100% consumer-consented data model. One that people can fully approve of, and provide a needed passive income stream for many people.
The Invisibly platform lets you earn points for different ways of linking or sharing data. Users can then exchange these for money, paid directly. When they link data, customers also get curated personalised offers, based on interests, allowing customers to make more money.
