Tag: ecommerce

Event Recap: NJ Tech Meetup #65

Posted on by Ben Hone

On October 20th, the Lab attended the 65th New Jersey Tech Meetup in Hoboken, NJ. As is tradition, the event began with three entrepreneurs introducing their startups, followed by a fireside chat with an industry veteran. This month’s speaker was Micah Rosenbloom, Managing Partner of Founder Collective, an early-stage investor fund.

The first entrepreneur to present was Scott from Thrive Commerce. A major friction point in eCommerce occurs when consumers leave a retailer’s site to search for coupons on third party sites like RetailMeNot. Often times, once someone leaves the site, they do not come back to check out. Purchased on a SaaS model, Thrive Commerce is a deal management platform that enables retailers to publish, track, and offer discounts to their products across their owned properties. With the coupons readily available, the consumer is encouraged to stay focused on checking out once they have decided to purchase. The platform also allows brands to optimize language on their site to efficiently compete with these third parties’ SEO campaigns.

Next to the podium was Lisa, Founder and CEO of Savile Row Society (SRS), to discuss her new app, Savil.me. Savile Row Society is an eCommerce platform for men who are in need of fashion advice. The site and app connect consumers to personal stylists who shop for them. Products are delivered through Postmates. Each user can also curate their own ‘Virtual Closet,’ which is composed of items already in a user’s closet and garments they have purchased through SRS. Users can then leverage SRS’s color matching algorithm to receive outfit suggestions.

The last presenter introduced the audience to Paydunk‘s secure checkout service, which solves an issue even further down the funnel than Thrive Commerce. Rather than shopping cart abandonment, Paydunk is looking to solve checkout abandonment. Too often, online shoppers get confused or spooked by having to enter personal information over and over again on different sites in order to purchase online. Pay dunk allows users to have one secure method of checkout that does not save purchase information. A user is prompted to enter a pin number to confirm purchase, then a push notification is sent to their mobile device as a secondary confirmation. This essentially acts as a virtual debit card.

After the presentations concluded, Micah Rosenbloom took the stage to discuss his career as a founder and a funder. He stressed the importance of leaving no stone unturned because inspiration or opportunity may reveal themselves in unlikely places. He also recommended that everyone frequently take a pomodoro to maintain focus and increase productivity at work.

 

Twitter Debuts “Conversion Lift Reports” For Comparing Campaign Performance

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Thursday, Twitter announced its plan to allow advertisers to generate reports that measure how much impact their promoted tweets have on converting users into customers across desktop and mobile. The reports will compare multiple Twitter Ads campaigns against one another to see how their conversion rates stack up. Facebook introduced a similar feature in early September, so it makes sense for Twitter to add this feature to better compete with Facebook for ad dollars.

What Brands Need To Do
According to Twitter’s own data, people who see a promoted tweet are 1.4 times more likely to to take action and move down the sales funnel than those who don’t. This new report can help advertisers better understand the impact of their ads and make informed decisions about where to spend their money. As Twitter ramps up its efforts in courting brands and advertisers under the reign of newly appointed permanent CEO Jack Dorsey, we expect them to continue to come out with new marketing tools and products, in the same vein as the “Sponsored Moments” and an ad network for pre-roll videos they introduced earlier this month.

 

Source: AdAge

How Retailers Are Fighting Showrooming With Digital Price Tags

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Showrooming refers to the popular practice of consumers visiting retail stores in order to examine an item before buying it online instead, and it is hurting the bottom line of many brick-and-mortar retailers. Lower prices offered by online sellers is a primary reason for showrooming, and that’s why some big-name retail brands, such as Sears, Kohl’s, and Home Depot, are installing digital shelf displays, which allow for real-time adjustment of product prices, at select stores in order to match the low prices shoppers find online.

What Brands Need To Do
While it may be an effective way for physical stores to compete with online marketplaces such as Amazon, it is in fact a rather pricey solution, as digitizing all price tags in one single store could reportedly cost up to six figures. In order to better combat showrooming, retailers need to think about more ways to incorporate their digital assets into physical stores, like what Rebecca Minkoff did, or figure out ways to convert customers to webrooming, which entails product research online before in-store purchase.

 

Source: Bloomberg Business

 

How Adblockers Are Messing Up Retailers’ Websites

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The perils that Apple’s ad-blocking extension in iOS 9 inflicted on digital publishers has been well–documented, but one lesser-known impact of those ad-blockers is that it can cause problems with retailers’ ecommerce sites. According to Fortune’s hands-on experiments, multiple major retailers’ digital sales channels would be negatively impacted when popular iOS ad-blocker Crystal is enabled.

The damage varies from site to site: Sears and Walgreens would have an entire webpage wipes out, whereas mobile sites of Lululemon and Walmart lose functioning online shopping carts with Crystal enabled. This is likely a result of some retailers using ad servers as part of their web platform to aid in retargeting, which in turn caused adblockers to wipe out their actual content. What’s more, ad-blockers can also strip out backend shopper behavior-tracking codes like Google Analytics or Adobe’s Omniture, which some retailers rely on for real-time customer insights.

What Brands Need To Do
Just as digital publishers have to get creative and move towards social and native ads in order to deal with the rise of ad-blockers, retailers too need to make it a priority to update the backend of their sites to prevent their web content from being misidentified as ads and getting blocked. Moreover, retailers should consider exploring social commerce enabled by buy buttons or, if resource permits, developing their own branded mobile apps, which the ad-blockers don’t affect, to offer customers a truly controlled mobile shopping experience.

