Retail Tech: Walmart Debuts Shoppable Simulcast, Cart.com Raises $60M, Gather AI x Ware

Glenn Taylor
·16 min read

The weekly Retail Tech Roundup compiles technology news across the supply chain, manufacturing, retail, e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment sectors.

Live shopping

Walmart/TalkShopLive

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Walmart is growing its partnership with live commerce platform TalkShopLive, using the tech provider’s new Shoppable Simulcast.

The platform’s latest innovation allows sellers to simulcast their shoppable livestreams to their Facebook business page as a Facebook Live stream.

Walmart, which has worked with TalkShopLive on over 150 live shopping experiences, was the first to activate TalkShopLive’s Shoppable Simulcast product with a live show on June 20 featuring blogger Ree Drummond, who hosts the television show, “The Pioneer Woman”.

During the livestream Drummond, who has hosted several shopping events with TalkShopLive, launched her new home goods line, The Pioneer Woman Furniture Collection, available now at Walmart.

Shoppable Simulcast allows sellers to simulcast their stream to multiple destinations at once (up to four pages simultaneously), with Facebook being the first to roll out. Once live, the Facebook followers of retailers, brands, publishers and talent receive an alert when they go live, enabling consumers to watch and shop directly within the social network at the same time.

When customers type the word “buy” as a comment during the show, they immediately receive the products in Facebook Messenger for checkout, without ever needing to leave the experience.

“Customers are finding inspiration everywhere, especially in their social feeds. That’s why Walmart is engaging with customers on their terms, in places and channels they love,” said Justin Breton, director of brand experiences and partnerships at Walmart, in a statement. “Through Shoppable Simulcast, we will reach even more customers during those crucial ‘aha!’ moments, and provide them with a seamless, digital shopping experience that shortens the distance between inspiration and purchase.”

Walmart first extended the TalkShopLive partnership to Walmart Connect last year, to test how suppliers can create and amplify engaging livestream content at scale.

“We continue to work with TalkShopLive to test and refine this offering, such as seasonal or category omnichannel campaigns with multiple suppliers,” said Sylvia Yam, senior director of strategy and business development, Walmart Connect, in a recent blog post. “We’re still in the early stages of this pilot, but already seeing encouraging results in three key areas: Engagement, such as average watch time; reach, such as live viewers and post-event video consumption; and overall value of livestream content—meaning, the ways the video can be used for a number of marketing activations, such as repurposing for social media or onsite category pages.”

The startup has powered shoppable livestreams for other retail giants like Target and Best Buy, as well as publishing behemoths Conde Nast and Hearst and celebrities and creators including Oprah, Jennifer Lopez, Dolly Parton, Bobby Flay, Shania Twain and Meredith Duxbury to sell books, music, makeup, housewares and more.

Fulfillment

Cart.com

Cart.com, a provider of comprehensive commerce fulfillment solutions, has raised a $60 million Series C equity funding round at a valuation of $1.2 billion. The company claims it has increased its valuation nearly 50 percent since its Series B extension funding in February 2022.

The round includes participation from B. Riley Venture Capital, Kingfisher Investment Advisors, Snowflake Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures, Legacy Knight and other strategic corporate and financial investors.

The company will use the new investment to meet increased demand from enterprise and B2B clients, accelerate its international expansion, and expand product development across its software portfolio. The commerce and logistics enablement technology provider has nearly 6,000 brands on its platform.

Cart.com’s software, services and fulfillment offerings are built to alleviate some of the inventory, supply chain and promotional challenges multichannel commerce brands and large enterprises face in a competitive macroeconomic environment. The company will continue to invest in the expansion of its software and artificial intelligence capabilities to enable even greater order and inventory control across the commerce value chain, powered by predictive and prescriptive analytics.

In 2022, the company’s software powered over $5 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV), 140 million product listings, $10 trillion in product ads and 11 billion marketplace repricing events. Last year, the company grew revenue by more than 500 percent across its software, services and fulfillment offerings and doubled its GMV and fulfillment footprint.

Jesta I.S.

Jesta I.S. has developed enhancements to its Supply Chain Management Suite that are focused on global manufacturers and wholesalers specializing in apparel, footwear and accessories that improve critical supply chain management and wholesale operations.

With customers including Cole Haan, DSW, Harry Rosen, Perry Ellis and Puma, Jesta I.S. wants to address a major industry challenge—including lack of visibility, sluggish speed to market and client dissatisfaction—in adding new features to the Supply Chain Management Suite.

