Sourcing Journal Mentions First Insight | Retail Decision Making
Retail decision making
Retail decision making platform First Insight, Inc. has acquired SnapRetail, a digital marketing platform aimed at boosting in-store traffic and online sales programs for retailers and brands.
Details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
According to First Insight, SnapRetail is the first in a planned series of acquisitions and internal developments aimed at broadening its own global retail services platform of concept-to-conversion offerings. The platform is built to deliver consumer-driven analytics across key decision areas, including strategy, planning, product design, merchandising, sourcing, pricing, supply chain, marketing and sales.
The SnapRetail acquisition follows the recent launch of First Insight’s My Insight mobile app, a core enhancement to the InsightSuite platform built to empower retail decision makers with more rapid, private, and simplified assortment building and rationalization capabilities.
Positioned as an alternative to traditional market research tools that can depend on historical and current data to forecast general trends, demand and pricing, InsightSuite is designed to actively engage targeted consumer segments, delivering predictive analytics within hours, and thereby placing the consumer at the heart of every retail decision.
This can range from strategic planning to product development, pricing, planning and marketing—resulting in verifiable increases in sales and profit margins.
Buy now, pay later
Sweden-based global payments network Klarna has debuted a new subscription service model with the launch of Klarna Plus, which is now available to eligible U.S. consumers through the Klarna app for a monthly fee of $7.99.
Klarna Plus offers a variety of features and offers, including waived service fees on Klarna’s One Time Card product, double rewards points and access to deals with the company’s more than 500,000 partner brands.
With the global subscription e-commerce market projected to reach a valuation of $2.4 trillion by 2028, Klarna said, citing data from Research and Markets, Klarna Plus aims to deliver a suite of benefits that cater to evolving shopping preferences.
Available within the Klarna app, this new service wants to expand further on its “buy now, pay later” provider’s payments and shopping services, offering a subscription model that can give members access to various exclusive offers and deals.
The double rewards points feature lets shoppers collect two points for every $1 spent on purchases with Klarna rewards club. Additionally, users can shop at any retailer outside Klarna’s network to split payments into four interest-free installments using Klarna’s One Time Card, with no added service fees. This exclusive benefit can save Klarna consumers roughly $12 each month. the company says
Users can access special discounts at Nike, Coach, Macy’s, Instacart, and Goat, totaling up to $30 per month.
Retail
Aptos is expanding its cloud-native, microservices-based unified commerce platform Aptos One to include a new inventory management solution, a new promotions management feature and what the company says is a more flexible payment partner integration.
The Aptos Store Inventory Management (SIM) solution is a mobile application designed to allow retailers to manage all movement of inventory coming into or transferring out of the store. The SIM tool supports a range of in-store inventory management needs, such as shipping and receiving; cycle counts; inventory adjustments; pricing updates; and carrier integration and shipping label printing for transfers between stores or return to vendor.
Built on the Aptos One platform, Aptos SIM offers pre-built integrations to the company’s order management system (OMS) and merchandising solutions and has an extensibility framework with APIs to integrate with third-party software. With Aptos SIM, retailers can better reflect store inventory updates in real time across all systems that touch or manage merchandise, creating a more accurate record of network-wide inventory.
The Aptos Universal Promotions Manager allows retailers to configure their campaigns and promotions for all channels through a single and centralized promotions engine. The manager was created to offer retailers a more streamlined approach to promotions, leveraging APIs to extend promotion data to any of the retailer’s applications or channels that require it.
With a singular promotions engine, a promotion that is delivered in stores, online or through a consumer mobile app would calculate the same way, using the same deal logic, according to Nikki Baird, vice president of strategy at Aptos. This eliminates the risk of customers being given different totals for the exact same purchase across different selling channels.
And in partnership with Verifone, Aptos is introducing its first “sidecar” payment integration, which is designed to enables deeper interaction between mobile-native apps.
Aptos now supports Tap to Pay on iPhone powered by Aptos One and payments processing company Adyen. With Tap to Pay on iPhone, retailers can accept all types of in-person, contactless payments, such as physical debit and credit cards, Apple Pay and other digital wallets, using just an iPhone and the Aptos One iOS app—no extra terminals or hardware needed.
For Aptos’ fiscal year 2023, which ended on Sept. 30, the company exceeded its goals for both corporate revenue and operating EBITDA.
Aptos says it will invest 15 percent of revenues in research and development in 2024.
Robotics
GreyOrange
GreyOrange, a provider of AI-driven fulfillment automation technology, announced in December it closed a Series D funding, securing $135 million.
Led by Anthelion Capital, this investment is designed to reinforce GreyOrange’s approach to transforming warehouse and retail store operations through a hardware-agnostic software platform and a range of certified robotic and sensing technologies.
GreyOrange will deploy the growth capital to accelerate the company’s technology leadership, continue its global expansion, and further support the adoption of GreyOrange’s fulfillment orchestration platform in warehouses, distribution centers and retail stores.
