Retail Tech: Walmart Launches Back-to-School Campaign on Roblox, Shoe Carnival Taps CommerceHub
The weekly Retail Tech Roundup compiles technology news across the supply chain, manufacturing, retail, e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment sectors.
Metaverse
Walmart/Roblox
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Walmart has introduced Supercampus, a back-to-school-themed game, as part of its collaboration with online gaming program Roblox.
Players aged 13 and up can solve puzzles and play using supplies from Bic, Crayola, 3M and other popular back-to-school brands, according to the retail giant. In March, the retailer ended its Universe of Play, a branded space it had on the platform for six months.
Walmart’s partnership with Roblox is one of many today in retail, particularly in the fashion realm where brands like Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Pacsun, Vans, Forever 21, and Dick’s Sporting Goods have all created their own experiences with the gaming platform.
The move came a month after Target’s Shipt released a back-to-school experience of its own on Roblox, where gamers can act as Shipt shoppers and deliver back-to-school items.
“Walmart has always aimed to create engaging experiences for our customers and members; now, we’re continuing to explore how to do that in the virtual worlds where they are spending more of their time,” the company wrote in a blog post. “We’re proud to have created a one-of-a-kind virtual journey where players can showcase their talents and uncover hidden skills, perfectly timed for the back-to-school season.”
E-commerce
Shoe Carnival/CommerceHub
Shoe Carnival has partnered with e-commerce technology and services platform CommerceHub to make it easier to find, onboard and effectively merchandise new products from qualified brands.
As part of its growth strategy to increase scale and become a multi-billion-dollar retailer, Shoe Carnival aims to leverage the partnership to significantly increase online sales of third-party-owned products.
Shoe Carnival currently generates over $1.2 billion in annual revenue and is one of the nation’s largest family footwear retailers, offering a broad assortment with an emphasis on national name brands. In addition to its nearly 400stores nationwide, the company has a growing online retail business.
Over the past decade, Shoe Carnival says that its growth has been based on a customer-centric approach, strong supplier brand partnerships and best-in-class merchandising. The company has applied these same strengths to grow its e-commerce business, with a successful strategy increasing online product assortment and personalization at scale.
CommerceHub, where 40,000 brands and retailers transact over $50 billion in gross merchandise value annually, is a cloud-based commerce network and provides SaaS solutions enabling its partners to profitably grow their retail and e-commerce businesses with asset-light business models, increased agility, and efficiency, while also improving consumer shopping experiences.
“We’ve built our business on getting closer to our customers and understanding their preferences and style choices in a rapidly changing market, and we are incredibly optimistic about our future growth,” said Kent Zimmerman, vice president of eCommerce and CRM, Shoe Carnival. “We are strategically growing our sales in third-party-owned inventory through e-commerce, which enables us to better serve consumers by providing them with more styles and more selection while making it easy for them to have a great experience shopping with us.”
While adding new product assortment can often be a challenge, CommerceHub’s e-commerce capabilities include unified drop ship and marketplace, advanced catalog services, and fast, effortless fulfillment.
“CommerceHub is helping us create more agile e-commerce capabilities and respond rapidly to shifts in consumer demand, to more effectively stock inventory consumers want right when they want it and allow them to get it faster,” Zimmerman said. “Shoe Carnival is doing this very successfully and providing a seamless experience for its consumers across its stores and online that is generating strong results.”
Shipping
ShipEngine
ShipEngine, a multi-carrier shipping platform that provides shipping functionality to e-commerce stores, logistics and warehouse providers, e-commerce application integrators and new application developers, has launched ShipEngine for Platforms.
The product gives e-commerce platforms the ability to embed pre-integrated shipping components directly into their own applications. As a result, e-commerce platforms can provide merchants a shipping experience within their existing product workflows without the need for custom software development.
For platforms, building their own shipping functionality can be complicated and expensive to implement. Often, this process requires a team of developers, product managers and designers, as well as a long-term commitment to ongoing maintenance and customer support. In contrast, the merchants using these platforms are actively looking for ways to streamline and enhance their shipping processes to meet online shoppers’ demands for efficient, cost-effective deliveries. By operating without embedded shipping functionality, platforms risk losing customers to external solutions to manage order fulfillment, shipping, and delivery.
