Stay in Touch
As Rent the Runway has established itself in the rental apparel market, the business is growing on the back of word-of-mouth, user-generated content and other organic marketing means. According to Anushka Salinas, Rent the Runway’s chief revenue officer, 94% of the company’s customers are acquired organically, while the rest come through paid marketing initiatives.
TikTok is the app du jour for the younger generation, and advertisers are just beginning to dabble with it. But does it have the ability to become a social commerce leader? While TikTok's parent company has seen e-commerce success in other territories, a few obstacles remain in the way in the United States.
As Amazon continues to set shipping expectations, competing marketplaces and platforms are racing to ensure their sellers don't fall behind. This week, Etsy became the latest marketplace to go all-in on free shipping, with an announcement that at the end of July, it will start ranking sellers who offer free shipping higher in search results.
As Boxed continues to add to products to its private label brand, Prince & Spring, it's looking for more ways for the brand to stand out outside of Boxed, and continues to experiment with which promotion type will drive up average order value. Boxed launched Prince & Spring four years ago. Now, approximately 100 of the 1,800 SKUs that Boxed carries are Prince & Spring products, and Prince & Spring accounts for about 15% of Boxed's sales.
Companies like The RealReal, which is now public, StockX and Poshmark have been garnering increased attention and shining a light on the business of reselling goods. This kind of commerce has been around for years, but these startups believe they're part of a burgeoning and soon-to-be dominant retail industry.
Instacart chief business officer Nilam Ganenthiran explained how Instacart is plotting its roadmap for grocery’s online turning point, the influence of the delivery wars being fought by Amazon and Walmart on the business, and why the company won’t open its own grocery store.
Scott Cutler, the new CEO of StockX, has experience getting brands to work with, not against, resale marketplaces. As the former president of StubHub, Cutler was responsible for signing partnerships with entertainment companies and sports teams to bring a greater air of legitimacy to the resale ticket marketplace. Now, Cutler is looking to convince more brands to join forces with StockX as the sneaker resale landscape gets more crowded.
Live today, Made For You is a razor brand for men and women made by Bic and selling exclusively on Amazon. As subscription razor companies have flooded the DTC market, Bic is using Amazon’s platform and existing operations – fulfillment, fast delivery, an existing membership base with Prime – to compete.
Ebay is pushing ahead on making its marketplace more personalized as customers shop not just by selection, but convenience. On Thursday, the company announced it was releasing 10 new features that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to learn and then adapt to customer preferences in search, product suggestions and ads, as well as on the homepage and through customer service.
Walmart is aggressively testing new delivery capabilities – both built in house and in partnership with startups – as the retailer prepares for a delivery war with Amazon. Within the past two weeks, Walmart has announced that it's testing in-home grocery delivery, piloting a grocery delivery subscription service, and, most recently, partnering with a Silicon Valley startup called Gartik to test out using autonomous trucks to deliver goods between warehouses and fulfillment centers.
Shopify is taking a page out of Amazon’s playbook as it looks to become the all-encompassing platform engineering the growth of direct-to-consumer retail.
In the last 18 months, Rocksbox's private-label products, made up of eight different brands, have grown from 25% of its total inventory to 85%, and private-label products are driving about 85% of sales for the company.
Pinterest said in its S-1 filing, released in March, that it was starting to build more product and measurement tools to better serve digitally native vertical brands, and had a dedicated sales team to serve these emerging brands. In the months since then, Pinterest has released a new campaign type called conversion optimization out of beta that it said it says has proven popular among DTC brands especially.
With Delivery Unlimited, Walmart is adding another option to its suite of delivery services that get orders to customers on a same-day basis, upping competition against Amazon and Target, as well as cross-retailer services like Instacart. It’s the latest in a string of additions to Walmart delivery options.
Pet retailer Chewy made a splash on the stock market this week. The online company priced its initial offering at about $22 per share, valuing it at $8.77 billion. On Friday, shares climbed to $39, and the company raised $1 billion in the IPO. PetSmart bought Chewy in 2017 for $3.4 billion, but spun it off in order to help pay down its debt.
Heinz is the latest in a growing line of brands to embrace live video shopping. In late October, the company worked with livestream e-commerce specialist Firework to take viewers inside its Halloween pop-up store in Santa Monica, California. The condiment giant’s adoption of shoppable live video is part of parent Kraft Heinz’s growing online marketing strategy.
Read MoreAt the Modern Retail Summit, retail marketers will discuss everything from the Amazon effect to new infrastructure to the shift in the direct-to-consumer world.
Book Passes
