Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: MACH Alliance has appointed Sonja Keer as its new president. Wunderkind’s partnership with Klaviyo to Drive Revenue, Email Conversion, and Revenue Growth with Robust Identification Capabilities for High-Converting Marketing Campaigns. B2B buyers want digital tools supported by human sales reps, industry webinar organised by Oro has reveals. Health food and wellness business Evolution Organics has selected Brightpearl to supercharge its operations as it enters its next stage of growth. CommerceHub has signed up Foot Locker Europe to a four-year agreement to help expand its digital footprint across eighteen European countries. DRUID introduces Oxygen, a new release designed to revolutionise the conversational automation space.
MACH Alliance appoints new president – Sonja Keerl
MACH Alliance, the group of independent tech companies dedicated to advocating for open, best-of-breed technology ecosystems appointed a new president. Sonja Keerl, co-founder and former Vice President of the Alliance has been appointed to a one-year term at the group. Former president Kelly Goetsch is moving into a newly-created chairman role upon the successful completion of his term.
The Alliance has grown from 11 members at launch to over 33 members over the past 12 months. In addition to more then a dozen dedicated ambassadors from Boston Consulting Group, Dawn Foods, Mars, Sephora and Sharper Image. The group’s member base spans North America, Europe and Asia and includes a who’s who of tech vendors.
Part of the MACH Alliance’s mission is to help digital leaders understand the benefits of the principle. So they can take those insights to the executive suite and make the case for MACH within their own enterprise. In this spirit, the organisation, which has grown to a $1M operating budget. It will be doubling its spend on webinars, education and in-person events during the second half of the year.
Wunderkind announces strategic integration with Klaviyo
Wunderkind has launched a strategic integration with Klaviyo, a leading customer data and marketing automation platform that delivers more personalized experiences across owned-marketing channels.
The strategic integration allows brands and retailers to leverage Wunderkind’s ability to scale eCommerce revenue through high-performing, one-to-one email sends. While keeping both marketing and triggered email sends in the Klaviyo platform. More than 100 mutual eCommerce customers will now be able to prioritise Wunderkind triggered messages within Klaviyo. It enables them to send a tailored message to the right person at the right time. This improves revenue per customer while consolidating email data in one place.
By leveraging both Wunderkind and the Klaviyo platform, leading online retailers like Andie Swim, UrbanStems, Tamara Mellon®, and Homage, have seen more than a 5.5X increase in triggered email revenue.
Experience is key to B2B eCommerce says Oro webinar and analyst report
Customer experience is emerging as a top driver of growth and brand differentiation for B2B eCommerce merchants in the post-pandemic world, industry experts from eCommerce pioneer Oro conclude in a newly released webinar. The webinar features global research and advisory leader Forrester. Enterprise buyers are expecting B2C-grade experiences across all stages of the purchasing journey, creating both challenges and opportunities for brands.
Delivering compelling B2B eCommerce experiences doesn’t mean doing away with sales reps, guest speaker, Forrester senior analyst Joe Cicman explains in the webinar. In fact, according to the 2020 Forrester report, Winning The New B2B Buyer, self-service eCommerce accounted for only 18% of B2B sales in 2019. This compared with 42% of sales that still required sales reps. Not all B2B products are ready for self-service buying. B2B buying committees requiring assistance from knowledgeable, experienced sales reps to make the right choices as they purchase B2B products.
Delivering hybrid experiences that allow buyers to self-educate by giving them instant access to salient information, but also to quickly and easily request support from human sales reps, requires a new approach to selling. The key, Cicman argues, is to “enable reps to be great through digital” by adopting robust and adaptable platforms that bring commerce, digital selling, and experience management under a single solution. That also provides the support that new B2B eCommerce sellers need to succeed.
The “Sales Enablement in Digital Commerce” webinar is available on-demand until August 18, 2021.
All natural supplement supplier gets a wellness boost from Brightpearl
Health food and wellness business Evolution Organics has selected Brightpearl to supercharge its operations as it enters its next stage of growth.
The health food retailer of cutting edge food supplements selected Brightpearl’s built for retail digital operations platform. The solution will provide it with the automation needed to cut back on order processing times as well as the inventory management capabilities needed to keep its customers fully stocked at all times.
The firm had initially opted for Microsoft Dynamics 365, but costly, time consuming issues with integrating the ERP system with its BigCommerce store meant that a rapid change was needed. Brightpearl’s rapid implementation times and simple, out of the box integration with BigCommerce gave Evolution Organics the speedy deployment and flexibility it was looking for.
In Brightpearl, Evolution Organics has a single source of truth for all of its operational needs, from stock management to financial reporting. With easily generated, real time reporting the firm will be able to optimise its stock levels. Brightpearl’s demand planning component will provide it with the data needed to accurately plan for the future.
CommerceHub wins contract with Foot Locker Europe to drive eCommerce growth
CommerceHub has signed up Foot Locker Europe to a four-year agreement to help expand its product assortment and create a more efficient supply chain for its Foot Locker and Sidestep brands across eighteen European countries.
“We are excited to be working with Foot Locker Europe to help them drive growth via drop ship as part of their digital expansion strategy,” said Philip Hall, Managing Director Europe, CommerceHub. “With access to CommerceHub’s drop-ship network, we are enabling their large global brands and emerging brands to offer more product assortment and selection and cost-effectively share inventory to maximize fulfilment.”
“At Foot Locker, we’re committed to enhancing the consumer experience across all of our platforms,” said Vijay Talwar, Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer, EMEA, Foot Locker. “Building partnerships, which drive growth, improve delivery, and create greater access to product are key to delivering on our vision of creating unrivaled experiences for our customer.”
DRUID launches Oxygen, a platform for building virtual assistants and chatbots
DRUID has introduced Oxygen, its latest technology release that promises to effectively support the conversational automation space. This is achieved by making AI-driven virtual assistants’ deployments dramatically faster and simpler for companies of any size. DRUID Oxygen enables an automated conversational experience design that makes it 90% faster to deploy a new chatbot for both employees and customers.
DRUID Oxygen also introduces a new, more straightforward way for clients to design their intelligent virtual assistant with the help of an intuitive graphic interface. Thus, the latest release allows for a 35% increase in chatbot relevance, as conversational experiences can be designed visually by dragging and dropping different conversational flows into one diagram, which clearly shows how the conversation with the bot would evolve. At the same time, this translates into an accurate response time of just 1 second and increased scalability, making the chatbot implementation equally fast for a multinational with distributed teams of thousands of people as well as for a small company with a dozen employees.
The accelerated demand for chatbot virtual assistants has prompted sustained substantial revenue increases for DRUID, at a rate of 580% YoY growth, as conversational AI automation implementation services generate five times more value for the network of implementation partners.