ShipEngine for Platforms is built to enable more seamless fulfillment and shipping capabilities, and grant users access to discounted rates, directly within the experiences merchants are already familiar with. For e-commerce platforms, this means no more customer diversions to external sources for order fulfillment and the ability to cut costs associated with developing an in-house shipping solution.
The technology is powered by ShipEngine Elements, ShipEngine’s embeddable web components that can enable businesses to add shipping features such as address validation, rate shopping, shipping service selection and label printing directly into their systems, without the need for costly design and engineering work.
ShipEngine, which is owned by delivery experience company Auctane, supports carriers across the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia, including USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL and more.
ProShip
ProShip Inc., a provider of multi-carrier shipping software solutions, has debuted the ProShip Shipping App. This browser-based application is designed to modernize shipping operations by providing a modern user interface (UI), seamless device configuration for hardware, such as scanners, scales, and thermal barcode printers, and centralized, automated business rules—all while minimizing IT footprint and setup complexities.
The ProShip Shipping App comes at a time when enterprise brands are seeking advanced shipping technology to optimize their logistics operations and enhance distribution efficiency. This solution offers a range of customer-driven features built to cater to modern shipping demands, from printing labels and rate shopping to streamlining manifest finalization.
Customers who use the Shipping App gain benefits including: universal compatibility for shipping, voiding, and closeout operations; minimal IT footprint, reducing complexity and setup time; a modern user interface catering to users of all technical backgrounds; a simple integration with the rest of the Enterprise Software Stack (ESS); an enhanced application security.
The ProShip Shipping App is a feature-packed solution designed to benefit shipping and logistics operations across various industries. Its browser-based UI offers flexibility, the device connector ensures rapid communication with hardware, and the integration layer can deliver compatibility with existing systems.
Inventory management
Flagship
Flagship, a retail inventory planning platform, raised $5 million in seed funding led by global software investor Insight Partners.
This investment is designed to underscore Flagship’s commitment to deliver customer-focused, data-driven solutions to the retail sector. Flagship will use the funds to further accelerate their first product—an inventory cloud solution—and grow its customer base.
Using advanced machine learning and AI models, Flagship provides predictive intelligence that retailers can use to optimize their inventory decisions. Flagship’s solution blends customer-level product feature-level data, allowing for more accurate demand prediction and smarter inventory management. Early customers include Athletic Propulsion Labs (APL), State & Liberty, Cariuma, Ministry of Supply, Public Rec, and more.
“What sets Flagship apart is its dynamic and adaptable nature,” said Adam and Ryan Goldston, co-founders of APL in a statement. “The platform is an entire ecosystem that sheds light on the predictive reasoning behind inventory decisions, and then it allows us to manipulate inputs to change outputs. It doesn’t just tell us what inventory to stock; it shows us where we should be placing our bets.”
Flagship’s platform is built to solve a pressing issue in the retail industry—poor and unsophisticated inventory planning that costs brands and retailers millions each year. The company’s AI and machine learning-based platform has already shown promise in backtesting, with findings suggesting that improved inventory decisions could save brands in their target market between $40,000 to $150,000 per item from premature sell-outs alone.
Dream Ventures, Essential Capital, Klemhurst, Future Archives, Aufi Ventures, and the Kleiner Perkins Scout Fund participated in the round along with several strategic angel investors.
By integrating multiple data streams and applying proprietary algorithms, Flagship helps brands and retailers optimize their inventory assortment, minimizing overstock and reducing lost sales due to understock.
Customer engagement
First Insight
First Insight, Inc., a Voice of the Customer (VoC) retail decision-making solutions provider, has integrated with Captcha technology, underscoring its commitment to ensuring high quality and authenticity in consumer feedback.
Google’s ReCaptcha is now a standard offering for First Insight’s clientele. The technology is used to optimize the likelihood that the respondent is a human and not a computer.
Guarding against bots with Captcha is one line of defense in improving results quality. However, other means are also necessary since digital survey data are subject to various sources of error, creating the issue of “dirty data.”
