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Multibillion dollar business, eBay experience 22% rise in US sales amid 2020 pandemic

Thanks to corona-virus, eBay, an American multinational e-commerce corporation managed to add 11 million new customers and buyers contributing to the highest annual sales growth for the online marketplace since at least 2013.

This multibillion-dollar business with operations in about 32 countries facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer as of 2019. The company manages the eBay website, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a wide variety of goods and services worldwide. The website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items after a limited number of free listings, and again when those items are sold.

Global gross merchandise volume, which includes its U.S. and international marketplaces, reached $100.0 billion in 2020, up 16.9% from $85.51 billion in 2019. The $14.5 billion incremental GMV eBay added last year was more than the marketplace’s GMV growth in the previous seven years combined.

In the US, eBay’s market share of online shopping is second only to Amazon, but while the rest of the market is growing. The gross value of goods sold on eBay’s U.S. marketplace grew 22.1% to $37.53 billion in 2020 from $30.74 billion the year prior. With everybody turning to online shopping to avoid coming in contact with people and brick-and-mortar stores, eBay takes advantage of this opportunity to its growth trajectory around. In 2019, U.S. GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) plunged 18.1% year over year.

“eBay is proving that it has the ability to sustain the gains it is seeing from COVID,” says Ygal Aronian, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. “We expect these trends to increasingly become ingrained in consumer behavior, which will support eBay in 2021.”

eBay marked the end of 2020 with 185 million active buyers, up 11 million from the end of 2019. The biggest growth in active buyers was in Q2—the height of COVID-19-related lockdowns—when eBay added 8 million new customers compared with Q1 to a total of 182 million. Besides, eBay acquired 3 million new shoppers in the second half of the year, even as panic-buying essentials slowed down and stores opened back up, leading experts to believe eBay’s turnaround may last post-pandemic. Additionally,eBay executives are of belief new consumers will be permanent buyers on eBay and that the majority didn’t go to the marketplace just for COVID-19 essential items like masks and hand sanitizer.

Uber creates opportunity through movement; acquires Drizly, alcohol delivery startup for $1.1 B

Uber Technologies Inc. and drizzly, an on-demand alcohol delivery app made an announcement that they both have reached an agreement for Uber to acquire Drizly for approximately $1.1 billion in stock and cash.

Drizly is the leading alcohol marketplace in the United States available and is designed to be in full compliance with local regulations. With the speed and convenience of on-demand or scheduled delivery Drizly partners with retailers in over 1,400 cities across a majority of US States. The alcohol beverage marketplace began as an app-only company in 2012 and launched its e-commerce site in September 2014. In today’s date, It deals with an incredible selection of beer, wine, and spirits, offering competitive, transparent pricing and employing thousands of local merchants.

This deal of Uber-Drizly merger will the biggest for Uber since July when it bought Postmates, a robot food delivery app. This purchase by Uber is being paid off with Uber common stock, with less than 10% in cash. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions and is expected to close within the first half of 2021. Uber shares were up about 7% in the first minutes after the market opened after they announced the deal. After the completion of the transaction, Drizly will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Uber. Drizly’s marketplace will eventually be integrated with the Uber Eats app, while also maintaining a separate Drizly app.

The purchase will add an expansive new category of products for Uber to deliver. The pandemic has transformed Uber from a company that primarily transported people to one that mostly delivers food from restaurants. However, with the post-pandemic Uber’s mission to create opportunity through movement, the company will add Drizly’s alcohol selection to the Uber Eats app, alongside meals and groceries. The deal is expected to close in the first half of the year, the companies said.

Drizly is on the same page with Uber. It plans to innovate and expand independently in its fast-growing and competitive sector, while also gaining access to the advanced mobile marketplace technologies of the world’s largest food delivery and ridesharing platform. best-in-class routing technology and a significant consumer base will make it possible for Drizly to achieve its vision. Merchants on Drizly will be able to benefit from Uber’s Delivery drivers will have even more ways to earn. Moreover, Uber’s rewards and subscription programs will be able to deliver even greater value to consumers with new benefits and perks on Drizly.

“Drizly has spent the last 8 years building the infrastructure, technology, and partnerships to bring the consumer a shopping experience they deserve. It’s a proud day for the Drizly team as we recognize what we’ve accomplished to date but also with the humility that much remains to be done to fulfill our vision. With this in mind, we are thrilled to join a world-class Uber team whose platform will accelerate Drizly on its mission to be there when it matters—committed to life’s moments and the people who create them,” said Drizly co-founder and CEO Cory Rellas.”

Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter in competition to monetize themselves

The pandemic has left behind a world where social media platforms are thriving from a user engagement point of view since consumers can’t go out to meet their friends. Pinterest made an estimation that its user engagement has risen by 4 million extra users every month during the pandemic. On the same hand, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel noted during the firm’s earnings call that the firm ended the quarter with 265 million active users and that the average Snap user opens the app about 30 times a day.

However, the challenge starts at monetizing these platforms since social brands are getting creative in what they’re doing and nobody is running a charity. Some have struggled to turn user attention into revenue. Pinterest, for example, saw accelerated user growth in 2020, but its revenue growth appears to have dipped below the trend, at least in the first half of the year — though things did revert more to normal in the latter half of the year. Pinterest also spent much of 2020 making efforts at monetizing previously unmonetized international users, which should mean stronger international revenue growth in future years.