The company could benefit from the overall growth seen in the warehouse automation sector in recent years. According to the 2023 Gartner Hype Cycle for Supply Chain Execution Technologies report, by 2027, over 75 percent of companies will have adopted some form of cyber-physical automation within their warehouse operations.
Merchandising
Algolia
Algolia, an end-to-end AI search and discovery platform, unveiled the newest version of its AI-enhanced, data-driven Merchandising Studio designed to prevent customers from having to manually merchandise hundreds of category and product landing pages.
For merchandisers, digital marketers and e-commerce professionals alike, the new Merchandising Studio is built to delivers improved data and visibility functionality, which forms the backbone of more informed decision-making, while enhanced recommendations capabilities will open doors to untapped opportunities.
Algolia’s Merchandising Studio introduces a new revenue analytics feature, equipping merchandisers with the ability to make data-driven decisions. This advanced capability can enable merchandisers to assess the impact of their decisions on key business metrics such as average order value (AOV) and revenue per search/category.
By surfacing information based on specific pricing and currency details, merchandisers gain predictive capabilities to optimize revenue generation, especially during critical decision-making scenarios like A/B tests.
The addition of an unlimited events retention feature in Algolia’s Merchandising Studio provides merchandisers with the ability to look back at an unlimited amount of years’ worth of events data, providing insights into seasonal trends and offers the historical context needed for informed planning.
Algolia also introduced a comparison mode feature, providing merchandisers with side-by-side, instant comparisons of results for any query as they adjust ranking and relevance settings. Additionally, the company has added data-driven personalized recommendations, which are a set of features that presents individualized recommendations to consumers with “Recommended for You” and “Personalization Recommendation” carousels.
Merchandising Studio will include an image-based recommendations capability, which enables merchandisers to replicate the in-store experience online. This new capability, which will include a broad family of features such as “complete the outfit” and “looking similar,” reveals a set of products based on visual aspects, seamlessly matching any product a shopper shows interest in.
Algolia’s image-based recommendations feature can enable merchandisers to better showcase their catalog in an effort to meet evolving expectations of today’s consumers.
Finally, the new AI attribute enrichment feature aims to further empower merchandisers by adding attributes to all SKUs using generative AI, thus improving the search and discovery experience.
Constructor
Constructor, an AI-powered product discovery and search platform for enterprise e-commerce companies, unveiled conversational product discovery tool AI Shopping Assistant (ASA). Shoppers on e-commerce websites and mobile apps can interact with ASA to discover and explore products related to their interests and intent.
ASA blends generative AI with Constructor’s AI-based personalization technology and ability to optimize experiences for e-commerce companies’ unique key performance indicators (KPIs). When shoppers engage with ASA on e-commerce sites and apps, they can explain what they want in long-form natural language, or even have a conversation if they like, and then receive product and content recommendations personalized to their preferences, history and intent, and reflective of the e-commerce company’s real-time inventory.
E-commerce companies across industries, including apparel brands, general retailers and grocery chains, are already taking advantage of AI Shopping Assistant.
According to Constructor, they’re using the tool to address use cases and queries such as finding occasion-appropriate apparel. For example, they can say: “I’m going to a formal wedding in the Caribbean in August. What can I wear in the summer heat?” The returned recommendations are designed to make sense contextually; are in-stock in the shopper’s size; and map to the shopper’s preferred styles, colors, price points, etc.
Users can also identify relevant items across categories, asking questions like: “I’m going camping with my pre-teen kids for the first time in the White Mountains. What kinds of supplies and camping gear do I need?” ASA can provide personalized suggestions across different areas of the retailer’s inventory.
With the ability to answer a broad range of queries, ASA provides intent-based, natural language prompting to return relevant product suggestions, and refine results. The platform supports many types of results from product recommendations, to articles and guides, to task-specific instructions like recipes and do-it-yourself guides. Additionally, ASA incorporates Constructor’s connected product discovery algorithms, including clickstream, personalization and KPI metric optimization.
Fulfillment
Supply chain technology provider Manhattan Associates has launched the Fulfillment Experience Insights dashboard to give retailers a real-time assessment of how their omnichannel fulfillment performance stacks up against the industry.
Included in Manhattan Active Omni, this new capability gives retailers a single view of digital order fulfillment KPIs like store pickup conversion, shorts and abandonment, time to fulfill and more. Retailers can evaluate, measure and adjust their supply chain execution strategies using aggregated and anonymized data from the Manhattan Active cloud ecosystem. This analytical tool, which includes the ability to pivot between various timeframes, can provide detailed insight into the experience a retailer is delivering for their customers.
The new dashboard comes at a time where retailers are struggling to gauge their own fulfillment business. Last year, Manhattan launched the Unified Commerce Benchmark which measured 286 customer experience capabilities across four segments. Of these four primary segments, promising and fulfillment returned the lowest scores by a significant margin.
Cart.com
Cart.com, a provider of e-commerce and logistics solutions designed to enable merchants to sell and fulfill across channels, has secured a $70 million debt facility from the revived and now First Citizens Bank-owned Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). The latest facility is part of a larger $100 million debt refinancing provided by SVB’s technology corporate banking division and Trinity Capital Inc.
