Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: BigCommerce releases Stagingpro, highly-automated staging environment to allow teams to quickly and efficiently develop and deploy multiple store builds. Hull retailer joins the mission to tackle food waste mobile app Gander. Reward Gateway announces new leadership amid record-setting platform usage and global growth. Norwegian proptech Speiz secures €1.3M in seed funding to launch new European marketplace for warehouse leasing. Lightspeed Inventory streamlines the process of ordering, tracking and pricing stock, reducing food waste and hours of administration.
BigCommerce provides StagingPro integration to support staging and deployment suite
BigCommerce has announced an exclusive tech partner integration of StagingPro, a comprehensive staging and deployment suite. The suite gives enterprise merchants and agency developers a collaborative, near-production level environment to test and deploy code to a BigCommerce store.
Purpose built for BigCommerce, StagingPro provides an easy-to-use staging environment for merchants, agencies and third-party developers to create one or more replica sandbox stores without the need to reproduce and duplicate work onto a production store. Teams can now efficiently manage every aspect of the build and then test with confidence. With StagingPro, teams will experience:
- Accelerated Production-to-Market Cycles. Run multiple projects at once and save time with faster development and deployment cycles with enforced best practices to ensure projects are delivered on time. Real time automated push, pull, change and error notifications help improve collaboration, transparency and teamwork.
- Secure and Risk-Free Environment Replicas. Create replica staging websites with the same data as a production environment to securely test designs and catalogs, ensuring risk-free live deployments.
- Seamless Integration with Existing Teams, Tools and Workflows. The StagingPro platform can scale up to meet growing teams such as design, development and marketing, and integrates seamlessly with Github, Atlassian Jira and Microsoft that’s fully auditable with rollback capabilities.
As an early beta user, digital experience agency Inviqa was able to access StagingPro for testing and feedback prior to general availability. With StagingPro, Inviqa provided clients with their own dedicated playground to push changes and test directly within their pre-production store environment with the click of a button and no technical knowledge needed. Clients can always revert any and all changes to bring back previous versions of their store without the worry or risk of losing data or affecting their live production site.
StagingPro is Multi-Storefront compatible, allowing merchants to confidently migrate between storefronts for swift deployment design changes and data migration between trusted environments. StagingPro is currently available in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
Hull retailer joins the mission to tackle food waste
Sewell on the go has become the latest retailer to join forces with award-winning and world-first mobile app Gander to enable its customers to snap up reduced-priced foods and mitigate food waste. Its stores on Chanterlands Avenue and in Cottingham are the first to be integrated with the app.
Speaking on the new partnership, Head of Customer Engagement and Business Development, Stacey Williams at Gander, says, “We are delighted to be extending the implementation of Gander across the UK and through working with Sewell on the go we will continue our mission to reduce food waste. With seamless integration, retailers have no down time and shoppers can instantly start saving on their weekly shop.
“Engagement with the app from retailers and shoppers alike has been positive and we hope to continue building upon our new relationship with Sewell on the go.”
Reward Gateway announces Nick Burns as new Chief Executive Officer
Reward Gateway, a global employee engagement company has appointed Nick Burns as its new Chief Executive Officer. Burns joins the company from Arthur J. Gallagher & Co, where he served as Chief Executive Officer of Gallagher’s UK Employee Benefits Consulting Division. A veteran leader in the employee benefits and technology arena, Burns will work with the company’s leadership team to set the strategic direction for continued global expansion and growth.
As the global cost of living crisis worsens and inflationary pressures continue, Reward Gateway has seen rapid growth of its core employee engagement platform as HR leaders seek out practical and scalable solutions to support the wellbeing of their employees in challenging times. Reward Gateway’s all-in-one employee engagement platform delivers a streamlined, centralised yet flexible employee experience, empowering organisations to choose the right combination of wellbeing and engagement tools – from market-leading reward and recognition solutions, surveys and employee discounts – to attract and retain top talent.
Norwegian proptech Speiz secures €1.3M in seed funding
Norwegian proptech startup, Speiz, has raised €1.3M in seed funding round led by F-LOG Ventures. The funding will enable Speiz to continue establishing their new SaaS-enabled marketplace for commercial warehouse real estate in Norway and expand its reach across Europe.
This investment comes at a time when the commercial proptech industry will be facing significant challenges and changing demand. Despite the recession increasing interest rates, causing property yields to shrink and property prices to collapse, Speiz sees these difficult times as an opportunity to support businesses. With reports of a warehouse vacancy rate of just 3% in the UK, a strain on supply chains will be felt as SMEs across Europe scramble to find warehouse space in competition with larger retailers storing excess inventory leftover from the pandemic.
The start-up’s innovative product leverages the network effect to digitally transform the outdated brokerage market. Currently, Speiz’s pricing is 3-5 times cheaper compared to average broker market rates and removes up to 80% of the cost & time associated with leasing activities for suppliers. Both them and tenants can register free of charge to either list properties or submit searches. The new marketplace is cheaper and faster than working with brokers because it automates a lot of manual work with machine learning and smart algorithms used for data extraction & modeling as well as tailoring the search experience for customers. Speiz also offers supplier insights on market price and tenant needs enabling them to adapt and increase yield, bringing transparency to the market.
Currently, Speiz has data on over 1 million warehouses listings in seven markets, including the UK, Germany and Sweden and as a result has gained an impressive customer list that already includes the likes of ride app, Bolt and construction and engineering corporation, Elecnor.
The €1.3M investment will be used for product development and business expansion. With a 10% month over month growth on new facilities, data and plans to use this funding to aggregate the largest European warehouse facilities database in commercial real estate – Speiz are primed to blitzscale across Europe. This kickstarts in 2023 with their first market expansion planned, thanks to this successful funding round.
Lightspeed launches restaurant inventory management solution to cut costs and limit food waste
Lightspeed Commerce the one-stop commerce platform for merchants to simplify, scale, and create customer experiences, has launched Lightspeed Inventory. A fully integrated solution into the Lightspeed Restaurant.
The new tool offers restaurants greater visibility and control over their stock, allowing managers to steadily cut costs through the acceleration of inventory management processes and the reduction of food waste – an endemic issue that costs the UK hospitality industry a staggering £3.2 billion a year.
Built with solid real-time stock and wastage reporting, Lightspeed Inventory seamlessly allows restaurants to monitor and record stock usage in real time to make informed business decisions. Businesses can then adjust their orders accordingly to minimise the financial impact of waste, should goods consistently be left to spoil.
The platform also allows for the scheduling of recurring orders and automatic replenishment of ingredients up to restaurants’ desired stock level. Staff can reduce the hours spent on the administrative side of inventory management processes, and focus on serving guests instead.
Additionally, Lightspeed Inventory offers menu pricing suggestions and calculates the appropriate price of each item on their menu, based on the cost of the ingredients ordered – as showcased by Lightspeed’s Food Cost Calculator. This ultimately leads to creating more profitable menus.
Restaurants are then free to track these metrics throughout the menu writing process, from pricing individual ingredients to creating recipe instructions – which can be set with exact quantities to avoid error.
