Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: The multi-channel B2B eCommerce platform, Znode’s new product release introduces features for payment and ordering while enhancing inventory, notifications, and site search synonym features. Validity data collaboration provides customers with added defence against phishing attempts. Omnichannel retailers growing revenues faster than any other sector reveals the Lightspeed State of Retail 2022 report. TrueLayer has released its unique Variable Recurring Payments (VRP) API for sweeping and non-sweeping payments
Znode pushes release with payment enhancements
Znode has published a new release which includes payment features and enhancements in the Znode eCommerce platform account for important business use cases. The release enables more streamlined transactions. CardConnect ACH payment is now available, allowing both buyers and customer service representatives to use this method for order payment. The 9.7.2 release gives buyers the ability to make multiple, full, or partial invoice-based payments and extend this for 3rd party invoicing software.
CMS updates allow administrators to hide price and inventory information from guest users, prompting users to log in to access such information. Administrators can enable a feature that allows buyers to subscribe to an email notification when a product is back in stock.
Ordering features have also been added and updated in the new release. Buyers can use “Save for Later” feature within the cart for products that do not need to be purchased immediately. Such products can be added back to an order before it is placed. The latest release also enables reordering in the administration console. Another eCommerce ordering feature enables buyers to place bulk orders for variant products through a product grid view on the product display pages. Other updates in the 9.7.2 release include integration with Twilio for SMS notifications.
The multi-channel B2B eCommerce platform, Znode, released its 9.7.2 version in April 2022. This new product release introduces features for payment and ordering while enhancing inventory, notifications, and site search synonym features.
Payment features and enhancements in the Znode eCommerce platform account for important business use cases, enabling more streamlined transactions. CardConnect ACH payment is now available, allowing both buyers and customer service representatives to use this method for order payment. The 9.7.2 release gives buyers the ability to make multiple, full, or partial invoice-based payments and extend this for 3rd party invoicing software.
Validity forms partnership with Red Sift to protect domain reputation
Validity, the leading provider of data quality and email marketing success solutions, announced a data partnership with Red Sift. The company is an integrated cloud email and brand protection platform. The data exchange will facilitate compliance with Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). This ensures Validity and Red Sift customers are implementing ethical and secure email marketing campaigns.
Poor data quality prevents email marketers from executing their campaigns to the best of their ability, and it leaves the door open for bad actors to damage companies’ domain reputations. The DMARC standard is the best solution available for brands to combat phishing attacks that target customers by spoofing their owned domains, as it allows organisations to prevent their domains from being impersonated. This ultimately strengthens the trustworthiness of marketers’ email campaigns for the recipients and increases email engagement for today’s digital marketers.
Validity gives marketers the tools they need to manage and monitor their DMARC policy, ensuring marketers receive the benefits of properly authenticated email while safeguarding their domains against phishing attempts. As the only integrated cloud email and brand protection platform, Red Sift automates BIMI and DMARC processes, makes it easy to identify and stop business email compromise, and secures domains from impersonation to prevent attacks.
Validity will provide data feeds to enhance Red Sift’s ability to monitor brand spoofing and phishing for customer domains as they relate to DMARC and brand protection solutions. Red Sift customers can also leverage this data to see outside DMARC by monitoring close cousin domains for spoofing and activity. The partnership comes off the heels of rapid growth for Red Sift as well. The company recently announced a $54M Series B funding round, bringing its total investment to $68M.
Lightspeed launches innovative new flagship omnichannel retail platform
Lightspeed Commerce has launched Lightspeed Retail. A groundbreaking new retail commerce platform that unites advanced POS, payments, and eCommerce into a single solution. Lightspeed Commerce is a one-stop commerce platform for merchants to simplify, scale and create customer experiences.
Leveraging headless commerce, integrations, and a completely reimagined interface, Lightspeed Retail helps business owners elevate their strategy. At the same time managing the complex challenges of the evolving retail landscape.
This omnichannel solution puts at retailers’ fingertips the tools they need to meet consumer expectations in 2022. New data from a Lightspeed and Checkmarket survey of over 7,200 global merchants and consumers shows that omnichannel retailers are growing revenue faster than any other sector.
In the UK, 58% of omnichannel merchants report revenue was higher or significantly higher year-over-year, compared to just brick-and-mortar retail merchants (38%) and just eCommerce merchants (20%). Today with Lightspeed Retail, merchants around the world can self-serve modern retail commerce tools, with a custom solution that fits their unique business needs. The new Lightspeed Retail is available on all platforms (web, iOS, and Android), meeting the needs of more customers with more flexibility for hardware configuration.
Lightspeed Retail is now available in the UK, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Africa, unleashing the power of headless commerce to meet consumers where they prefer to shop with integrated cross-channel selling and complex multi-store inventory management.
One in five (21%) UK merchants said the biggest challenge to modernising and growing their retail business was the need for more support for digitisation and eCommerce technology. Whether starting out or looking to scale, retailers can achieve ambitious goals with Lightspeed Retail’s user-friendly suite of connected solutions, backed by best-in-class support from in-house industry experts.
TrueLayer creates payment options for businesses with industry’s first VRP API
TrueLayer has released its unique Variable Recurring Payments (VRP) API for sweeping and non-sweeping payments. The solution changes the way customers make and manage eCommerce payments, subscriptions, utility bills and more.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has mandated the UK’s nine largest banks to provide VRPs that support the automatic transfer of money between two accounts belonging to the same person. Referred to as ‘sweeping’ or ‘me-to-me’ payments.
With this launch, TrueLayer is the first open banking provider delivering different recurring payment types. Sweeping and non-sweeping – through a single API. Firstly, through sweeping payments that support third-party providers such as fintech firms, fulfilling a range of use cases within recurring payments. Particularly within the Credit, Savings and Current Account market.
Secondly, going beyond the mandated approach, TrueLayer is collaborating with select banks around non-sweeping offering businesses recurring payments to their customers for a range of services, including utility bills, subscriptions and other forms of digital payments. Using VRP through TrueLayer enables the amount being collected to vary without needing the account holder to re-consent every payment – for example, utility bills with a fixed payment date but different amounts due each time.
As a result, businesses can offer their customers an alternative to Direct Debit and debit cards that delivers a higher conversion rate at a lower cost, with less fraud, immediate settlement and enhanced control for consumers. TrueLayer is already working with businesses that will be going live with non-sweeping recurring payments from May onwards.