EBay on Tuesday launched a new generative AI-powered feature to appeal to fashion enthusiasts: a “shop the look” section within its iOS mobile app that will suggest a carousel of images and ideas, based on the customer’s shopping history.
The idea is to introduce how other fashion items may complement their current wardrobe.
“Shop the look” will appear to any eBay shopper who has viewed at least 10 fashion items over the past 180 days, the company notes.
Google last summer introduced a way for consumers to virtually try on clothes using a new AI shopping feature, for example.
“Shop the look” will initially be available on iOS in the U.S. and U.K., with support for Android coming later this year.
Kids’ clothing and gear is more expensive than ever.
Kidsy has a sustainable solution for discountsAll parents know that raising kids is expensive.
Enter Kidsy, a new Chicago-based e-commerce startup which aims to give consumers greater access to discounted baby and kids products by partnering with large brands, retailers and liquidation companies for their overstock and returns inventory.
At the same time, it says, it can help prevent overstock and liquidation items – such as kids’ clothing – from ending up in landfills, which is obviously not good for the environment.
Kids’ clothing: A massive marketTandon’s road to founding Kidsy started when she founded her own media production company after working as a journalist for Bloomberg TV and ABC News.
DoorDash is expanding its partnership with Alphabet’s Wing to bring its drone delivery pilot to the U.S., the company announced on Thursday.
DoorDash first launched its drone delivery pilot program in Australia in 2022, where it is now operating drone deliveries with over 60 merchants.
Once they select the drone option, their order will be prepared and delivered via a Wing drone within 30 minutes.
Most of Wendy’s items will qualify for drone delivery, but certain items be not be eligible if they exceed volume and weight restrictions.
If the order contains more than what one drone can carry, DoorDash will deploy up to three drones to deliver the order.
Throne, which lets fans gift items to creators from their wishlist, is launching a new gifting portal for family and friends called Happy Wishlist.
The co-founders started exploring the idea of Throne when some of their creator friends talked about issues like creating a P.O.
Fans can gift creators items from that list.
While the company was about to raise Series A, it decided to turn towards profitability and returned the investor money by December 2023.
Essentially, Throne is diversifying its revenue sources already — instead of raising money, it wants to make money.
It has heavily invested in its supply chain infrastructure over the years, with a particular focus on reducing delivery times for grocery items.
Quick-commerce accounts for about 40% of the online grocery delivery category, the analysts said.
“Quick commerce with a potential TAM of ~$45 billion (~7% of the grocery market of $620 billion),” they wrote.
We estimate quick-commerce GMV to grow to $6.2 billion by 2025.”Indian news outlet Entrackr first reported some of the details of Flipkart’s instant commerce play Thursday.
We constantly work towards delivering a wide range of products to customers with speed,” a Flipkart spokesperson said.
Uber has quietly started testing a feature that lets gig workers pick up prepaid items from local stores and deliver them to customers in India.
It suggests that Uber sees a business opportunity in delivering items from local stores in India — just like in the U.S.
For instance, the item set for pickup at the local store needs to be five kilograms (11 lbs) or less.
In addition to Store Pickup, Uber offers its regular Connect feature to let customers deliver packages through its app.
However, the Store Pickup feature is specifically for arranging deliveries from local stores.
For example, the MTA transit system in New York collected more than 18,000 lost items from 2018 to 2023 — and that time includes when people were sheltering in place for the pandemic.
Boomerang thinks AI can fix lost and found.
The Miami-based startup built software that uses machine learning to match pictures and descriptions of lost items.
Customers, which can range from gyms to theme parks, upload pictures and descriptions of their lost and found while consumers do the same for the item they’ve lost.
If there is a match, consumers can choose to pick up their items or have them shipped.
The app, which includes instant cash offers and pickup, promises an easier way to sell your stuff.
That led to TipTop’s first product, TipTop Cash, which makes it easy to sell the items you own.
“TipTop Cash works like a reverse Postmates,” Lehmann explains.
(Due to higher fraud risks, these may not be instant cash offers, however.)
When they no longer needed the phone, they could unload it through TipTop Cash and buy their new one.
Most notably, Walmart is launching a new generative AI search feature on iOS that will allow customers to search for products by use cases, instead of by product or brand names.
These enhanced search results will span categories, rivaling Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience), which can recommend products and show various factors to consider, along with reviews, prices, images, and more.
At the time, Walmart teased that a generative AI-powered search feature was also in the works.
In another area, Walmart’s generative AI tool for store associates, My Assistant, will be expanded to 11 countries outside the U.S. in 2024, where it will work in employees’ native languages.
Outside of AI, Walmart is looking to other new technology for faster deliveries.
TikTok is looking to grow the size of its TikTok Shop U.S. business tenfold to as much as $17.5 billion this year, according to a new report from Bloomberg.
As Bloomberg previously reported, TikTok was on track to amass around $20 billion in global gross merchandise value last year.
In addition, the report says the company is planning to launch TikTok Shop in Latin America in the coming months.
The report indicates that during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday season in November, more than 5 million new U.S. customers purchased something via TikTok Shop.
TikTok Shop has also started to reduce some subsidies for merchants.
