Tag: ecommerce

Walmart Plans Premium Shipping Service And Tests Mobile Payment In China

Posted on by Lab Team

Walmart is set to challenge ecommerce overlord Amazon with its own premium shipping service. The No.1 brick-and-mortar retailer will reportedly start testing a yet-to-be-named unlimited free shipping service this summer to expedite the delivery of online orders to customers. Tentatively priced at $50 a year, it will cost half as much as Amazon Prime, which, however, also covers unlimited access to Amazon’s streaming service Prime Video.

In related news, Walmart is aiming to use convenience win over local customers in China by adding support for Alibaba’s Alipay, the most popular e-payment service in China. Customers will be able to check out by having their Alipay Wallet app scanned, and will then be rewarded with cash-back on their purchases. Considering that Walmart is not currently accepting Apple Pay in the US because of its allegiance to MCX’s still-in-beta CurrentC, one has to wonder if this new partnership with Alipay in China serves as a test of in-store mobile payment for the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer.

Taken together, these two moves by Walmart suggest a strong intention to bridge the gap between the physical world of retail and digital one. In order to succeed in both worlds, all retail brands will need to step up their ecommerce game while also finding new ways to improve the in-store shopping experience with digital convenience.

 

Why Messaging App Tango Launched In-App Shop

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Read original story on: TechCrunch

Mobile messaging app Tango is taking a page out of WeChat’s playbook with the launch of an in-app commerce service called Tango Shop. Initially available in the US, Tango’s e-commerce platform is powered by two retail giants, Alibaba and Walmart.  The Tango shop features a wide variety of items that can be purchased without leaving the chat app. Payment and logistics are handled by the two retail partners.

Messaging apps have enjoyed a meteoric rise in recent years, emerging as a major platform in the mobile ecosystem. As of the third quarter of 2014, 616 million global users were using chat app and mobile instant messengers, spending 7.6 hours per month on them on average. Accordingly, mobile messaging commerce has been seeing some early success in Asia markets with LINE in Japan and WeChat in China, where it has become the de facto mobile Internet platform in China, particularly for retailers.

However, messaging app-based mobile commerce has yet to take off in the U.S., where the relatively high usage of iMessage and persisting popularity of SMS has made it harder to build a mainstream audience for chat apps. Still, if the recent success of Snapchat, with its relentless push towards original content, is any indication, messaging app-based mobile commerce could certainly take off in the U.S. market sooner rather than later.

Mondelez Experiments With “Buy Now” Button In Digital Ads

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Read original story on: CNN Money

Mondelez International has inked a global partnership with marketing tech firm ChannelSight to ramp up e-commerce sales across its digital platforms, including brands’ product pages, social media, and video ads.

As a crucial part of this partnership, “Buy Now” buttons will be added to the aforementioned media platforms across 25 global markets to make it easy for sweet-toothed consumers to find and purchase Mondelez products online. After clicking the button, interested consumers will be presented with a list of relevant third-party retailers that stock the specific product being advertised.

It is worth noting that such lists are compiled through ChannelSight’s technology rather than partnerships struck with the retailers, so as to offer prospective customers the best deal available. Although not quite the “one-click” purchase that some major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, are striving for, it is definitely a step in the right direction for the multinational conglomerate to improve its digital attribution.

Amazon To Let You Order Things Simply By Pushing A Branded Button

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: The Verge

Amazon is ready to streamline your purchase process even more with the launch of a new “Dash Button”, a branded, key fob-sized button that orders a specific product with just one press. Connected to your Amazon account over WiFi, this physical button comes with its own safeguard measures to avoid repetitive orders, and promises to distill the tedious process of online purchase into one simple, tangible act.

Header image taken from Amazon’s site for “Dash Button“.

Amazon Officially Launches Marketplace For On-Demand Service

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Read original story on: TechCrunch

Back in August last year, we reported that Amazon was starting to tap into the local services market, and now the ecommerce giant has reportedly confirmed the official launch of its Angie’s List competitor, aptly named “Amazon Home Services”, set for next Monday.

With the launch, Amazon is taking a big step to compete in the on-demand economy. Right now most services in the marketplace are focused on providing assembling or placement help for Amazon shoppers following certain purchases, but a promotional video for the site promises that it will eventually offer a wider range of professional services, including “plumbers, auto mechanics, and yoga instructors”.