 

Source: Fortune

Facebook Partners With Shopify To Build Shop Sections On Pages

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
A week after Facebook first announced the addition of a new mobile-optimized Shop section to Pages, Canadian ecommerce platform Shopify is revealed as the partner that will be powering those new shopping channels on the social network. Shopify says the feature will be made available for all page-owners for free, and merchants can active it by simply adding the Facebook sales channel within the Shopify dashboard in the “coming weeks”. In related news, Shopify has also been selected by Amazon as a preferred Webstore alternative, as the ecommerce giant begin shutting down its own Webstore ecommerce platform in July.

What Brands Should Do
The new Shop section allows businesses to sell directly from their Pages, and merchants that are already using Shopify should definitely take advantage of this new partnership. As Shopify allows Shopify shoppers to save their payment information for future purchases, it can create a frictionless shopping experience, which is crucial for conversion rates. As mobile commerce continues to grow substantially, retail and CPG brands would be wise to make use of this new mobile-friendly feature.

The Lab has always kept an eye out for the ever-changing consumer behaviors in ecoomerce. To learn more about the shifting ecommerce space and the opportunities in social commerce, you can contact our Engagement Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) and schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: Marketing Land

 

Event Recap: September 2015 NY Tech Meetup

Posted on by Ben Hone

Last week, the Media Lab attended the New York Tech Meetup on campus at NYU. A number of startups showcased demos of their products, with varying levels of marketing implications. The environment was an open forum and the only question that was off limits from the audience was: “what is your business model?”

There were a wide range of solutions on display including a company that turns text into digital handwriting, a URL security database for brand protection, and an app that automatically edits music videos by syncing multiple takes to the audio. As far as companies that could be potentially interesting to marketers, a couple of the presentations stood out:

  • Grsp is a shopping app that allows a consumer to shop confidently by aggregating product reviews and competitive online and offline pricing. Consumers can scan a barcode, take a picture, or manually type in the name of a product in order to inform purchase decisions. As of now, Grsp is focusing on growing their scale. However, in the future, it may be possible to leverage their purchase data to re-target or conquest consumers.
  • Goldbean is an investment platform that targets finance novices. They are able to recommend equity to users based on their consumption data. Goldbean offers transparency into holdings within ETFs in order to lift the veil to people who are just starting off with their investments in order to make finance less intimidating. Their trading is built on Tradekings API and once scale is achieved, they will have an impressive amount of consumption and finance data on their audience.

Overall, there were some very impressive demonstrations that had practical use cases, although not many of the presentations offered much to be leveraged by brands. Most were in the very early stages of development and will be monitored as they grow their user bases for potential partnerships.

 

Facebook Revamps Brand Pages To Be More Mobile-Friendly

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook announced on Tuesday that it’s updating its Pages to offer brands enhanced call-to-action (CTA) buttons and improved layout. Now brands will be able to incorporate new CTA and messaging buttons to capture followers’ attention. Plus, Facebook is adding new sections such as “Shop” and “Services” sections that will help make Pages more organized on mobile devices.

What Brands Should Do
The social network company has been making strides in forging a more brand-friendly platform, and this update will no doubt make brand Pages more accessible on mobile devices. The inclusion of a Shop section would allow businesses to sell more of their products right from their Page, dovetailing nicely with the recent rise of social commerce, which retail and CPG brands should definitely pay special attention to.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Uber Readies Push into E-Commerce Delivery

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Uber is slowly unveiling its plan to enter ecommerce with a strategic partnership with dozens of big retailers and fashion brands, as the on-demand car service tries to establish itself as an express delivery option for shoppers on a wide range of shopping websites and apps. Moreover, Uber has also been reportedly in talks with retail tech companies like Bigcommerce and Shopify, which help small businesses set up online storefronts. The news came just 3 weeks after Uber started testing the UberRush courier service to handle package returns.

What Brands Should Do
Clearly, this new program would offer retailers, big and small, a great opportunity to modernize their customer experience with on-demand service. Its potential partnership with Bigcommerce and Shopify could also establish Uber as an aggregator for small local stores in the brick-and-mortar retail space, similar to the way Amazon provides a platform for independent online vendors, and that is something all retail and fashion brands need to be aware.

 

Source: Re/code

Amazon Expands Dash Button Program To Add More Brands

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Now that all prime members can get their own dash buttons, Amazon is expanding the program from 18 brands to include a total of 29 different brands, adding new household names such as Orbit, Smartwater, and L’Oreal. Moreover, the ecommerce giant is also offering credit refund for the first Dash button purchase to incentivize users to try out the physical “one-click buy button”.

What Brands Should Do
With the new expansion, Dash Buttons now cover more than 500 CPG products for Amazon shoppers to purchase with a simple press. As we previously wrote, any brands with a regularly-replenished consumer product would be wise to get on board now and develop their own branded buttons to cultivate a long-term relationship with consumers.

 

Source: 9to5 Toys

PayPal Acquires Mobile Commerce Startup Modest

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, PayPal announced its acquisition of mobile commerce platform Modest for an undisclosed amount. This marks PayPal’s first acquisition since its split from eBay and signals the digital payment company’s ambition in diving deeper into ecommerce. Modest’s team and capabilities, which includes helping online businesses create their own app or integrate their stores within existing apps, and helping merchants add “buy buttons” into their social channels, will be integrated within PayPal’s Braintree platform, a move which the team described as a “cheat code” to get huge scale.

What Brands Should Do
As more and more consumers warm up to mobile commerce, especially on social channels, brands have to be quick to respond to shifting online shopping behaviors. For example, Pinterest’s newly introduced “Buyable Pins” feature, which uses the Braintree platform, allows users to easily buy products pinned from retailers such as Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus with just a few taps. For brands that aim to create better experiences for their customers on digital platforms, this kind of “contextual commerce” powered by the likes of Modest would be an interesting and potentially rewarding option to explore.

 

Source: VentutreBeat