Pinterest has found a way to monetize its platform by developing its social commerce presence as a place where consumers go not only to discover goods — organically or through paid advertising — but also to purchase them directly. It has also paired with Shopify, which has drastically increased the goods inventory on its site. The firm has also been looking to upgrade its technology to better support shopping journeys, developing things like augmented reality (AR) and image recognition to make it easier for users to search the site for goods. The AR tech is enabling users to do things like virtually try on things like cosmetics before a purchase is made.

Snapchat, joining Pinterest in the race s evolving toward capitalizing on the site’s features like Map, Communication, Camera, Stories, and Spotlight — which they believe will drive increased focus and operational excellence as they transition each platform into a monetizable business. They have successfully made that transition with Stories, which are being monetized with full-screen vertical video ads, and with our Camera, where businesses can pay to promote their Lenses. All of their platforms share the same powerful monetization infrastructure, which drives strong ROI for their advertising partners.

Instagram Reels, a TikTok competitor, has stumbled out of the gate and is currently rolling out its “Professional Dashboard,” a management overview platform that provides basic performance insights and a suite of tools to help Instagram creators maximize and monetize their platform presence. The dashboard lets Insta creators view key trends and data notes based on account performance, and provides tools to help them grow their businesses, including Badges, Branded Content, and IGTV promotions.

Finally, rounding out the social media players’ early 2021 moves to make their platforms more efficient money-makers, Twitter has recently announced its purchase of Revue, a newsletter platform that allows users to create, customize and distribute newsletters to a proprietary list of email subscribers and get paid for their efforts. Revue also offers Twitter a chance to diversify its revenue streams, with the social platform recently speculating about the possibility of “identifying subscription opportunities.”

PayPal India planning to make an exit out of competitive domestic payment system

As per the report by the Economic Times on Friday (February 5, 2021) PayPal is shutting down its domestic business in India, less than four years after the American giant kick-started local operations in the world’s second-largest internet market. In simple words, the company is planning to exit the domestic payments market in the country. The company took this step to streamline operation in India’s cutthroat market for online payments. Domestic operations include PayPal’s payments gateway and aggregator services for online merchants and brands. Starting from 1 April 2021, it wants to focus all its attention on enabling more international sales for Indian businesses, and shift focus away from our domestic products in India. This means they will no longer offer domestic payment services within India.

India has emerged as one of the world’s largest battlegrounds for mobile payments firms in recent years. Scores of heavily-backed firms, including Paytm, PhonePe, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, are competing to increase their share in India, where the market is estimated to be worth $1 trillion by 2023. Several of these firms also offer a range of payment services for merchants.

In a long statement, PayPal said its priorities had shifted in India but did not elaborate why it was winding down the business. A report recently said the company, which has amassed over 360,000 merchants in the country, was struggling to make inroads in India. Nonetheless, the move comes as a surprise. The company said last year that it was building a payments service powered by India’s UPI railroad, suggesting an increase in the level of investments it was making in the country.

On the contrary, PayPal has plans to grow its business cross-border trade business for small enterprises, with an eye on getting a piece of India’s expanding export market. “It made sense to us to do one thing right, which is our cross-border trade business, rather than to focus on multiple businesses … we can’t do everything here,” PayPal’s spokesperson stated.

The company’s three technology centers — in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad — have some of the most extensive operations outside of the U.S. The business development teams are now making a shift to global trade and business, the source said. PayPal intends to maintain some operations for dispute resolution and refunds, the anonymous spokesperson said.

By the end of last year, PayPal’s international money transfer service Xoom had joined hands with NPCI’S Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for the purpose of bringing inter-bank transactions to India. It enabled users to send money to 66 banks in India including State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Punjab National Bank, Andhra, Bank of Baroda, Bank of India, and others. In Q4, PayPal’s results displayed a payments volume of $277 billion across 4.4 billion transactions. With the growth in dollar volume by 39%, transaction count simultaneously went up to 27%.

Leafly and Jane entering into a strategic partnership enhancing online cannabis shopping experience

Cannabis consumer marketplace Leafly and e-commerce platform Jane today announced a strategic partnership to create an improved retail experience for consumers and dispensaries alike. This merger will allow Leafly and Jane’s technology solutions to offer dispensaries powerful tools to sync online e-commerce with in-store inventory — something that is sorely lacking in the cannabis world and can also instill consumer trust in the online shopping experience, build stronger customer acquisition tools for retailers, and help dispensaries grow their e-commerce capabilities with consistency and automation.

Legal weed shoppers face some challenges when a handful of different apps report to show the inventory of local dispensaries and yet, the online menus often do not line up with the store’s real-time inventory. What’s more, sometimes other dispensaries have different ways of listing the same product. There’s a good reason for the dispensaries: there’s not an industry-standard UPC barcode and the dispensaries often have hundreds of fast-moving SKUs from dozens of vendors.

The first initiative of this strategic partnership is the integration of Jane into Leafly Menu Solutions so that retailers can manage online menus from both companies in a single, centralized location on the Jane platform, reducing time and resources spent on menu management. Retailers can choose to have Jane power real-time menu updates on Leafly.com for dispensaries utilizing both platforms. Jane’s product catalog, Leafly’s strain database and verified reviews from both platforms will come together to attract and engage new customers.

