Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: Oracle NetSuite celebrated its 25th anniversary as Evan Goldberg, Founder and EVP of NetSuite provided the keynote address at the SuiteWorld 2023 event in Las Vegas. The company has been successful in winning contracts across its portfolio of products in several sectors and industries. The company has unveiled new generative AI-powered features to help enterprises reach their goals faster and more efficiently.
Infosys and Google Cloud expand alliance to help enterprises transform into AI-first organisations
Infosys is expanding its alliance with Google Cloud to help enterprises build AI-powered experiences leveraging Infosys Topaz offerings and Google Cloud’s generative AI solutions.
As part of the expansion, Infosys will create new global Generative AI Labs to develop industry-specific AI solutions and platforms, which will help enterprises infuse generative AI into their business processes. Infosys will also train 20,000 practitioners on Google Cloud’s gen AI solutions, including Vertex AI and Duet AI in Google Workspace, to ensure organizations have the professional services expertise and resources to successfully develop, implement, and manage any type of generative AI project.
This alliance between Infosys and Google Cloud builds on Infosys’ existing data, analytics & AI expertise on Google Cloud. Infosys is actively working with Google Cloud to develop a suite of transformative AI platforms and industry solutions for a range of business scenarios, including Consumer AI, autonomous supply chain, autonomous marketing, anti-money laundering and customer services transformation. A wide range of its existing platforms and solutions are being enhanced with Infosys Topaz and Google Cloud generative AI capabilities. These include Infosys Live Enterprise Application Management Platform, Infosys Applied AI Platform, Infosys Customer Intelligence Platform, Infosys Data Streams, and Infosys Supply Chain AI Platform, among others.
The joint capabilities will help create a strong foundation for enterprises towards AI-enabled transformation. For example, Infosys Topaz and Google Cloud generative AI recently helped a leading consumer goods company in successfully launching an AI Twin to assist in real-time planning of marketing spend, promotion, and product supply across markets. In another case, for a major telecommunications company, Infosys built a new data and AI capability on Google Cloud to drive growth through digital channels and support the end-to-end customer journey from prospecting to servicing. Infosys AI-powered solutions use insights to improve customer experience, drive sales, and redefine client’s digital business strategy for long term success.
MACH Alliance publishes comprehensive admissions criteria to provide clarity for a maturing market
The MACH Alliance, the group of independent tech companies dedicated to advocating for open, best-of-breed technology ecosystems, has published a new Admissions Playbook. The playbook adds rigour to the certification and admissions process as the market matures. The criteria highlight the stringency of certification and how fiercely the Alliance protects the purity of the certification for the clarity of enterprise technology buyers.
MACH certification is in place to provide buyers with complete confidence that the products and services they choose will enable a future-proof technology setup. The full criteria for certification, consolidated and described in detail in the Playbook, are solely in place to ensure enterprises get the swappable, future-fit technology they expect when committing to a MACH strategy.
Since its June 2020 inception, and having grown to almost 100 members, the MACH Alliance assessment criteria and scoring system have evolved as the organization gains experience and incurs new application considerations. The volume of member applications has grown more than 60% in three years, while the rejection rate for companies that fail to meet the criteria has remained stable at around 50%.
The increase in the number of applications reflects a maturing market. The Alliance is seeing more complex applications from companies who have reshaped their portfolio and product strategy from monolith to MACH and from companies with multiple products in their portfolio, for example. To prevent confusion for buyers, the criteria were recently extended to accommodate for companies that still maintain legacy products for existing clients, as long as the solutions being actively sold are 100% MACH compliant.
The new publication clarifies the complete neutrality and transparency of the certification process to reinforce market trust in the MACH-certified mark. It also shows potential members exactly what’s required to achieve certification. It includes:
- Specific criteria for each membership category – ISVs, SIs and Enablers of varying size and maturity.
- A detailed step-by-step overview of the admissions, appeals and rejection processes.
- Clarification of what’s required during evaluation and the scoring system applied.
Settle Partners with Finaloop to offer eCommerce and DTC brands an all-in-one finance platform
Settle, the leading cash-flow management platform, announced today it has partnered with bookkeeping software Finaloop to help eCommerce and CPG brands and founders with an all-in-one finance platform.
