The weekly Retail Tech Roundup compiles technology news across the supply chain, manufacturing, retail, e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment sectors.
Retail analytics
RetailNext/Ipsos
RetailNext has acquired fellow brick-and-mortar retail analytics firm Ipsos Retail Performance for an undisclosed sum.
The deal is designed to accelerate RetailNext’s vision to provide retail intelligence to multiple brands, from SMBs to enterprises, in both the U.K. and European markets, which are Ipsos’ largest coverage areas.
The acquisition of Retail Performance is part of a broader strategic, multi-year partnership with multinational market research and consulting leader Ipsos, which adds to RetailNext a breadth and depth of insights into global retail and consumer trends that drive value for its customer base of more than 400 brands in over 90 countries.
With a team of retail experts and a portfolio of long-standing client relationships, Retail Performance can augment RetailNext’s existing capabilities to give global retail brands the customer intelligence needed to manage staffing, optimize business processes and elevate the customer experience.
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Through its centralized SaaS platform and AI-powered in-store sensors, RetailNext can automatically collect and analyze brick-and-mortar shopper behavior data, providing retailers with insight to improve the shopper experience in real-time. The technology is built to help retailers better understand the shopper journey to increase same-store sales, mitigate risks and eliminate unnecessary costs.
In the near term, there will be no changes to the account management for all customers. However, as RetailNext onboards the more than 40 Ipsos Retail Performance employees, as well as the company’s offices in both the U.K. and the Philippines, the analytics firm will seek to better strengthen its resource allocation to brands.
RetailNext products and solutions will continue as they are, the company says. Any future changes will be communicated to customers in advance.
In a blog post, RetailNext CEO and co-founder Alexei Agratchev, said that the deal indicates that strategic M&A activity and partnerships are the keys to driving growth in the retail analytics space. By acquiring Ipsos Retail Performance, and forging an enduring relationship with Ipsos, RetailNext can “double down on that process to build out even better solutions and technologies in the months ahead,” Agratchev said.
Fit technology
VS&Co./NetVirta
Victoria’s Secret & Co. (VS&Co) is introducing new technology to help customers find the right size when shopping on the the company’s app for Victoria’s Secret and Victoria’s Secret Pink bras.
Now, in partnership with NetVirta, the fit technology provider and creator of Verifyt, shoppers will be able to leverage 3D scan technology to receive personalized bra size recommendations, without the need for measuring tape. This latest offering in technology reflects the brand’s continued focus on creating a welcoming, approachable environment both online and in stores, while demystifying finding the right-sized bra.
“We have always dedicated ourselves to providing an exceptional customer experience, and our measuring and fit capabilities set us apart in the industry,” said Christine Rupp, chief customer officer for VS&Co, in a statement. “We are thrilled to offer this new technology to our customers to give them even more confidence when buying their favorite Victoria’s Secret and Punk bras.”
With this technology, customers online can reduce the need for returns by finding the right size the first time.
Checkout
Bolt/Adobe
Checkout technology company Bolt says its one-click Quick Checkout capability is now available for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source users, a year after the companies first partnered up. Quick Checkout enables Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source users to add mobile-friendly, passwordless checkout experiences so they can streamline the checkout for shoppers.
Solution integrators can also now offer their e-commerce clients a checkout offering that can be implemented in less than an hour, with no custom coding needed, Bolt says.
Bolt will be accessible to all brands that use Adobe Commerce, an end-to-end commerce application for B2B, DTC and hybrid users alike.
Adobe Commerce merchants will be able to embed Bolt’s checkout capability in an effort to bolster their customer experience in their digital storefront. In addition, Adobe merchants can soon join Bolt’s merchant network, which will provide access to the company’s pool of 10 million recognized shoppers who can complete their checkout in just one click, and without logging into an account.
By providing a streamlined checkout, Bolt says its account shoppers are 50 percent more likely to complete checkout and 67 percent more likely to return and make a repeat purchase than guest shoppers.
The Quick Checkout extension is now available on Adobe’s Commerce Marketplace.
“The checkout experience is so important—one of the top three most important factors of the site,” Sara Kim, director of commerce at women’s fashion retailer Akira, said in a statement. “Bolt made it possible for us to implement a fast and easy checkout that allows our customers to complete their purchase in a matter of seconds.”
Bolt will also offer Adobe customers free Risk Assessment scoring that draws on Bolt’s fraud prevention technology. This gives merchants insights into risk scoring for credit card transactions in the Bolt Merchant Dashboard, empowering them to make more informed decisions for their businesses
The checkout technology provider also has a free analytics dashboard where brands can see data trends across transactions, payments, risk analysis, and outcomes.