“Trust is the cornerstone of online shopping,” said Leafly CEO Yoko Miyashita. “The Leafly marketplace provides trustworthy, up-to-date cannabis information to help customers shop with confidence and delivers those customers through retailers’ doors. That information and connection with retailers coupled with Jane’s leading product catalog and B2B tools will power the explosion of online ordering for retailers throughout North America.”

Both Jane and Leafly rule the cannabis world. Over the past year, Jane powered over 17 million orders and $2 billion in cannabis sales. Jane is the trusted e-commerce partner for over 1,800 dispensaries and brands across 34 state markets. More than 120 million people visit the Leafly consumer marketplace each year to learn about and shop for cannabis products. In 2020, more than 4,500 cannabis retailers in North America leveraged the Leafly platform to bring new customers in the door.

However, despite the successes, Leafly experienced a rough patch in 2020 with layoffs and leadership changes. Yoko Miyashita took over as the company’s CEO in August 2020 and has been focused on Leafly leaning heavily into building a better online shopping experience.

Due to the cannabis business being under federal prohibition, there isn’t an Amazon of weed or even a Shopify of weed. With Leafly and Jane’s merger, the cannabis industry comes closer to a modern e-commerce business. With Jane’s ability to standardize and auto-populate product listings, and Leafly’s deep point of sale integrations, both the consumer and dispensary sees benefits.

Walmart doubles ad revenue and acquires Thunder technology to buy ad tech eyeing business from SMB(s)

Walmart, a giant retail corporation being a rival to Amazon, has decided to buy technology and assets behind Thunder in order to create automation to create digital ads. One key goal for the retailer is to bring in more advertising business from small to medium-size businesses (SMBs). This huge retailer’s latest move is part of its campaign to take on Amazon’s advertising division, in party broadcasting what Walmart can do for its online sellers. It continues to invest in its ad business and seeks a greater slice of marketing budgets from small businesses.

“Thunder’s technology and the team will reduce the time between the idea for an ad and the ad going live for suppliers,” said Janey Whiteside, chief customer officer for Walmart, in a press release. “While we expect our largest suppliers to adopt automation technology fastest, we are building this new platform to scale for Marketplace sellers and suppliers of all sizes.” Whiteside added that “Thunder technology will be integrated with our display self-serve platform,” and that “Thunder will also increase ad effectiveness over time with creative versioning, testing, and optimization.”

The company has declined to comment on the terms of the deal as of now but has previously said it doubled ad revenue in the past year. Walmart is purchasing the technology and assets of PaperG Inc., which does business as Thunder Industries, and will bring over most of the company’s employees. It isn’t purchasing Thunder’s existing customer contracts, which will be wound down. Walmart instead will use Thunder’s technology to launch a self-service tool that helps advertisers make and buy numerous versions of display ads targeting different kinds of consumers on its properties

Last week (Jan. 28), Walmart renamed its media operations from Walmart Media Group to Walmart Connect. The retailer said the new name reflects its capacity to connect its 150 million weekly shoppers and advertisers, according to an announcement.

Walmart is not the only one who is trying to generate new revenue by using their shopper data to help marketers target customers online and in stores. There are other retailers like Kroger Co. and the target group who also have been building digital-ad offerings.

They are also chasing powerful competitors with large head starts. Amazon.com Inc., the third-largest seller of digital advertising after Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc., generated roughly $8 billion in sales in the fourth quarter of 2020 in the segment that primarily includes advertising revenue.

Google to suspend merchants who practice price discrepancy starting April 6,2021

Studies have found over 75% of potential customers will leave a site without purchasing. One of the reasons for abandoned checkouts is pricing discrepancy. For anyone who isn’t sure what pricing discrepancy is, A pricing discrepancy (sometimes referred to as a rate discrepancy) happens when a customer goes to the checkout page on your website and finds a different price than they expected for their order. it can happen due to various reasons including shipping costs, taxes, handling fees like express delivery, or gift wrapping expenses. Another common price discrepancy among e-commerce stores is handling fees that aren’t fully disclosed until late in the checkout process.

To tackle this problem, Google gives a solution. Google announced that starting April 6, 2021, it is enforcing a longstanding policy of requiring merchants to display the price of an item from their e-commerce page, all the way through the checkout process in the shopping cart. If you show a higher price than what is on your landing page, Google can suspend your account.

Google posted its guidelines for the checkout requirements:-

“People expect to pay the advertised price for your products. If the price of a product advertised in a Shopping ad or free product listing is different from the price shown in a customer’s shopping cart, that could create a negative experience for the customer and could result in the loss of a sale. To ensure that the customer gets a clear price the following steps are to be followed.

  • The price of the price should be the same throughout the checkout process.
  • The price shouldn’t increase at the checkout.
  • The price could be lowered after the product is added to the cart if a promotion is added.

This enforcement starts by 6 April 2021 and anyone who violates the guideline will receive a 28-day warning to resolve those mismatches, otherwise their account will be subject to suspension at the end of the warning period.

How does Google enforce this?

When several months ago Google told us that GoogleBot can add items to your shopping cart. The purpose was to not mess up your conversion metrics, but rather to have “automated systems to ensure consumers are getting accurate pricing information from our merchants.”

So Google knows about some merchants violating this rule and has decided to start enforcing it with suspension notices.

Google wrote “consistent and accurate pricing is one of the most important factors shoppers take into considerations when making a purchase. If the product’s price at the checkout is higher than the price shown in an ad, free product listing, or on a product landing page, shoppers are more likely to abandon the purchase.”