Up-to-date, accurate financial data is critical to drive a business effectively and to be able to secure debt or equity capital. Accounting for physical inventory businesses is highly complex and requires subject matter expertise to get it right. The Finaloop and Settle integration gives CPG businesses the ability to optimize cash flow and sync to financial statements in real-time.
Finaloop leverages AI technology and a team of accounting professionals to equip CPG founders to make astute financial decisions, drive revenue, and excel against competition. Paired with Settle, CPG leaders can save time and money by managing their entire purchase-to-pay workflow in one place, and get access to flexible working capital at founder-friendly rates.
PAAY partners with SOLVPATH to provide eCommerce merchant support and fraud prevention
PAAY and SOLVPATH have joined forces to provide a solution tackling two major challenges faced by online businesses today: friendly fraud and customer support efficiency. Friendly fraud, an escalating concern for eCommerce enterprises, now accounts for a staggering 75% of all disputes in the US.
PAAY, an operator in cardholder authentication, has risen to the occasion with its innovative PAAY 3DS platform. This cutting-edge technology seeks to authenticate the cardholder in real-time, thereby shifting the liability burden from merchants to banks. Additionally, this helps alleviate the financial strain imposed by chargebacks and refunds stemming from friendly fraud disputes.
SOLVPATH, a trailblazer in automated customer support solutions, is revolutionising how eCommerce merchants connect with their clients. It simplifies customer support visually while utilising extensive data for intelligent decision-making, resulting in an improved customer experience and enhanced merchant performance. With the recent PAAY 3DS partnership, SOLVPATH is able to automate 3DS data to help merchants curtail unnecessary refund requests and boost profitability.
The partnership between PAAY and SOLVPATH introduces a synergistic collaboration that capitalises on the strengths of both companies. Clients of SOLVPATH who integrate PAAY’s 3DS solution will gain access to valuable data points, allowing them to readily identify 3DS-authenticated customers. Armed with this information, merchants can dynamically adjust their support processes to mitigate refund requests and chargebacks, further fortifying their business operations.
Study by Ecom Express & ISB unveils data driven shopping patterns
Ecom Express, a technology-driven end-to-end logistics solutions company, in collaboration with ISB Institute of Data Science, has conducted a comprehensive research to gain valuable insights into consumer shopping habits and preferences, and demand from different parts of India. The survey unveils online shopping patterns across geographies in India. The survey further highlights product categories and the payment trends that are prevalent across these markets.
More than 70% of items bought online are clothes, fashion accessories, skincare, and makeup products. This survey also highlighted trends in the volume of online shoppers across India. Metropolitan cities like Delhi, Bengaluru, and Mumbai are the biggest shoppers, followed by larger cities like Lucknow, Jaipur, and Srinagar. Notably, growth hotspots in cities like Kolhapur, Jammu, Azamgarh, and others are bringing in the largest volume of online orders across the country when compared with their population. This trend suggests that due to the scarcity of physical retail outlets, online shopping is breaking barriers by delivering products across the nation.
The study further unveiled that Indians prefer to pay for their shopping once it reaches their doorstep as compared to prepaying for it at the time of ordering. Across India, Cash on Delivery (COD) / Pay on Delivery (POD) is four times more popular than Pre-Paid Delivery (PPD).
Coveo generative answering solution for B2C and B2B enterprises
Coveo has announced early access to Coveo Relevance Generative Answering for B2B and B2C commerce enterprises. This expands the programme to give manufacturers, distributors, and retailers access to test Coveo’s generative answering solution at enterprise scale on their eCommerce sites. This new capability will support product and knowledge discovery with access to secure enterprise-ready generative answering for Coveo Commerce customers. General availability is expected later this year.
Coveo Relevance Generative Answering empowers customer experiences with generative AI question-answering capability by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) on top of the leading unified indexing functionality of Coveo’s platform. An enterprise-ready solution, Coveo Relevance Generative Answering is scalable, secure, traceable, and provides accurate and relevant answers from multiple sources of content. Coveo Relevance Generative Answering is a natural augmentation of Coveo’s AI models and can be injected to improve each touchpoint across the customer journey from early in the sales cycle to post-sales customer service.