Bolt most recently launched its latest product, Shopper Assistant, which helps retailers turn anonymous guest shoppers into account-holding customers, provide a faster login for returning shoppers, and increase conversion with personalized shopping experiences.
At this time, Adobe checkout powered by Bolt is just for U.S. and Canadian shoppers.
Robotics
Pickle Robots
Pickle Robot Company, a provider of AI-enabled robotic automation systems that unload trucks, now has live pilot implementations unloading tens of thousands of packages per month at customer sites in the greater Los Angeles area, and has raised $26 million in Series A funding led by Ranpak, JS Capital, Schusterman Family Investments, Catapult Ventures, and Soros Capital.
Founded in 2018, Pickle Robot was built to tackle a number of warehouse challenges using industrial robots built on core AI software, computer vision and advanced sensors. The company is focused on applying its technology to a labor-intensive, physically demanding and high-turnover work area in logistics operations: truck unloading.
United Exchange Corporation (UEC) is an early customer using the Pickle Robot Unload System. UEC produces, sources and distributes quality private-label and licensed consumer goods and food items sold by retailers around the world. At UEC’s Southern California distribution center, the Pickle Robot Unload System processes eligible floor-loaded ocean freight containers alongside UEC staff who use traditional manual processes to unload other trailers at the facility.
“Pickle robots really do unload trucks, or in our case ocean freight containers,” said Tom Blaylock, director of operations at United Exchange Corporation. “Pickle has been a great partner to work with. We’ve seen their technology improve month-over-month handling our varied product types and package sizes, plus their team works closely with our staff on site to make sure the daily work gets done on time to quality standards.”
Pickle will use the funding to accelerate go-to-market activities and strengthen deployment capabilities. Omar Asali, chairman and CEO of product packaging company Ranpak, has joined Pickle’s board of directors as part of the investment deal.
Following this Series A investment round, the company has raised a total of nearly $32 million to date. Previous investors that participated in this funding round included Toyota AI Ventures, Third Kind Venture Capital, Hyperplane Ventures, BoxGroup and Version One Ventures.
Additionally, Pickle Robot has added industry veterans to its leadership team to accelerate commercialization of the company’s flagship robotic unload systems, with new members including Mike Donikian, vice president of product and product operations, and Pete Blair, vice president of marketing and sales. Donikian brings experience from his previous roles launching and growing teams and products for Wayfair, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Pay and Alexa. Blair brings go-to-market strategy and execution from his previous roles leading marketing at Berkshire Grey, Applause App Quality and Kiva Systems/Amazon Robotics.
Addverb/McMurray Stern
Smart end-to-end warehouse and industrial automation and intralogistics solutions provider Addverb has partnered with mobile storage and warehouse automation company McMurray Stern.
Combining McMurray Stern’s integrated storage options with Addverb’s fixed and flexible solutions featuring its proprietary software, will enable new and existing customers to fully customize and optimize their picking, packing, storage and other automation systems. The combined integrations can deliver innovative automation solutions for businesses across sectors such as apparel, grocery, retail, healthcare, and government.
The strategic partnership will focus on providing Addverb’s robots, including mother-child pallet shuttle Multi-Pro, guided sortation robot Zippy, carton shuttle Quadron and autonomous mobile robot Dynamo to deliver streamlined and cost-effective automation systems to McMurray Stern’s customers.
Addverb will also provide its software suite consisting of warehouse execution system Concinity, warehouse control system Mobinity and fleet management system Movect. Each of Addverb’s software can be integrated with any ERP, WMS or any third party systems. Concinity can manage the end-to-end functions of a warehouse with coordination among different operations, while Mobinity offers real-time tracking of materials inside a warehouse and optimizes material handling. Movect centrally manages the robot fleet end-to-end with effective coordination, control and scheduling.
Addverb’s mission is to discover a customer’s warehousing problem, design an appropriate customized automation solution to the identified problem, deliver the solution and provide dedicated after-sales support.
This can complement McMurray Stern, which specializes in planning, designing and implementing automated storage solutions. Its design-build process is engineered to ensure projects are managed from concept to execution so that its customers have an improved workflow and can more efficiently manage their time, space, materials and information.
Addverb’s suite of solutions will be displayed at McMurray Stern’s new technical center in Santa Fe Springs, Calif.
Visual search
Etsy is now offering an image search feature to help iOS app users with discovery on the marketplace with handmade goods.
Consumers using the app can tap the new camera icon in the search bar and upload or take a photo, and Etsy will surface items that are visually similar to the image they shared.
The feature is an employee-led initiative that was developed as part of CodeMosaic, an annual Etsy Hackathon that gives engineers opportunities to flex new skills while building creative solutions to benefit the marketplace and community.