 

Post pandemic still demands for convenient online deliveries which benefits Amazon by 21%

When on one hand corona-virus disrupted economies and businesses, at the same time there are a few online retail businesses that have not only managed to stay afloat but also experienced booms in their course of journeys. This pandemic brought a massive influx of consumer spending to Amazon. This boost outlived the pandemic and is still helping shares to charge higher.

The team led by Michael Graham lifted their price target for Amazon stock to $4,100 from $3,800, reflecting expectations for a 21% climb from Tuesday’s closing level. The move comes after the e-commerce giant reported fourth-quarter figures that beat estimates for profit and revenue. Quarterly sales grew 44% and passed $100 billion for the first time ever.

The company had another major event marked by Jeff Bezos stepping down from the position of CEO only to be replaced by AWS CEO Andy Jassy as Amazon’s chief executive. Bezos, however, stated that he will still continue to guide Amazon’s long-term strategy as executive chairman. The rosy earnings data suggests Amazon’s popularity due to the pandemic has a “good chance” of being permanently ingrained in consumer spending trends after stores reopen and the economy recovers, the analysts at Canaccord Genuity said in a note to clients. Comparables in the new year will be difficult to overcome, but a “new era” of leadership and “ongoing secular tailwinds” should bolster performance, they added.

In addition to the retail business growing stronger, the company’s cloud computing arm is also expected to improve this year. AWS has already received commitments from huge platforms like JPMorgan, Thomson Reuters, and Twitter in the fourth quarter, and ended the period with 28% revenue growth. In this response, Canaccord said that the business’s strong growth should pay dividends through the recovery as ad spending bounces back and its new deep learning model improves ad targeting.

Apart from enjoying the economic booms, the company still faces certain challenges. Amazon had been booked $2 billion COVID-19 related expenses in the first quarter itself down from twice as much in the previous three-month period. The company also guided for operating income of $3 billion to $6.5 billion in the first quarter, mostly falling below the consensus estimate of $6 billion. The company has 70 “buy” ratings from analysts with a median price target of $3,316.23.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos steps down as Amazon’s CEO to be replaced by Andy Jassy

Amazon CEO is stepping down from his position this year, turning over the helm of the company over to the company’s top cloud executive, Andy Jassy. Bezos on the other hand will be transitioned to be the executive chairman of Amazon’s board. This move as he stated would give him “time and energy” to focus on his other ventures.

Jeff Bezos, 57, founded Amazon nearly 30 years ago in 1994 and has escalated the one-time online bookstore into a huge-retailer with various different categories available from gadgets to groceries to streaming with an international reach. Under Bezos’ leadership, Amazon had crossed a $1 trillion market cap in January of last year which is now worth more than $1.6 trillion.

“Being the CEO of Amazon is a deep responsibility, and it’s consuming. When you have a responsibility like that, it’s hard to put attention on anything else”, Mr. Bezos said in a letter to Amazon staff on Tuesday. He added, “I’ve never had more energy, and this isn’t about retiring. I’m super passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have”.  He even shows full confidence in Jassy’s competence in leading Amazon and thinks of him as “well-deserved” to have been given the company.

Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 and has led Amazon’s Web Services cloud team since its inception. AWS continues to drive much of Amazon’s profit.  However, Jassy will need to guide the company through antitrust concerns once he takes the reins

The news came alongside an earnings report in which Amazon posted its first $100 billion quarter. AWS, under Jassy, reported 28% revenue growth for the fourth quarter. About 52% of Amazon’s operating income was attributed to AWS as of October 2020. Shares of Amazon rose by about 1% in extended trading Tuesday on the back of the earnings report and the C-suite news. The company’s stock has gained about 4% so far in 2021 and is up nearly 70% in the last 12 months.

Bezos said he will stay engaged in important Amazon projects but will also have more time to focus on the Bezos Earth Fund, his Blue Origin spaceship company, The Washington Post, and the Amazon Day 1 Fund. “As much as I still tap dance into the office, I’m excited about this transition,” Bezos said in his internal announcement.

Alloy automation raises $4 million to sharpen its e-commerce automation business

Alloy automation, a startup that is a no-code tool for e-commerce brands to set up automated workflows to eliminate the time-intensive tasks associated with running their stores announced today that it has raised $5 million across two rounds.  This fundraising is the most recent, which brought $4 million to the company in October of 2020. This startup was a part of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort having customers ranging from the Baltimore Ravens to D2C brands like Lick Home who uses the company’s services to automate all sorts of operational tasks.

The company’s latest fundraising was led by Bain Capital Ventures and Abstract, with participation from Color Capital, BoxGroup, and a collection of individual investors, including Shippo’s Laura Behrens Wu. Alloy’s $4 million round came from a relationship that started when the startup had shown off its tech on Product Hunt.

Sara du, the CEO of the startup began the venture as a small streetwear store, though she was interested in automation and app-connecting tools like Zapier or MuleSoft. Out of a desire for something in between that would let her connect apps, Alloy Automation was eventually born.

The startup was with Y Combinator once sharpened its focus to the e-commerce market and, as it has just announced, attracted millions more from a cadre of investors. The shift to focus on e-commerce from a broader toolset came from customer pull, the co-founders said. toward the end of their time in Y Combinator, Alloy’s tech was being used by Shopify and BigCommerce customers, helping make e-commerce a fertile area for the company, its co-founders said.

