Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: BigCommerce has acquired Feedonomics to help merchants increase cross-channel sales of products everywhere people shop online. TruNarrative and ieDigital have joined forces to facilitate digital transformation and provide cutting edge customer onboarding and monitoring processes. The partnership is expected to reduce account opening time to less than four minutes.
AKQA has joined the MACH Alliance. The company supports its missions for future-proofing technology and propel digital experiences with open and connected enterprise tech. 35% of online shoppers in the UK will only associate with ‘responsible’ brands says research from Empathy.co. SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder, an eCommerce software and digital merchandising company, have bought DotCom Partners.
BigCommerce buys Feedonomics
BigCommerce has acquired Feedonomics, a full-service data feed management platform. The company helps mid-market and enterprise merchants succeed on hundreds of advertising channels and marketplaces. Feedonomics ingests, unifies, enhances and syndicates product data, and syncs the order data back into existing systems to streamline operations.
The joint functionality will streamline merchant integrations with 100+ global marketplaces and advertising channels. This includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft Ads, Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Wish, Pinterest and Snapchat, among others
In the US, eCommerce channel ad spending is expected to surpass $41 billion by the end of 2024. This represents nearly 15% of all digital ad spend. Together, BigCommerce and Feedonomics will provide merchants with the ability to integrate back-end operations and sales, marketing and advertising channels. This is expected to drive higher ROAS, higher conversion and ultimately, higher GMV.
BigCommerce acquired the assets of Feedonomics for approximately $145 million, with approximately $80 million in cash paid at closing and up to $32.5 million to be paid at each of the first and second anniversaries of closing or upon the earlier achievement of certain milestones. BigCommerce may elect to make the anniversary payments partially or entirely in shares of its Series 1 common stock in lieu of cash.
TruNarrative and ieDigital partner to help banks and digitalise customer onboarding
ieDigital has partnered with TruNarrative to provide Banks and mutual societies access to ID verification, eKYC, AML and account monitoring technology. Banks, payment services and FinTechs trust the TruNarrative platform for compliance, customer onboarding and financial crime prevention.
Founded in 1986, ieDigital is a trusted technology provider to some of the UK’s leading financial institutions. ieDigital’s team of experts deliver its solution, Interact, to banks, building societies, consumer finance, motor finance and retail firms. The company facilitates digital transformation and improving customer experience. ieDigital has integrated TruNarrative’s technology to ensure businesses can access the tools needed for secure and compliant customer onboarding. Financial institutions will be able to access TruNarrative’s financial crime prevention, compliance and onboarding through the ieDigital platform.
The partnership delivers firms the ability to build bespoke and complex customer journeys in no-code cloud-based environments. This ensures secure, compliant, low friction customer onboarding and monitoring. Using ieDigital and TruNarrative’s technology banks and building societies will benefit from the latest in regtech and fintech innovation. This will support their digital transformation strategy and reduce account opening time to less than four minutes.
AKQA joins Mach Alliance
AKQA has joined the MACH Alliance, the group of independent tech companies dedicated to advocating for open, best-of-breed technology ecosystems. It supports the headless architecture and technology space and will now work alongside MACH Alliance members. It aims to bring awareness and education to the market around the benefit from open-tech ecosystems and composable enterprise technology.
The MACH Alliance was (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless) launched one year ago. It believes the common belief that modern software’s interoperability and open architecture will propel current and future digital experiences.
Nicolas Le Pallec, executive Technology Director, EMEA AKQA said, “Joining the MACH Alliance is an amazing opportunity for AKQA. We can help define the future of the headless martech model in collaborations with our partners. It is our chance to stand together for the tech architecture principles we have been advocating for years. API first, flexibility, evolutibility.”
“We are thrilled to welcome AKQA into the MACH Alliance”, says Sonja Keerl, President of the MACH Alliance. “AKQA has an amazing track record in helping brands to dream big and more importantly realising those big dreams digitally. Technology moves from being the bottleneck to being the enabler with MACH, a brand’s creative process will drive differentiation exponentially. Adding AKQA’s experience, expertise and creativity to the Alliance means a lot to the member setup and our community.”
One third of online shoppers will only associate with responsible brands
More than one third (35%) of online shoppers in the UK will only associate with ‘responsible’ brands. Those that treat staff fairly, source goods ethically, and do not misuse consumer data. This is according to research into online shopping behaviour and ethics from Empathy.co, the global commerce search and discovery platform.
The data was obtained via a Censuswide survey of 4,000 online shoppers from the UK. It also revealed that half of consumers (47%) prefer to shop with brands they trust. Furthermore, 22% will pay more for the brands they trust.
In fact, 40% of surveyed shoppers said that they don’t like being asked for unnecessary or sensitive data. 37% said that they would like more control of the data that businesses have on them. This is due to an inherent mistrust around how their data is being harvested, used or sold by these brands.
The survey also revealed that 31% of online shoppers prefer to associate with brands that are green, and use ecological packaging in their deliveries. 37% actively try to order local, or national, to reduce their carbon footprint.
The appetite for online shopping has not slowed down either, the Empathy.co research concluded. For example, 49% of consumers revealed that they will not stop shopping online, even now that lockdown has lifted. 30% even revealed that ‘online’ will be their default option for 100% of their shopping moving forward.
Conversely, only 13% don’t consider their online shopping behaviour to have an environmental impact. 20% don’t think about the environment at all when buying online.
SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder Acquires DotCom Partners
SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder, an eCommerce software and digital merchandising company, have bought DotCom Partners. DotCom Partners is an eCommerce solution provider specialising in Walmart online business.
DotCom Partners and SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder first worked together in early 2020 when launching the Digital Catalogue Programme. During this joint venture, the teams realised a distinct synergy in their use of proprietary software such as SKU Ninja. This accelerated the business of national brands on Walmart.com through full-service item setup, content management, search optimisation, and actionable insights.
Since February 2020, DotCom Partners has made it their mission to be the leading solution provider to vendors on Walmart.com. One of the few official solution providers for Walmart eCommerce, the DotCom Partners team provides an unprecedented level of Walmart.com account management.