To cleanse the data and ensure higher quality results, First Insight also screens for repetitive comments per respondent, as well as comments exceeding a specified length. Its Risk Alert feature analyzes feedback on test items that may indicate the design or messaging is offensive, which can create a public relations nightmare if taken to market. The technology’s use of Bayesian Modeling helps screen respondents’ responses “in real time” to be used in the data set to create predictive, actionable and proven results.
First Insight is built to empower retailers and brands worldwide to make better decisions regarding product, pricing, planning and marketing decisions, which in turn can drive better financial outcomes. First Insight’s InsightSuite delivers quantifiable results including, on average, a 10 to 12 percent increase in conversions; inventory reductions by five to 18 percent; sample cost reductions of 20 to 30 percent; and an ROI of 11 to 15 percent.
SAP Emarsys
SAP Emarsys has introduced the Emarsys Partner Connect Ecosystem, which offers expanded access to pre-integrated solutions from technology and solution partners, in an effort to equip brands with the capability to create marketing and commerce experiences that can attract and advance authentic relationships with customers.
Enhancements to the Emarsys Partner Connect portal are set to benefit partners, customers and prospects. New updates can help prospects and customers expand their omnichannel customer engagement capabilities with partners, tools and resources. This model is designed to give marketers more time and agility to deliver excellent experiences for their own customers
Additionally, the Emarsys Partner Connect Ecosystem will benefit partners by allowing them to more easily connect and expand into the SAP and Emarsys customer base. The ecosystem also offers partners access to added value, scalability and novel revenue streams to fuel their business’s growth.
Partners in the SAP Emarsys partner ecosystem include businesses like Mention Me, Wunderkind and Movable Ink, all who aim to help retail businesses bolster their customer engagement practices.
Mention Me, an AI-powered customer advocacy intelligence platform that helps businesses turn their brand fans into a sustainable revenue driver. They enable brands to track and incentivize referrals, identify and activate the advocates in their customer base and rebalance growth through organic and paid channels.
Wunderkind is a marketing solution that helps brands reach new customers through their owned channels. Powered by identity management and permissioning technology, Wunderkind can help grow customer relationships and revenue through one-to-one messages across their website, email, texts, and ads.
Movable Ink personalizes every customer engagement through automation and artificial intelligence. Brands often rely on Movable Ink to maximize revenue, simplify workflow and achieve the optimal customer experience.
The launch of the ecosystem comes after SAP Emarsys released a study finding that two-thirds (65 percent) of Americans like the option to communicate with brands via different platforms. Another study by the omnichannel customer engagement platform found the average American has four ‘shoppable devices’ in their home.
Engageware/Aivo
Engageware, a cloud-based customer engagement software, has acquired Aivo, a conversational and generative AI technology company, for an undisclosed sum.
The acquisition extends Engageware’s platform capabilities to help enterprises automate customer service, reduce call center workload, increase sales and improve operational efficiencies. Additionally, the deal reinforces Engageware’s commitment to meet their customers anywhere in their customer journey and improving customer satisfaction leading to increased sales and higher retention.
Engageware offers a suite of self-serve and employee knowledge management solutions, intelligent appointment scheduling, and analytics, including client satisfaction tracking, all powered by conversational AI.
With a 20-year history of providing exceptional support and consultation to financial institutions, the company, helping it develop an acute understanding of the stringent regulatory demands governing customer and employee knowledge management data. Engageware’s knowledge management solutions are designed to ensure data is meticulously managed, thereby increasing the chance of accurate and up-to-date responses to customers via any channel.
Aivo was founded in 2012 in Argentina as an innovator in artificial intelligence-driven solutions for enterprise customer engagement. It has customer relationships across fintech and banking, telecom and retail. Together with Aivo, Engageware will serve more than 700 enterprise customers with its customer engagement suite.
With more than 300 third-party integrations, as well as the capability to enable bespoke integrations, companies are enabled to use Engageware’s comprehensive customer engagement platform to resolve customer needs in the first interaction through any channel, including SMS, website content, Meta’s social media products including WhatsApp, mobile, interactive voice response (IVR), video banking, and in-person or online appointments.
Engageware’s end-to-end platform can offer clients a holistic view of their customers’ journey, synchronize channel handoffs (for example, conversational chat to live agent transfer to appointment scheduling) and provide data and analytics to inform strategic business decisions.