Alloy’s tech helps e-commerce players link services to help automate their shipping, marketing, analytics, and other tasks. One example that Du provided was customers using Alloy to connect SMS functionality to fulfillment tools. Doing so might allow small e-commerce companies to automatically text customers when their order ships, for example.

The founders said they intend to raise a Series A for Alloy, but that their current capital could float them for two or three years. In the previous years, Q4 2020 was good for Alloy.

Today the team of the company is of the co-founders Sara Du, CEO, and Gregg Mojica, CTO, about the round, their market, and their experience in Y Combinator, 3 engineers, a designer, and a marketer who are in different time zones with workers in America, India, and the Philippines. Alloy intends to hire sales staff, new engineers, and a customer success denizen with the funds it has raised.

As a celebration, Walmart offers free online grocery delivery service

Walmart, a multinational retail corporation is celebrating its rise in online business by offering the service for free. The U.S grocery retailer announced the last Friday that it will go without fess for 3 separate deliveries to new and existing customers who use the code “Delivery” at checkout on orders of $50 or more.

The decision to offer this free delivery service has been provided since Walmart reached,3000 stores that can offer grocery deliveries. The 3,000th store is in Harker Heights, a town between Killeen and Temple, but the offer, which ends this time next year, is nationwide.

Walmart even mentioned the fact that its stores with delivery capabilities can serve 68% of the U.S. population and almost all can accommodate deliveries in two hours or less.

The big retailer competes with Amazon, Target, and traditional grocers Kroger, Albertsons, and Tom Thumb to meet the growing demand for online grocery shopping. Walmart and experts said they believe online grocery shopping was adopted as a necessity for many during the pandemic, but that it’s become a habit customers won’t give up.

Walmart said this week that it will be increasing its capacity to fill online grocery orders with smaller automated fulfillment centers built into dozens of stores. Walmart identified stores in Lewisville and Plano that are getting the new mini centers. It is also spending $800 million to build two fulfillment centers dedicated to groceries in Lancaster.

Another major step taken by the retailer was the launch of Walmart+, as a response to Amazon Prime. It was launched last fall though it is not known how many subscribers have signed up.

“We’re really happy with the adoption we’ve seen to date,” said Tom Ward, senior vice president of customer product for Walmart U.S. “We’re hearing amazing feedback from members.” “Our stores have been at the heart of Walmart for nearly 60 years. As customer shopping behaviors have evolved over the decades, we’ve used this competitive asset to help us serve customers no matter what they shop for or how they shop,” he said in an emailed response.

He has called the demand for grocery pickup and delivery incredible. He expects that the company continues to serve more and more customers who have come to rely on pickup and delivery as an important part of their lives. The company is scheduled to report year-end results on February 18, 2021.

Uber Eats partners Nimble for on-demand prescription delivery service for New Yorkers

After a successful delivery pilot in Dallas, Austin, and Houston, Texas, Uber Technologies Inc. is expanding its on-demand prescription delivery to one of the largest U.S. metros: New York City.

Uber eats has partnered with Nimble a quickly expanding prescription delivery service, links neighborhood pharmacies with delivery. It can now connect New Yorkers with prescription delivery, enabling them to easily transfer existing prescriptions — or fulfill new ones — from neighborhood pharmacies right from an app.

“At Uber, we’re hard at work making Uber Eats your go-to destination for much more than food from your favorite restaurant, corner store, or grocer,” Kiran Vinta, Uber’s US GM for New Verticals, said in the announcement. “We’re one step closer to delivering that reality to our consumers everywhere with the launch of on-demand prescription delivery in the US, powered by our partner Nimble.”

Customers can manage their medications with the tap of a button, directly from the Uber Eats app, and follow their prescriptions at every step of the journey: from phone to pharmacy to doorstep. Users can simply transfer current prescriptions, or have new prescriptions filled, from neighborhood pharmacies through the mobile program. However, users can’t harness the service for controlled substances or prescriptions completely or partially paid for by a government healthcare program like TRICARE, Medicaid, or Medicare.

Nimble Founder and CEO Talha Sattar said consumers have increasingly desired a quicker, simpler, and more secure way to get their medications during the past year. Sattar noted that the company was developed on the concept of letting neighborhood pharmacies better serve their clients by offering a high-quality and more accessible experience.

“This partnership expansion with Uber Eats will allow us to offer millions of New Yorkers on-demand prescription delivery at a time when they and the city’s pharmacies need it most,” Sattar said in the announcement.

The prescription delivery service also partnered with Uber in its Texas pilot locations. Nimble has raised more than $50 million of venture capital from Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, First Round Capital, DAG Ventures, and Khosla Ventures.

With pandemic on the roll, Amazon’s online sales surges high

As COVID-19 shook the global economy, Amazon.com Inc.’s e-commerce revenue saw gains of 47.0% year over year for the second quarter of 2020. The pandemic has led to a surge in online orders. A spike in sales from Amazon’s core e-commerce operations, which include online stores, third-party seller services, and retail subscription services, has fuelled its revenue growth amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The coronavirus pandemic forced a huge amount of retail purchases to move online, and as a result of this that has  Amazon.com is winning.

According to a recent study by Dunnhumby Retailer Preference Index, Amazon now holds the crown of being the country’s most popular grocery store. He used a “COVID Momentum Metric system” to get these results, which considers preference drivers, emotional connection, and financial performance to get an RPI ( Retailer Preference Index) score.

