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Fast-food chains are having a banner 2021, and digital orders, in particular, are driving this growth. But four current and former employees at McDonald's Starbucks, Whataburger and Sonic say the deluge of digital orders is making their jobs more difficult.
Shopify is attempting to retain merchants by offering them more ways to customize their stores across multiple access points, from the web to mobile and beyond. The company on Monday is previewing its new Hydrogen front-end web development framework and SDK. With Hydrogen, Shopify is taking its first true steps into headless commerce.
Today, link-in-bio company Linktree announced a new partnership with Shopify, integrating Shopify storefront features directly into users’ link-out Linktrees. As link-in-bio companies face an existential threat from social media e-commerce integration, Linktree builds out a multi-platform e-commerce aggregation strategy.
Today, eBay relaunches its eBay Refurbished program with gifting in mind. The investment runs side-by-side to the platform’s continued rollout of site features and fee benefits for personalized items, another holiday focus for eBay. These are a few of the ways the marketplace is implementing to woo both buyers and sellers.
Once seen as a niche side hustle, reselling how becoming a go-to gig for entrepreneurs since the early days of eBay. With the entry of niche resale platforms like Mercari, Depop and Poshmark, the market has grown even more in recent years. Now many of these platforms are adding features and services trying to keep power sellers on their own turf.
A new more concerted push into travel represents an attempt for buy now, pay later services to differentiate themselves at a moment when seemingly every e-commerce site has begun to offer BNPL options. What's more, it signals that these companies are targeting industries with higher average purchase values, in a bid to ease some of their profitability woes.
Shopify recently launched a central control panel called Shopify Markets. It's part of an ambitious expansion plan, which includes a new focus on b-to-b and international services. These are all strategies aiming to give the company a boost amid slowing growth.
Ahead of the holiday shopping season, Facebook is bolstering its live shopping efforts as the social commerce space continues to heat up.
For Instacart and Gopuff, a new shift into fresh meals seems to be a way to reach more customers. As competition heats up in food delivery, the platforms seem to be betting that the way to become customers’ platform of choice is to offer a little bit of everything.
Mailchimp is launching an integration for Shopify more than two years after a public bust-up between the two companies. The partnership emphasizes the importance of software integrations for Shopify. These third-party tools are an integral part of e-commerce as they allow merchants to add more functionality to their storefronts.
On Wednesday, Shopify announced a new partnership with music streaming platform Spotify, allowing musicians connect their Shopify storefronts to their Spotify artist pages. Shopify’s director of product Amir Kabbara talked to Modern Retail about Shopify's streaming and entertainment ambitions, the differences between its Spotify and Netflix partnerships and building a creator economy online.
Reports of PayPal's interest in acquiring Pinterest presents an opportunity for two tech giants to keep up with consumer trends. For PayPal, tapping into a user community to market its digital checkout services. Pinterest, on the other hand, gets the opportunity to further invest in e-commerce tools that lure brands away from competitors like Facebook and TikTok.
In 2020, according to the postage technology company Pitney Bowes, the U.S. shipped 20.2 billion parcels, up a whopping 37% from 2019. That growth is radiating out to all companies within the parcel carrier ecosystem -- including not just household names like FedEx, UPS and the Postal Service, but also regional carriers like LaserShip, OnTrac and others.
Faced with acute product shortages, retailers are incorporating the humble gift card into their outsized holiday rescue efforts. As part of their revamped strategies, retailers increasingly rethinking when to push gift cards on their websites, as well as how they can offer personalization.
A small group of startups are creating digital marketplaces that feature an assortment of potential manufacturers -- either custom manufacturers or professional private labelers -- in order to help small businesses speed up the process of designing and launching a new line of products.
Big CPG has been aggressively pushing into plant-based grocery products the past year. Many of these efforts are increasingly coming from partnerships with the likes of Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and Hungry Planet.
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