Top Five Takeaways From Facebook’s F8 Conference 2015

Posted on by Lab Team

With more than 30 million apps and sites currently on Facebook’s platform, Facebook is much more than just a social network. At their big F8 Developer Conference today, Facebook made some major announcements that uncovered their detailed plan for building out its platforms, as well as helping developers and publishers alike connect with users and monetize their content.

Messenger App To Become A Platform And Disrupt Ecommerce

As we reported earlier this week, Facebook is expanding its Messenger app into a full-fledged media platform by allowing integration with third-party apps and content. More importantly, it is also looking to disrupt ecommerce with a new mobile shopping experience. Equipped with real-time shipping notifications and enhanced receipts, the new Messenger Platform promises to connect shoppers to businesses by integrating all disconnected emails generated through online shopping into one cohesive chat thread for easier access and tracking.

New Parse SDK To Connect The Internet of Things 

Parse, a mobile development platform that Facebook acquired 2 years ago, is coming out with a new SDK that will make it easier for developers to create apps to connect a variety of connected devices. One demo featured a garage door opener build on Parse’s new platform. This puts Facebook directly in competition with Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Nest Platform, as well as a handful of other IoT platforms.

Mining Insights From App-Generated Data

Mobile apps generate tons of untapped data all day, and Facebook is looking to make better use of them with a new Facebook Analytics for Apps. Essentially a “Google Analytics” for mobile apps, it will help developers and content owners alike gain valuable insights into engagement or conversion rates of Facebook-powered apps.

Bringing New Video Experiences Into Social

Besides a new video plug-in tool that allows easy embedding of Facebook videos on other sites, Facebook is also looking to integrate its new Spherical Videos, which let viewers move around in a 360-degree view, right into the News Feed, laying the groundwork for virtual reality video in your social stream.

New Ways Of Monetization Glue The Platform Together 

To help publishers better monetize their content, Facebook unveiled an upgrade of its video ad platform Live Rail that will add support for mobile display ads—especially native ads, Facebook’s Audience Network—while also improving content targeting using Facebook’s anonymized data. Moreover, the previously mentioned deep integration of content and apps on Facebook Platform will undoubtedly bring in ample opportunities for monetization.

 

 

SXSW 2015: E-Commerce Is The New Publishing

Posted on by Lab Team

With the total democratization of ecommerce, Rachel Youens of Wanelo believes online retailers should look to publishing for advice. When online media first appeared and proliferated, tools lowered the entry barrier to effectively zero. Blogs enabled content creation to be so easy that for awhile, it became almost impossible not to be a publisher.

The downside was that there were too many places to consume content. Blogs diffused across the Internet, and didn’t consolidate well. Social media changed that — instead of an XML or RSS feed, social feeds like Twitter enable a curated stream of media. This has led to some scaled success, like BuzzFeed, and some consolidation. Whatever the media revolution was, it is no longer that easy to become a publisher.

Youens thinks ecommerce is following a similar trajectory. Tools like Etsy and Shopify have enabled a revolution, allowing a massive proliferation of small online retailers. At the same time, it is difficult to scale such an industry. This is why platforms like Amazon, Pinterest and Polyvore — so-called shopping search engines — are gaining in popularity. Successful ecommerce businesses are creating different profiles on each site, much like publishers did with social platforms during the second phase of the media revolution.

The tipping point, Youens believes, has arrived. In order to stay ahead of the curve, ecommerce needs to adapt to become part of the new ecosystem — robust feeds, native platform integration, accessible messaging, as consolidation won’t be far behind.

Know Your Audience: Why Fab Flails And Zulily Thrives

Posted on by Lab Team

Ecommerce can be a tricky territory for retail startups to navigate. A few years back, mobile retailer Fab was one of the hottest startup on the scene, yet the company started to flail in 2013 after blowing through $200 million in two years without finding a sustainable business model. Flash forward to now, PCH Innovations is set to close its acquisition of the what’s left of Fab for a meager $15 million. Meanwhile, fellow digital retailer Zulily has been steadily growing and just posed an impressive $1 billion in 2014 annual revenue.

The difference between the fate of the two retailers comes down to “know your audience.” Over the years, Zulily has greatly benefited from its unwavering focus on young moms and a nuanced understanding of its targeted audience through purchase data analysis. The company stayed true to its core value offering daily updated collections of well-curated products that caters to its niche costumers. In contrast, Fab simply cast too wide of a net with its aggressive, uncalibrated expansions, including some costly over-scaled marketing campaigns and a hasty venture into the European market. At the end of the day, a deep understanding of your audience is what leads to targeted offers of true values, something all brands need in order to thrive in today’s market.

Do you know your audience?