This giant retail platform is even ahead of big-box retailers like Walmart, Costco, and even fan-favorite, Trader Joe’s. The company’s speed and digital performance seem to owe to the fact that in today’s date Amazon has the top spot. Amazon is the best e-commerce marketplace to build a brand. It is driving 43% of total e-commerce growth this year, and recent sales have remained strong.

With corona-virus starting in March, Amazon experiences a sudden rise in online orders. The demand has been increased so much that both Amazon Fresh and Prime Now experienced delivery delays and unavailable inventory. Moreover, Prime Pantry also ceased its operations for a while since they were able to handle too many orders. Prime Pantry’s operations have since been permanently ceased.

Handling well the increased demand, timely delivery from Amazon has since been continued and Amazon Fresh is constantly offering daily deals on groceries.

“Covid-19 created a perfect storm that played right into the unique strengths of Amazon’s customer value proposition,” Dunnhumby said in the study. “In Q2 of 2020, Amazon reportedly tripled their online grocery stores.”

Robotic startup, Starship raises $17 M along with its business getting boosted due to corona virus

Starship Technologies is a company developing small m delivery vehicles. The company confirmed that it has raised $17 million to keep working on autonomous deliveries. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with engineering operations in Tallinn, Estonia, and a satellite team in Helsinki, Finland. Starship also has offices in London, UK, Germany, Washington, DC, and Mountain View, California. Moreover, the company has also added two new service campuses, UCLA and Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. With the new funding, Starship now boasts $102 million in funding to date.

Starship, which was founded in 2014 by Skype veterans Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, offers a six-wheeled robot that packs a wealth of electronics, including nine cameras and ultrasonic sensors that afford a 360-degree view of its surroundings.

The company started six years ago and said while it wanted to hit the million mark sooner, it plans to continue ramping up deliveries. The company also revealed that it has reached the milestone of completing 1 million autonomous deliveries, up from 100,000 deliveries as of August 2019, which Starship claims are a first for an autonomous delivery company.

The company founders stated that they were unsure where the 1 millionth delivery was going to take place, as there are around 15–20 service areas open globally all with robots doing deliveries every minute. In the end, it took place at Bowling Green, Ohio, to a student called Annika Keeton who is a freshman studying pre-health Biology at BGSU. Annika is now part of Starship’s history!

With the pandemic musts of being contactless in trend, there’s more interest in the autonomous delivery industry these days, like contactless deliveries and payments much more popular for fear of transmitting the virus otherwise. Starship says it’s seen demand increase five-fold since the pandemic began. The past year has also seen the company’s work expand to places like Arizona State, the University of Mississippi, UC Irvine, and the city of Mountain View, California. The company also began working with The Save Mart Company in Modesto.

On campuses like UCLA, mobile apps for Android and iOS handle ordering. Customers select what they’d like from a menu and drop a map pin where they want their delivery to be sent, and Starship’s robots — which can carry up to 20 pounds of goods (about three shopping bags’ worth) in their password-locked compartments — get moving while continuously reporting their location. When they arrive at their destination, they issue an alert via the app.

It is also reported last year that Starship was debuting autonomous food delivery in Tempe, Arizona. The service comprised 30 robots working from 10:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. every day in a geo-fenced area near Arizona State which included numerous popular eateries.

With spike in online grocery demand, Walmart takes opportunity to grow and become automated

Walmart Inc., a multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets and grocery stores announced on Wednesday that it is planning to grow and expand its use of high-tech systems that enables customers to quickly pick and pack online grocery stores. The retail giant already did its research and anticipated that shopper’s demand for pickup and delivery will outlast even the pandemic.

If the plan goes as it is, dozens of Walmart will become fulfillment centers, with even some of the stores being turned into small, automated warehouses. For this to be accomplished, Walmart will use a store’s existing footprint or add to it. It is already out that there will be fulfillment centers in different parts of the country including in the Dallas area, Arkansas, and also the place Walmart is headquartered, that is, Bentonville.

The company has already begun its testing of one system called Alphabot at its Salem, New Hampshire store in 2019 and fortunately immediately saw the results. The system enables to pick up orders within minutes and have them ready for the customer just within an hour of placing the order.

With this success, as Walmart automates more and more stores, it will try out various configurations and experiment with several technology providers like Alert Innovation, Dematic, and Fabric. There is a mechanism in some stores where customers will be able to and delivery drivers can drive up, scan a code, and grab their order.

Walmart refused to comment as to how many stores will receive the technology or even say how much it will spend on the upgrades. For customers, Walmart’s expansion of these high-tech systems could ultimately mean they can snag a same-day delivery or pickup slot without much effort and also have those groceries ready faster.

The concept of automated fulfillment goes as it follows-

Instead of relying on store employees to get any item a customer wants, the local fulfillment centers will combine machinery and manpower. When orders will come in, robots will retrieve the items from chilled groceries to electronics and bring them to an employee at a picking station to help him assemble. Customers may even seek out online delivery for convenience.

During the pandemic, Walmart and other retailers have seen demand for online grocery delivery go up. Walmart’s growth in pickup and delivery peaked at 300% and its new customers for the services became 4 times in the early days of the health crisis. To answer, Walmart increased slot capacity by 40%.

One click checkout platform, Fast closes $102 M investment led by Stripe

Stripe is a leading online payment company that is leading an investment in a smaller online check-out company called Fast. This San Francisco-based Fast announced a $102 million funding round on Tuesday, just a few months after launching its first checkout product. Series B was led by Stripe and Addition, with participation from Index Ventures and other existing investors.