Jesta I.S. says it has provided global manufacturers and wholesalers with advanced capabilities to fulfill multichannel B2B and B2C orders more efficiently, with the goal of enhancing business deliverables and service level agreements.

Beyond extending visibility across the entire supply chain, including making both current and future inventory availability for faster fulfillment, Jesta I.S. is extending product personalization and customization capabilities to brands to help them improve their direct-to-consumer (DTC) experience.

The new features include Order Express Fulfillment, a reimagined rapid Order Management System, and a headless commerce API for channel agnostic order creation.

Jesta’s e-commerce Order Express Fulfillment notifies users about DTC order prioritization. Designed to significantly improve click-to-ship times for multichannel e-commerce order fulfillment, this feature empowers customer service and allocation teams to fulfill high-priority e-commerce orders in less than one hour using rule-based algorithms.

The omnichannel sales order management portal gives customer service teams real-time insight into the status of sales orders and related inventory across the entire supply chain. When they can view and act on order fulfillment issues, such as stock-outs, users can pivot and leverage existing and inbound supply across channels to substantially improve the ability to compete.

Lastly, Jesta’s new Sales Order API provides a swift method to bring sales orders from all channels and marketplaces into Jesta’s Supply Chain Management Suite, eliminating the need for electronic data interchange (EDI) transactions. This can speed up the process of inbound sales orders, and also negate the necessity to configure or support an EDI infrastructure, resulting in savings in time, money and resources.

MyFBAPrep

E-commerce warehouse and logistics network MyFBAPrep added another 70 million square feet of warehouse space to its existing network, bringing the total to 85 million square feet. The expansion brings the network to over 100 warehouses and gives the company a presence in key international markets including Mexico, Europe, the U.K. and Canada.

MyFBAPrep’s warehouse network is strategically located in major metropolitan areas and allows merchants to leverage a comprehensive suite of e-commerce logistics solutions at a global scale.

MyFBAPrep has reported exponential growth since its inception in 2018, achieving more than an 8,000 percent growth percentage over the past three years. MyFBAPrep can match e-commerce sellers with warehouses that will pick, pack and ship their products worldwide.

This suite of logistics and warehousing services includes Amazon 1P and 3P (FBA); direct-to-consumer (DTC) fulfillment with nationwide one-to-two day shipping; retail replenishment (B2B) including Walmart, Target, Amazon and grocery; storage; cold chain services; reverse logistics; domestic trucking; container drayage; and value-added services (VAS) including kitting, bundling, assembly and more.

Complementing its network in the U.S. as well as in various countries across Europe, MyFBAPrep’s recent expansion also brings access to key 17 new warehouses across international cities, such as Toronto and Montreal in Canada, and Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey in Mexico.

Flowspace/RetailOps

Flowspace, the software platform powering independent fulfillment, has enhanced its fulfillment technology with the acquisition of RetailOps, a San Diego-based software company that enables omnichannel brands to manage and optimize their supply chain operations.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Flowspace will incorporate RetailOps’ technology into its fulfillment platform, and all of its employees, including founders Sam Moses and Daniel Norman, will join the company. The acquisition aims to accelerate product development and enhance Flowspace’s ability to meet the needs of modern omnichannel retailers.

Flowspace also evolved its brand identity to reflect the alignment of software and services that power its fulfillment management solution.

Brands already leverage Flowspace’s OmniFlow software and its network to orchestrate and optimize fulfillment across multiple locations. As a standalone software, OmniFlow offers retailers operating any network configuration and the centralized, omnichannel visibility and reporting necessary to manage fulfillment from anywhere.

Flowspace’s distributed network can expand or enhance a brand’s existing network. The company’s dynamic network design automatically identifies efficiencies and optimizations for a merchant and its customers, taking existing configurations into account.

Flowspace OmniFlow software comprises a suite of offerings to address even the most complex retail process flows, including a proprietary network optimization algorithm that determines the ideal configuration of warehouses and fulfillment locations, along with inventory allocation, that maximizes efficiencies including cost savings, delivery times, and sustainability.

Additionally, the software includes an order management system (OMS), an inventory management system, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a product information management (PIM) system, a visibility suite, a warehouse management system (WMS) and a vendor purchase order (PO) management solution.

