Retail and eCommerce news this week includes Celebrus and OnMarc combining to reduce dropouts at World Wide Lighting. Koverly launched “Pay in 30” to provide customers with a means to defer FX Payments for 30 days with no cost to the buyer or seller
Adobe
Adobe announced that co-founder Dr John Warnock passed away on Saturday, 19th August 2023, surrounded by his family. Dr. Warnock co-founded Adobe in 1982 with Dr Charles Geschke after meeting as colleagues at Xerox. Their first product was Adobe PostScript, a groundbreaking technology that sparked the desktop publishing revolution. Dr Warnock retired as CEO in 2000, and he was chairman of the board, a position he shared with Dr Geschke, until 2017.
CommerceIQ
CommerceIQ launched its Incrementality Estimation Module, a new solution that estimates the true ROI of retail media investment through the Incremental Return on Ad Spend (“iROAS”) metric. The new solution helps brands to effectively allocate retail media investment across retailers and optimize them in real-time for incremental sales.
CommerceIQ’s AI-based Incrementality Estimation Module solves these challenges by incorporating dynamic share of voice and search rankings, shopper propensity to buy and relevancy of searches to truly estimate net new sales that a brand would not have gotten without advertising.
Guru Hariharan, CEO, CommerceIQ, said, “With iROAS, brands can now maximize their media investments by delivering more total sales with the same media budget, or flat sales with lower media spending. It’s a powerful tool in the CommerceIQ arsenal that enables comprehensive and proactive media planning and moves the brands from media mix planning to media mix automation.”
HCL Software
HCL Software announced a strategic collaboration that will enable HCLSoftware to integrate Google Cloud’s generative AI solutions into its software products. It gives customers access to Google Cloud’s leading AI capabilities and advanced large language models.
By combining HCLSoftware’s expertise in software development and AI with Google Cloud’s cutting-edge AI technologies, the two companies aim to create a new generation of intelligent business applications. Those applications can transform industries, enhance business processes, and improve how organizations operate.
Kalyan Kumar, Chief Product Officer, HCLSoftware, said, “Building on HCLSoftware’s AI capabilities, we will infuse Google Cloud’s generative AI to develop a suite of powerful solutions that will enable customers to automate processes, make better decisions, scale their businesses and stay ahead of the competition while increasing efficiency and profitability.”
Stephen Orban, Vice President, Migrations, ISVs, and Marketplace, Google Cloud, commented, “Generative AI is streamling countless business processes and improving productivity across nearly every business function – from finance to marketing to software development to summarizing large corpuses of data – and more.
“Through our partnership, HCLSoftware is expanding the generative AI expertise available to our mutual customers to bring these improvements across their business, accelerate their digital transformations, and improve cross-organization collaboration using Google Workspace.”
Salesforce
Salesforce published a holiday forecast for the 2023 holiday shopping season (Nov 1-Dec 31). It believes:
- Digital sales growth will level off. Salesforce forecasts 4% global and 1% U.S. year-over-year online sales growth across November and December – reaching $1.19 trillion and $273 billion, respectively.
- AI catches consumers’ eyes — and wallets: 17% of shoppers report they’ve already used generative AI for purchase inspiration.
- Discounts will come earlier this year. Salesforce expects a flurry of promotional events in early October.
- Retailers take a closer look at returns: 88% of retailers say they will make their return policies stricter ahead of the holidays, which presents a risk.
Rob Garf, VP & GM, Retail, Salesforce commented, “After a few years of accelerated eCommerce adoption throughout the pandemic, retailers are under pressure to drive sustainable growth and customer loyalty – while maintaining margins.
“Despite a slowdown in online spending, brands that activate customer data and insights to execute effective promotions, relevant engagements powered by AI, and seamless experiences across channels will keep shoppers coming back over the holidays.”
Sana
Sana Commerce announced a strategic partnership with Usercentrics, a global market leader in the area of consent management platforms (CMP) for websites and apps. Through Usercentrics’ platform integration, Sana Commerce provides a user-friendly solution for managing consent and permissions related to cookies. This eliminates compliance hassles and ensures effortless adherence to regulations.
Using Usercentrics and Sana Commerce Cloud helps to optimize the web store’s ability to collect the correct and relevant data to make informed marketing decisions.
Usercentrics expressed their commitment to customer privacy protection, stating:
“We believe individuals have the right to privacy. And we believe that protecting individual’s digital privacy is not a contradiction with enabling a thriving digital ecosystem. It is not one thing OR the other. It is one thing AND the other. Where some people see a simplistic and only binary solution, we see an important tension and meaningful opportunity that can be solved with technologies – some that might not even exist yet.”
What3Words
What3Words announced a strategic partnership with Woosmap, a platform offering privacy-first geolocation APIs and SDKs. The partnership means online retailers, or businesses who collect addresses from their customers, can offer a user-friendly way to let them specify their exact location alongside a traditional postal address.
Co-Founder and CEO of what3words, Chris Sheldrick, comments: “Woosmap and what3words have brought two market-leading products together to offer a unique and cutting edge solution to customers when it comes to address validation. It’s really exciting to be working with Woosmap to innovate in this space.”
Jean Thomas Rouzin, Deputy CEO and Co-Founder of Woosmap, commented, “We’re excited to implement what3words to the Woosmap platform. It’s a perfect combination with our Localities API, which is a powerful autocomplete and geocode service that allows our clients to autocomplete, geocode and get details on worldwide geographical places.
“This partnership brings together our complementary strengths. With what3words, our users will be able to find the 3 words associated with any location. Working in such a competitive market can be challenging, but with the addition of what3words, we’re even more confident about our product”.
Retail and eCommerce news from the week beginning 14 August 2023