Fast’s co-founders believe that their mission is to improve the online checkout process for consumers worldwide. With even more people turning to buy online during these uncertain times, it has become clear that checkout hasn’t significantly changed in three decades, and customers are understandably frustrated. Fast’s one-click checkout will make it easy for people to buy things online: no more long forms, no more passwords, no more complicated purchase experiences. Fast is here to bring one-click checkout to the 5 billion global users of the internet and eliminate the need to remember or log in with passwords in the process.  After shoppers sign up once, they will be able to seamlessly use Fast Checkout on any website with Fast installed. And unlike anything else on the market, Fast one-click checkout will work on every site, every device, every platform, and with any bank. Fast. Easy. Safe.

The company’s funding from Stripe comes amid a backdrop of booming online sales during the pandemic. Americans spent roughly 32% more online in the 2020 holiday season compared to the prior year, according to data from Adobe Analytics. Stripe, which also led the start-up’s Series A, is the underlying payments rails for Fast’s checkout product. Stripe was No. 1 on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list last year and has raised its own war chest during the pandemic. In April, Stripe raised an additional $600 million that boosted its valuation to $36 billion. The digital payments company also highlighted the Covid-19 outbreak pushing the economy online and said several years of offline-to-online migration were compressed into several weeks.

“We’re so grateful for this investment, particularly in these difficult times, because it validates our approach and will enable us to accelerate development efforts and build out our team.” claim the Fast’s founders, Domm Holland and Allison Barr Allen. By the end of this year, Fast will grow from 20 to more than 60 employees.

“try-before-you-buy” platform, BlackCart secures an amount of $8.8 M in Series A funding

Ever felt uncomfortable making a purchase without trying out the merchandise? Well, a start-up called BlackCart is tackling one of the key challenges with the process of online shopping. That company, which has now closed on $8.8 million in Series A funding, has built a try-before-you-buy platform that integrates with e-commerce storefronts as a solution to the problem. It allows the customers to ship items to their homes for free and only pay if they choose to keep the item after a “try on” period has lapsed. Only last year, this Toronto-based company had raised an amount of $2 million.

The new round of financing was led by Origin Ventures and Hyde Park Ventures Partners and also saw participation from Struck Capital, Citi Ventures, 500 Startups and several other angel investors, including Christian Sullivan of Republic Labs, Dean Bakes of M3 Ventures, Greg Rudin of Menlo Ventures, Jordan Nathan of Caraway Cookware and First National Bank CFO Nick Pirollo, among others.

Realizing the opportunity for a “try before you buy” type of service, Donny Ouyang, the start-up’s founder first built BlackCart in 2017 as a business-to-consumer (B2C) platform that worked by way of a Chrome extension with some 50 different online merchants, largely in apparel. This MVP of sorts proved there was consumer demand for something like this in online shopping. Ouyang credits the earlier version of BlackCart with helping the team to understand what sort of products work best for this service. It makes money way of a rev share model, where it charges retailers a percentage of the sales where the customers have kept the products. This amount can vary based on a number of factors, like the fraud multiplier, average order value, the type of product, and others.

 

The start-up, as it stands today integrates with various online storefronts like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Big Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, WordPress, and even custom storefronts. The system is designed to be turn-key for online retailers and takes around 48 hours to set up on Shopify and around a week on Magento, for example. It has its own proprietary technology around fraud detection, payments, returns, and the overall user experience, which includes a button for retailers’ websites.

Since the online shoppers aren’t paying upfront for the merchandise they’re being shipped, BlackCart has to rely on an expanded array of behavioral signals and data in order to make a determination about whether the customer shows any sign of fraud risk. After the customer receives the item, they are able to keep it for a period of time (as designated by the retailer) before being charged.

BlackCart also verifies the user’s phone number at checkout and matches it to telco and government data sets to see if their historical addresses match their shipping and billing addresses.

The company has also expanded beyond home try-on to include try-before-you-buy for electronics, jewelry, home goods, and more. It can even ship out makeup samples for home try-on, as another option.

Wolt, a food delivery platform raises $530 million in attempt to enable better e-commerce for local restaurants

Wolt is a Finnish technology company known for its food-delivery platform which has expanded into groceries and retail. Customers can order food from the platform’s restaurant partners via mobile apps or a web browser, and either pick it up or have it delivered by the platform’s courier partners. It has recently raised $530 million as it tries to take on Amazon.

Founded in 2014 by Miki Kuusi in Helsinki told CNBC that their mission is to enable local restaurants and other brick and mortar operators to have an opportunity to provide a better e-commerce experience to the local customers than what huge competitors are able to do today. The company is a huge believer of next wave e-commerce and also that they will go from the same week and same-day delivery to delivery within the next 30 minutes or so as the standard. That’s what they are focused on building in all of the markets, starting with the restaurants first.

When they had first launched, they had just started with 10 restaurants on its platform and a little number of downloads. By the end of 2016, they had around 100,000 app users and 450 restaurants. However, as of Today, Wolt boasts over 10 million users across 129 cities in 23 countries. It claims to have 27,000 restaurant and retail partners, 50,000 couriers, and 2,000 employees.