“We know that buyers often seek shopping inspiration outside of the marketplace, then turn to Etsy to discover items and make purchases,” said Han Cho, product lead responsible for Etsy’s buyer-facing iOS and Android apps, in a blog post. “But sometimes they have trouble finding the right words to find the perfect items. That’s why the team built the image search feature from the ground up—leveraging Etsy’s first GPU-backed service—to give these users another, more visual way to make their inspiration a reality.”
Cho said Etsy saw “encouraging” results in early testing of the feature, leading to the beta rollout to all iOS app users. The company hopes to expand image search to Android app users soon.
“And with more than 100 million items in our marketplace, odds are that if you can dream it—or snap a photo of it—you’ll find something you love on Etsy,” Cho said. “We’re always investing in our marketplace to make it easier for sellers to grow their businesses. We’re excited for this new, innovative feature to make it easier for sellers to get discovered and connect with our built-in base of nearly 90 million buyers around the world.”
Logistics
Verishop/Shipito
Online fashion and beauty retailer Verishop has partnered with Shipito, an international logistics and parcel forwarding company that ships U.S. goods to customers in over 220 countries and territories worldwide.
Shipito, which offers logistics services for small and medium-sized business, recently announced its Shipito for Business service, which integrates international shipping, order fulfillment and returns processing into a single, flexible platform. Today, more than 1,000 businesses work with Shipito to manage their shipping, returns, or order fulfillment processes.
“Partnering with Shipito means shoppers all over the world will have ready access to the unique products we offer,” said Michelle Striowski, vice president of strategy, partnerships and corporate development, Verishop. “It’s also a tremendous opportunity for the vendors and designers we host to reach an audience beyond the one million people who now make purchases on Verishop every month.”
Many Shipito for Business customers were already selling on the Verishop platform, so “this partnership made perfect sense,” according to Dave Robinson, general manager of Shipito. The logistics provider also offers multilingual customer support in 13 languages.
Labeling/RFID
Loftware/SATO
Loftware, an enterprise labeling and artwork management solutions provider, and auto-ID and labeling solutions provider SATO, have launched a cloud-based RFID tag encoding and logging solution. The solution, using SATO RFID printers, tags, and Loftware’s NiceLabel Cloud software, is designed to meet strict track-and-trace, brand authenticity and authentication needs for manufacturers.
The solution logs the Electronic Product Code (EPC) and unique tag ID for every tag encoded, thereby enabling “closed-loop” tagging. By logging and mapping the EPC and unique ID to the database via NiceLabel Cloud, the SATO solution automatically keeps a record of every tag after encoding and allows users to know exactly which factory, country, and printer generated it. In addition to central data management, this extra layer of automation provides compliance with traceability requirements and eliminates the possibility of counterfeits. It also complements the suite of RFID products already available for item-level traceability.
Serialization allows manufacturers to track and trace individual items back to their origin—the factory—for supply chain visibility and to know if a given item is authentic or counterfeit.
Combatting counterfeit items is also critical for brands as they seek to prove the authenticity of their products. In 2021, Amazon alone identified, seized and appropriately disposed of more than 3 million counterfeit products targeted for sale to consumers. Counterfeits are a risk to e-commerce players, manufacturers, and consumers alike, and the global anti-counterfeiting packaging market is expected to grow by 45 percent between 2018 and 2026, according to data cited by Fortune Business Insights.
Currently, the SATO CT4-LX desktop printer and CL4/6NX Plus industrial printer line are compatible with the Loftware NiceLabel Cloud RFID tagging solution, but SATO’s S84NX print engine is also planned for support in the future.
ERP
Shopify/Jitterbit
API intergration platform Jitterbit announced it will provide ERP integrations for Shopify Plus merchants. Being an approved Shopify Plus integration partner demonstrates Jitterbit’s rigorous technical capabilities, customer service best practices, uptime, and performance.
By leveraging Jitterbit’s integration expertise to simplify and automate processes including finance, manufacturing, supply chain, sales and procurement, the ERP integration can boost productivity and allow Shopify merchants to spend less time working through disparate systems, and more time reaching new customers through new channels.
New and existing Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants can receive the benefits of Jitterbit’s integration platform as a service (iPaaS) to help integrate their Shopify admins with all major ERP and EDI systems, rather than struggling to build those complex integrations in-house. With Jitterbit’s global reach in North America, Latin America, APAC and EMEA markets, customers are able to connect any data to their Shopify admins to conduct business globally within days or hours, rather than weeks or months.
Jitterbit, already a Shopify partner, helps e-commerce businesses overcome a major hurdle—effectively and efficiently connecting and integrating their back-office systems to automate their order to fulfillment process, according to Ron Wastal, senior vice president, business development, channel and alliances at Jitterbit.