Read original story on: AdWeek
Facebook is giving Google a run for its ad money by launching a new Dynamic Product Ads platform specifically for retailers. With this new offering, retail brands such as Target will be able to upload their product catalogues and allow the social media giant to generate targeted ads for each item. By harnessing insights from the behavioral and location data of its users for product-specific offers, Facebook might just have a shot at competing with Google AdWords.
Read original story on: MediaPost
$4 billion this year, $44 billion next: BI Intelligence’s Beacons Report on beacon-influenced retail sales are certainly eye-catching. Despite its predicted substantial growth, it is important to remember that this still takes up less than 0.1% of total store sales for now. More retailers need to get on board with the proximity technology for beacons to hit mainstream. According to the report, consumer adoptions will be driven by coupons, loyalty programs and personalized messaging.
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?
Read original story on: Digiday
Last week we closely followed the coverage of the Digiday Retail Summit, where executives from the retail world came together to talk about the future of retail and the challenges facing the industry. A lot was discussed, but two themes stood out for us:
Attribution technology still needs work
With the growing number of devices and the dizzying array of ad types, cross-channel attribution keeps fracturing ad measurements. Insiders from the retail industry are increasingly impatient for the attribution technology to be precise enough to pinpoint exactly where their sale is coming from, but it looks like we might still need a few years for it to fully catch up.
Digital retail starts to converge with physical stores
As online commerce starts to circle back into physical space and converge with brick-and-mortar, how to efficiently make both work together poses an ongoing challenge for retailers today. Some are willing to experiment with cutting-edge technologies to tackle the challenge. Lowe’s, for instance, is using 3D virtual-reality rooms in their physical stores that allow customers to see a 3D model of their renovation projects.
Read original story on: TechCrunch
Charts courtesy of ben-evans.com
Apple just had the most profitable quarter of any company, ever. The Cupertino company announced on Tuesday the financial report for its fiscal 2015 first quarter ending December 2014, and the results are staggering.
The tech giant posted record quarterly revenue of $74.6 billion and record quarterly net profit of $18.04 billion. To put it in perspective, that means Apple makes around $8.3 million per hour in profit.
Thanks partly to the holiday shopping season, a record number of 74.5 million iPhones was sold in Q1, which saw a 46% year-to-year increase.
One side effect of the rising popularity of “phablet”-sized iPhone 6 Plus is a 21% drop in iPad sales compared to year ago, but at 21.4 million, tablet sales are still holding strong.
Another source for Apple’s record quarterly revenue comes from its aggressive retail expansion in China, its third biggest global market following the US and Europe. The company reports $16.1 billion in revenue from the greater China region, up 70% from the same period a year ago.
Read the original story on: TechCrunch
E-commerce startups like Bonobos, Warby Parker and Birchbox have been thriving in online retail—some have even made their way back to brick-and-mortal stores—but some traditional retailers have struggled with the transfer. Kit Hickey, co-founder of online menswear store Ministry of Supply, sums up the three key reasons behind such the contrast:
All of these factors are hugely beneficial to e-commerce companies as they continue to scale both online and offline.
The NRF’s BIG Day is a little like CES for retail: there are big tech announcements, thought-leading keynotes, and large showcases at New York’s Jacob Javits Center. Here’s a recap of a few of the larger news reveals:
NCR is releasing a new touchscreen pay kiosk, called SelfServ 90. With a small and nimble form, it’s meant to upgrade the self-service checkout experience. Wincor Nixdorf also premiered its new moPOS system, as did Panasonic.
Panasonic also premiered PowerShelf, an electronic shelving unit equipped with beacons that can be enabled for both advertising and inventory management.
Lots of partnerships this week: Samsung is integrating with tagging/payment system PowaTag. Gimbal, which is also premiering its new Series 21 Beacon, is partnering with audio recognition giant Shazam and mobile offers solution Koupon Media.
Spearheading the intersection between retail and tech, Intel has a big booth this year. It is showcasing beacon solutions, mobile payments, a Beef-o-Brady tabletop tablet payment implementation for Beef-o-Bready, its SteadyServ iKeg system for intelligent bar inventory, and its Memory Mirror apparel virtualization tech (on display at Neiman Marcus).
IBM released a suite of sales apps, called MobileFirst. Developed by Cognitive Scale, the apps will be Sales Assist (for customer acquisition + management), and Pick & Pack (smart inventory via beacon integration).
Stay tuned for more product news—this is only the beginning of retail innovation in 2015.
Here at the Lab, we are always looking for emerging technologies that capture the attention of audiences at the most effective moments. Kicking off 2014, we experimented with incorporating micro-games at point-of-sale using Vengo’s vendor machines, which produced some quite promising findings.
Fast forward to June, we teamed up with Kiip and conducted a mobile engagement study that reveals that moments-based advertising increases purchase intent. We then joined forces with YuMe to explore measures of receptivity and attentiveness, with the findings neatly presented in a short video.
Read original story on: VentureBeat
This holiday season, Banana Republic is in a giving mood, partnering up with not one, not two, but four local services. The national retailer is providing its customers with free credits for services on Shyp, Deliv, Curb, and TaskRabbit. The best part? No purchase is required to receive these perks; you just need to walk into a Banana Republic store.
With such generous offers, the company aims to make the holiday shopping a little easier for its customers, while giving the local services a boost. And when shopping is made easier, shoppers naturally tend to shop more. It is a win-win-win solution for all parties involved, and that’s why more retailers, especially the brick-and-mortar ones, should get closer to on-demand local services.
Read original story on: TechCrunch
It looks like online sales got off to a good start in the U.S., with Thanksgiving topping $1 billion and Black Friday passing $1.5 billion — respectively, a growth of 32% and 26% over 2013, according to early numbers from comScore. As online retailers use Cyber Monday to extend the post-Thanksgiving holiday sales rush, further growth in Ecommerce is expected this holiday season.
The good news for online sales, however, might come at the expense of subpar brick-and-mortar performance, as sales across physical stores for the past four days are down 11% to $50.9 billion from year-ago $57.4 billion, based on a new National Retail Federation report.