Omair Tariq, founder and CEO of Cart.com, said the business grew 50 percent in 2023.
The company provides physical and digital infrastructure designed to unify operations across channels and assist more than 6,000 multichannel merchants to sell and fulfill where their customers are. The company offers a suite of digitally driven logistics capabilities, enterprise-grade channel and order management software and expert services catered to simplify commerce for middle-market and enterprise companies.
Cart.com supports over $8 billion in gross merchandise value and operates 14 omnichannel facilities nationwide, totaling over 8.5 million square feet of space. In June, the company announced it had raised a $60 million Series C equity funding round at a valuation of $1.2 billion.
Retail decision making
Retail decision making platform First Insight, Inc. has acquired SnapRetail, a digital marketing platform aimed at boosting in-store traffic and online sales programs for retailers and brands.
Details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
According to First Insight, SnapRetail is the first in a planned series of acquisitions and internal developments aimed at broadening its own global retail services platform of concept-to-conversion offerings. The platform is built to deliver consumer-driven analytics across key decision areas, including strategy, planning, product design, merchandising, sourcing, pricing, supply chain, marketing and sales.
The SnapRetail acquisition follows the recent launch of First Insight’s My Insight mobile app, a core enhancement to the InsightSuite platform built to empower retail decision makers with more rapid, private, and simplified assortment building and rationalization capabilities.
Positioned as an alternative to traditional market research tools that can depend on historical and current data to forecast general trends, demand and pricing, InsightSuite is designed to actively engage targeted consumer segments, delivering predictive analytics within hours, and thereby placing the consumer at the heart of every retail decision.
This can range from strategic planning to product development, pricing, planning and marketing—resulting in verifiable increases in sales and profit margins.
Traceability
Kappahl/Trace4Value
Swedish fashion retailer Kappahl has partnered with traceability consortium Trace4Value to implement a digital product passport (DPP) that can provide consumers with more access to sustainability data on materials, suppliers, eco-labelling and how the garments can be circulated.
“Kappahl wants to be a pioneer when it comes to sustainability and transparency in fashion and is part of a pilot project on the development of digital product passports in textiles initiated by Trace4Value,” said Sandra Roos, vice president of sustainability at Kappahl. “We can now show our customers a first version of the digital product passport in textiles, all the way from production to sales.”
DPPs are digital representations of physical products that display sustainability data throughout the product’s lifecycle. For example, a DPP can provide information about a product’s origin, composition, carbon footprint, recyclability and reparability. In addition, there is the opportunity to clarify the product’s sustainability performance with a third-party certified ecolabel, as well as how the product is handled when it is fully consumed. The company says that increased information sharing about products and between actors in value chains can contribute to increased resource efficiency and circular economy.
The introduction of digital product passports is part of the E.U.’s Green Deal and is included in the Ecodesign Directive for sustainable products. The regulations will require that almost all products placed on the European market have a product passport that will provide reliable sustainability data down to the smallest component, all to increase traceability and facilitate a circular economy. Textiles, electronics and batteries are the first product areas to be introduced.
The test will provide Kappahl and the other project partners with input on how the product passports work for customers, as well as being part of identifying the necessary data and preparing the business and the value chain for DPP and future legislation.
The Trace4Value project consists of more than 65 companies with several different sub-projects. The pilot project on the digital product passports is a sub-project of Trace4Value and is led by traceability platform TrusTrace. The project started in the spring of 2022 and will run throughout 2024 and be evaluated. In addition to Kappahl, GS1, SIS, TrusTrace, Marimekko, Rudholm Group, Circularista, TexRoad Foundation and Trimco Group are participating in the project.
Aware
Aware, a blockchain-based traceability platform that also offers its own DPP for sustainable textiles, has secured a funding round with an opening contribution from Presstar Capital, a Singapore-based investor with a singular focus on sustainable textile manufacturing. The total amount of the investment was undisclosed.
Following a successful seed funding round in 2022, Presstar’s investment not only provides immediate capital for Aware, but also sets the stage for the new funding round, which is designed to power the company’s expansion within Asia’s sustainable textiles production industry.
Aware anticipates the backing from Presstar will solidify the firm’s position for the upcoming equity round, and help it expand across markets.
Returns
ReturnLogic/BigCommerce
Returns management provider ReturnLogic has integrated with e-commerce platform provider BigCommerce, enabling the company’s B2C and B2B merchants the ability to leverage analytics to transform the returns process into a source of strategic business insights.
This integration provides BigCommerce retailers with advanced features like automated return workflows and real-time analytics. Retailers can now track return trends, identify common issues and make data-driven decisions to reduce return rates and improve their product offerings. The platform’s focus on intelligent returns management allows for a more personalized approach to customer service, fostering loyalty and repeat business.
In addition to its analytical capabilities, ReturnLogic’s integration with BigCommerce is designed to be user-friendly and adaptable to the diverse needs of e-commerce retailers returns operations.
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