Working with 500 brands, Flowspace has developed an open platform equipped to integrate with systems, channels and partners across the retail ecosystem, including direct to consumer (DTC) storefronts, third-party marketplaces, brick-and-mortar retailers and beyond.

Pricing

Academy Sports + Outdoors/Revionics

Academy Sports + Outdoors is extending its use of pricing intelligence software from Revionics, an Aptos company. With a new multi-year agreement, Academy will leverage Revionics’ Base Price and Markdown solutions to continue to offer competitive pricing and better manage inventory levels throughout the product lifecycle.

Academy employs a localized merchandising strategy with a product assortment focused on key categories of outdoor, apparel, footwear and sports and recreation through both national brands and private labels.

Instrumental in Academy’s localized merchandising strategy is its ability to offer shoppers attractive prices in each community it serves—an advantage that the retailer says is accelerated with the help of Revionics’ Base Price solution. Additionally, with Revionics’ Markdown application, Academy can clear its seasonal inventory more quickly and profitably.

“Revionics software allows Academy to take a customer-centric and data-driven approach to pricing,” said Govind Madhu, senior vice president, merchandise planning and allocation at Academy Sports + Outdoors. “Revionics’ advanced AI platform can crunch massive amounts of data to help us understand how shoppers will react to different combinations of price increases and decreases, allowing us to price competitively on the items shoppers care most about and be less aggressive on items where demand stays relatively stable even when prices go up.”

The Academy and Revionics partnership first started in 2016. Powered by advanced AI models and machine learning capabilities, Revionics aims to translate consumer, competitor and market data into more actionable insights and transparent pricing recommendations.

“Being able to optimize prices across every product and in every store has been extremely important to us,” Madhu added. “Despite all the disruption the retail industry has faced in recent years, with our Revionics partnership, we can offer value-driven prices to shoppers and maintain a tight control on inventory—even as consumer behaviors, competitive positions and local conditions shift.”

Drones

Gather AI/Ware

Gather AI, a provider of AI-powered autonomous inventory management solutions for warehouses, has acquired another autonomous drone provider, Ware.

With this acquisition, Gather AI says it has 25 customers, more than any other autonomous inventory management company. Customers will be integrated into the Gather AI platform in the coming weeks with the support of the combined Ware and Gather AI teams.

Gather AI reported eightfold revenue growth in the last year, raising $10 million in a Series A round in 2022. Reported customer benefits include a reduction in inventory counting staff from six to one, finding $1 million in lost inventory, reducing full facility scans from 90 days to 2.5 days, and boosting revenue.

According to data from Straits Research, the global warehouse market is expected to grow at a 7.7 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and reach $1.26 trillion by 2030. With that in mind, Gather AI wants to take advantage of the retail-wide need for faster, more accurate inventory counting, and uses drones to accomplish these tasks.

Gather AI software enables drones to fly autonomously through warehouses to photograph inventory stored in pallet locations. AI software reads bar codes, text and other information in the images and automatically compares it with the products in the warehouse management system (WMS). The warehouse manager can view inventory data in real time from a web dashboard and easily view their warehouse.

The Gather AI solution is currently deployed in warehouses across 3PL, retail distribution, food and beverage, manufacturing and health and wellness.

Inventory management

Invent Analytics

Invent Analytics, a retail planning solutions provider, has released the Phantom Stock mobile app as the newest addition to its suite of retail supply chain solutions. The Phantom Stock app leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to detect discrepancies between inventory data and physical inventory in stores, helping retailers reduce lost sales, boost customer satisfaction and maximize profitability.

The app is designed to handle situations where retailers wind up with phantom stock, meaning inventory records don’t match what’s actually available on the store shelf. This could be caused by wrong shelf placement, pricing discrepancies, product damage, data entry mistakes or any other human error.

Running on any smartphone, the app uses AI and machine learning algorithms to analyze a retailer’s demand forecasts, sales data and inventory data to accurately predict and identify inventory inaccuracies. The app generates weekly alerts for individual store locations, listing suspected phantom inventory issues at the SKU level. The app also quantifies how much sales will increase by resolving the issues. Store managers can access the alerts at any time and investigate each item on the list, prioritizing opportunities with the biggest impact.

By using the app, Invent Analytics’ clients improve their bottom line by an average of 2 percent.

Additional benefits of the Phantom Stock app include better pricing accuracy, time savings, and a potential reduction in lost sales.

