Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: Acquia renews Drupal Steward Program after successful first year, security firewall from the Drupal Association protects thousands of sites. World’s largest food retail voluntary chain, Spar International, partners with Naveo Commerce to serve customers with improved online grocery services. TrueCommerce Partners with Vori to offers a broad set of unified commerce solutions to food industry players. Data8 strengthen their address validation services by integrating e-commerce location tool what3words. Research indicates 79% of online shoppers reveal their purchases are highly impacted by user-generated content shared by other consumers.
Acquia renews Drupal Steward Program Support with critical security fixes
Digital experience company Acquia has announced that it is renewing its founding partnership support of the Drupal Steward Program. The programme is a web application firewall introduced by the Drupal Association and operated jointly with the Drupal Security team. Acquia implemented Drupal Steward protection across its entire Drupal Cloud platform. The solution protects thousands of the world’s largest sites with the most up-to-date security and vulnerability fixes.
Acquia’s participation in this programme affords seamless, immediate protection to customers by routing their websites’ domains to Drupal Steward. This automatically filters requests through the firewall. Malicious requests are blocked, giving IT teams time they need to test and implement security updates on their own timelines. For instance, in November 2020, Drupal Steward implemented protection against a critical remote code execution vulnerability, immediately protecting Acquia’s customers.
Acquia’s commitment to Drupal Steward also provides resources that enable the Drupal Association to open the programme to users of open source Drupal at affordable prices.
SPAR International rolls out integrated grocery e-commerce platform worldwide
SPAR International has launched a fully customisable eCommerce solution to SPAR country organisations and retailers. The world’s largest food retail voluntary chain partnered with Naveo Commerce to drive the optimisation of SPAR’s grocery eCommerce offering.
The solution is expected to enable an optimised eCommerce experience for customers. The platform supports in-store picking and order fulfilment, thereby ensuring rapid delivery to SPAR’s customers in the close catchment communities the extensive SPAR store network serves. The SPAR eCommerce solution provided by Naveo offers a customer experience and technology solution. This allows localisation to market specifications and is fully customisable to provide an enhanced shopping experience utilising the platform.
The modular approach of Naveo’s platform is built to integrate complex systems, and allows SPAR national, regional, and individual stores to pick, choose and adapt the modules required while also ensuring order processes remain seamlessly integrated throughout. As a result, SPAR country organisations will now benefit from the Naveo platform to meet evolving consumer expectations and needs as part of the brand’s Better Together strategy.
The roll-out of eCommerce solutions has grown dramatically in 2020. Over 30 SPAR country organisations provided customers with online shopping at the start of this year. Combining the extensive store network of over 13,500 stores with agile and fast instore picking to delivery is a successful offline to online model for SPAR. This ensures its worldwide independent retailers can access global best practice and integrate this in their local offer.
TrueCommerce Partners with Vori
TrueCommerce has announced a partnership with Vori, the creator of a modern operating system for the global food supply chain. The initiative offers food industry customers new options to eliminate costly manual data entry with the end-to-end Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) between grocery retailers and suppliers. In addition to integration with numerous digital marketplaces, eCommerce storefronts, and dozens of ERP and accounting systems.
Vori transforms the B2B grocery replenishment process with a mobile application that allows a store buyer to walk their store once and scan shelf-tags to reorder from thousands of suppliers. Additionally, Vori facilitates suppliers’ access to retail customers. It streamlines their order receiving process through an online portal and a mobile application. The company’s strengths are in product development, machine learning/data science, and a deep understanding of their grocery supply chain customers and their needs.
TrueCommerce offers a broad set of unified commerce solutions and apps that connects customers, suppliers, channels, and systems. These solutions support supply chain visibility and collaboration by helping organisations make the most of their omnichannel initiatives. This is achieved by business P2P connectivity, order management, collaborative replenishment, intelligent fulfilment, cross-functional analytics, and product information management.
The solutions leverage TrueCommerce’s Global Commerce Network, which includes over 120,000 pre-connected retailers, distributors, and logistics service providers. As a fully managed services provider, TrueCommerce also manages new trading partner onboarding. As well as the ongoing management of partner-specific mapping, labeling changes, and communications monitoring.
Data8 strengthen address validation services
Data8 have teamed up with the location app, what3words, to bolster their advanced address validation services. what3words is an easy way to identify precise locations. It has divided the world into a grid of 3 metre squares. Each square is given a unique combination of three random words: a what3words address. Users can find, share and navigate to precise locations using three simple words.
Data8 was founded in 2005 with the ambition to deliver market-leading data solutions. The company has since delivered a range of address management and data validation solutions. To improve customers data quality helping data-driven marketing for their growing client base.
The UK-based company identified the benefits of what3words and what it will bring to customers who themselves have been waiting for a precise geolocation product for shipping purposes. Data8 customers will now be given the option to include what3words when they choose to integrate Data8’s PredictiveAddress on their site. They can switch the service on or off at their convenience.
Data8’s product, address validation, allows the customer to autocomplete their address with PredictiveAddress by simply typing out a small portion of their address from any line. But the benefits don’t just lie with the customer. Data8’s address validation uses over 27 regularly updated data sources. It ensures that the address information is valid from the point of capture.
Whilst integrated through Data8’s address validation services, what3words will offer the customer a quick and precise address search by simply inputting their exact what3words location.
Research suggests online shoppers shun influencers for authentic content from consumers
The majority (79%) of online shoppers reveal user-generated content (UGC) such as images and videos from other consumers highly impacts their purchasing decisions according to new research. But only 9% say the same for content produced by influencers.
The report from Stackla reveals that for 72% of consumers, photos and videos from real customers is the content they most want to see on eCommerce sites when making purchasing decisions. 66% have been inspired to purchase from a new brand after seeing social media images of that brand from consumers. 56% say they’re more influenced by images and videos from social media when online shopping now than they were pre-pandemic.
Stackla’s report, Post-Pandemic Shifts in Consumer Shopping Habits: Authenticity, Personalisation and the Power of UGC. It is based on a survey of 2,042 consumers across the US, UK and Australia. The findings suggest that UGC strongly impacts a variety of industry categories. For example,
- 65% of consumers in the poll have purchased apparel or fashion items because of user-generated images or videos from real customers.
- 53% have purchased a beauty, health or wellness product based on user-generated images or videos on social media.
- 48% of consumers say UGC is the most influential content when making home or sporting goods purchasing decisions.
The research indicates that post-pandemic consumers are crying out for more authenticity from brands. The overwhelming majority (88%) of respondents say authenticity – described as relating to firms being genuine and real – is an important factor in deciding which brands they like and support. And 83% believe retailers need to provide more authentic shopping experiences to customers like them.