The funding round in the six-year-old company, Wolt was led by ICONIQ Capital, which has also invested in Airbnb, Uber, Alibaba, and Zoom. It brings total investment in the firm to $856 million. Wolt, which did not disclose its latest valuation, said it will use the money to “continue expanding beyond restaurants.” Wolt’s Kuusi said that it took the company less than three weeks to close the new funding round. Tiger Global, DST, KKR, Prosus, EQT Growth, and Coatue joined as new investors

While Amazon is huge in the U.S. and many other countries, it isn’t as well established in some corners of Europe and large swathes of Asia. In fact, the tech giant only has dedicated online stores for around 17 countries worldwide. Hence, it is on the go investing in various platforms like London’s Deliveroo and Sweden’s Nordin online stores.

But while Wolt looks to take on Amazon, Amazon is also encroaching on Wolt’s turf: restaurant deliveries. Amazon also sells groceries on its platform from supermarkets like Whole Foods, as well as Morrisons and Booths in the U.K.

Exquisite Chocolate brand, Godiva falls victim to global pandemic; closes down all the US stores

Godiva Chocolatier is a Belgian company that produces chocolates and related products. The company was founded in Belgium in 1926 and it was acquired by the Ülker Group in 2007. Godiva has stores in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia and is also available in more than 10,000 assorted retail locations. Godiva also sells truffles, coffee, cocoa, biscuits, dipped fruits and sweets, chocolate liquor, shakes, including wedding and party favors, among other things.

However, this luxury chocolate brand has been unfortunately been caught in the global pandemic wave and hence it is closing all of its U.S. stores as demand for in-person chocolate shopping has softened during the coronavirus pandemic. The company plans to close or sell its 128 locations in North America, including 11 in Canada, by the end of March, Godiva confirmed in a statement. The company however has refused to make any comment on how many employees would be impacted by the store closures.

Less than two years ago, the company announced a major expansion into the café business. In 2019, Godiva opened its first café concept in New York City and said at the time it planned to expand the model to more than 400 locations in the United States and 2,000 spots worldwide.

Godiva plans to continue operating its retail stores in Europe, the Middle East, and China. By the end of March, chocolate lovers in the U.S. will have three choices to buy Godiva: order it online, through another retailer that stock it in their stores, or by traveling overseas.

“Our brick & mortar locations in North America have had a clear purpose since we first opened our doors in this market – to provide an in-person experience for consumers to enjoy the world’s most exquisite chocolates,” Godiva CEO Nurtac Afridi said in a statement. “We have always been focused on what our consumers need and how they want to experience our brand, which is why we have made this decision. Of course, this decision was difficult because of the care we have for our dedicated and hard-working chocolatiers who will be impacted,” Afridi added.

With new administration and new rules, Amazon tries to mix up to the new democratic party

WILMINGTON, DELAWARE - JULY 14: Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Chase Center July 14, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. Biden delivered remarks on his campaign's 'Build Back Better' clean energy economic plan. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

With the new political changes, like many other platforms, Amazon has cozied up to the Democratic Party. Its political action committee and company executives are among those who threw their money behind President Joe Biden on the campaign trail, while Amazon’s top spokesperson, Jay Carney, has longstanding ties to Biden. However, this doesn’t mean smooth functioning between the two entities for the next 4 years during the tenure of Biden’s administration. There exist a few issues like  Antitrust reform, stronger privacy standards, and a renewed push for workers’ rights that could be on the new administration’s agenda.

After going through a rough patch with trump’s administration, labor is in hopes that Biden will prove to be the “most pro-union president” as he promises. For that, amazon keeps a keen eye on the new administration’s moves in the labor context since it faces a renewed push from unions to organize its warehouse workers. Biden has not only made empowering workers a key element of his labor agenda to provide him with various reforms to labor laws and expand worker protections but also has voiced for the support of protecting the right to organize activities.  This act would levy fines against companies that interfere with workers’ organizing efforts.

Although Biden’s support of the labor movement has the potential to reignite union membership This could pose a threat to Amazon, which has staunchly resisted unions in its workforce.

While Biden and Amazon may not see eye to eye on unions, the company is in agreement with Biden on one issue: raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Secondly, Biden has also telegraphed plans to expand workplace protections by restoring some Obama-era reforms to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which were rolled back by the Trump administration. This could mean that Amazon and other companies face stricter enforcement of OSHA standards.  Amazon has supported  its workplace safety team with a number of people who have ties to OSHA and employment litigation as scrutiny of its warehouse working conditions continues to grow. The company added another staffer from the agency to the workplace safety team this month when it brought on Madeleine T. Le, a former OSHA lawyer, as senior governance and compliance manager.

Biden has offered few hints on how he would approach antitrust issues, beyond expressing concern over the power Silicon Valley giants wield in tech and other industries, signalling that he will take a tougher stance. While Google and Facebook are currently the focus of investigations on the federal level, Amazon is unlikely to escape antitrust scrutiny with Biden in the Oval Office. Amazon is already being probed by Federal Trade Commission officials over its business practices in retail and cloud computing, according to reports from several outlets.

Another tech policy that’s likely to be in focus in the new administration is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields tech companies from being liable for what users post on their platforms. Amazon has invoked Section 230 as a defense in some product liability lawsuits concerning faulty products sold on its website, arguing that it merely provides the platform for third-party merchants to hawk their wares, so it’s not actually the seller. Hence, Biden has called for Section 230 to be revoked, arguing that companies should be held accountable for hosting content they know to be false.

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