Logistics

Digital River

Digital River, a global e-commerce enabler built to directly connect brands and buyers, has expanded its global logistics capabilities to include increased efficiencies, greater flexibility, and streamlined brand and shopper experiences. This expansion is powered by a single integration, enabling brands to ship to over 240 markets worldwide.

Digital River’s global logistics network now helps brands streamline cross-border and local shipping with lower-cost shipping and return rates, more seamless customs clearance and simplified product classification. The solution also aims to give brands more flexibility to complement their existing logistics networks.

The expansion comes as cross-border e-commerce sales are expected to reach nearly $8 trillion by 2031, up from $758 billion in 2021, according to Allied Market Research. With that in mind, Digital River wanted to enhance its cross-border merchant of record solution and expand its logistics capabilities to better assist brands aiming for international growth.

This adds to Digital River’s cross-border services which include: merchant of record services related to payments, taxes, fraud and compliance; landed cost calculations; catalog pricing localization; scalable and dynamic integrations with e-commerce platforms such as Adobe and Salesforce; enhanced APIs and webhooks for customer notifications and service; and payment optimization.

Rose Rocket

Rose Rocket, a cloud-native provider of transportation management software (TMS) for trucking companies and third-party logistics providers (3PLs), has closed $38 million in Series B funding, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $69 million.

Scale Venture Partners led the equity round, with continued participation from current investors Addition Capital, Shine Capital, Scale-Up Ventures, Funders Club and Y-Combinator.

Headquartered in Toronto, Rose Rocket operates in the U.S. and Canada, catering to carriers and brokerages that have less-than-truckload (LTL), full truckload (FTL), hybrid and multi-division service offerings.

Funds will be used to accelerate the company’s expansion into larger fleets in the enterprise, as well as to further accelerate its investments in product development and network collaboration efforts to serve customers.

As trucking and logistics companies seek solutions to solve today’s pressing challenges, whether it be capacity, visibility, supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, Rose Rocket aims to bridge the gap in visibility and collaboration.

For instance, its network-centric TMS optimizes existing resources for carriers and brokers, reducing the need to rely on scaling assets for growth. It can also unify stakeholders on one platform, promoting streamlined visibility and transparency for proactive exception management throughout the supply chain. Its network scale has grown 47X since the last funding round in October 2021.

Rose Rocket can integrate apps that customers need to run their business, minimizing duplicate data entry and allowing for real-time updates.

Marketplace

Mercari/Rokt

Online resale marketplace Mercari has partnered with e-commerce marketing software company Rokt to better unlock new revenue opportunities and drive customer lifetime value on their e-commerce sites.

With users including Lands’ End, Wayfair and Poshmark, Rokt helps companies tap into additional revenues, acquire customers at scale and deepen relationships with their existing ones. The technology uses machine learning to present relevant offers to each shopper in the final stages of an e-commerce transaction, when they are most likely to convert.

After its inaugural launch with Rokt to enhance the post-checkout experience of its customers on the platform, Mercari has plans to extend its relationship with Rokt and integrate the technology into its mobile, listings and Payment Marketplace transaction flow.

Mercari has more than 50 million downloads in the U.S. and 350,000 new listings are added to its marketplace every day.

“We are excited to partner with Rokt to enhance our customers’ ecommerce shopping experience,” said Harshit Gupta, head of business development at Mercari, in a statement. “By leveraging Rokt’s technology, we will be able to offer our users even more relevant recommendations and create a more personalized shopping journey. This partnership reinforces our commitment to providing the best possible experience for our customers.”

Last-mile delivery

Frayt

Frayt, a last- and middle-mile delivery technology provider, has expanded its network to 15,000 drivers in over 50 metropolitan locations. This expansion underscores the company’s commitment to providing premium and scalable delivery solutions to businesses across the U.S.

The company said in a recent report that 79 percent of businesses describe last-mile delivery as very or extremely important to staying competitive—but less than half (48 percent) have actually optimized their networks to improve last mile delivery.

Frayt’s fleet now includes over 5,000 vans and more than 500 box trucks. This owner-operator fleet is complemented by the company’s batching and routing system, which can better enable more efficient, streamlined deliveries and outstanding five-star customer satisfaction.

In addition, the company prides itself on a “direct driver contact” policy, giving customers complete end-to-end visibility. All drivers in Frayt’s network are thoroughly vetted and vested.

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