When Jordan Nathan launched his DTC nontoxic cookware company, Caraway, in 2019, he knew he was not the only founder trying to sell a new brand of pots and pans to millennials scrolling through Instagram.
When Caraway launched, it joined companies like Our Place, Great Jones and Made In Cookware in an increasingly crowded category of online cookware startups.
Caraway’s competitors also helped Caraway decide to start talking to retailers early in the process.
You can now find Caraway sets at Target and Costco, among others.
While being a later entrant helped Caraway in many ways, it did hurt them in one area, Nathan said.
BIRA also takes aim at Amazon’s “Buy Box,” claiming that Amazon manipulated which retailers were selected for the coveted placement.
BIRA and its legal team say that the claim is the biggest ever collective action to be launched by retailers in the country.
Making itself a must use for retailers, Amazon has then proceeded to cause damage and financial loss to retailers by misusing their confidential data that Amazon was entrusted to keep safe and by preferencing its own retail operations.
Retailers in the U.K. were entitled to be treated better and fairly by Amazon.
The U.K. is its largest international market, where it made $33.6 billion in revenues in 2023 (out of $575 billion in global revenues).
The company first started working with Mr. Bricolage, a popular DIY retailer in France.
Dealt operates a white-label platform for Mr. Bricolage so that it can upsell its own clients with services.
After that, retailers like Mr. Bricolage can provide services and generate new revenue lines as they take a cut on each transaction.
Other Dealt clients include Fnac-Darty, Orange, E.Leclerc, Conforama, Boulanger, 3Suisses and Rue du Commerce.
Some of these retailers work with Dealt to provide services that aren’t necessarily related to a new purchase.
The “AI ClipHero” feature creates short clips from livestreamed selling events, which often last for hours.
“Shoppable ‘explainer’ videos are the most powerful video commerce medium right now, with TikTok and Instagram becoming the primary way Gen Z discovers, learns about products and purchases products.
However, creating shoppable videos [requires] significant production times,” CommentSold CEO Guatam Goswami told TechCrunch.
AI-powered clipping software isn’t new, but not many companies have developed AI-powered tools specifically designed for live commerce.
Since launching in 2017, CommentSold now helps over 7,000 small- and mid-sized businesses deliver live shopping and e-commerce experiences.
The capital, which brings total funding raised by the startup to $6.2 million, will enable it to serve more brands.
For diverse brands in particular, there are a lot of economic hurdles that these groups face, which makes it even harder for them to access capital.
Its other offering is a labor marketplace for brands not in a position to hire full-time teams but require talent occasionally.
Its community of brands recommends the talent or manufacturer, who are listed on the marketplace after several stages of vetting.
Brands gain access to the labor marketplace, capital and other resources, upon signing up (at a cost) on the startup’s main product, the B2B marketplace and SaaS product.
Among the many stress points in e-commerce machine, delivery has long been seen as one of the more painful ones.
“Delivery is the biggest unsolved puzzle is delivery part,” Piotr Zaleski, Ingrid’s co-founder and CEO said in an interview.
And in case you are at all curious: Ingrid the business was not named to ensure coverage in TechCrunch by me, Ingrid.
Ingrid has identified a very obvious problem that most certainly can use fixing, but it also faces a few challenges.
“The only way is to build a hell of a platform that retailers want to use to take a volume position,” Zaleski said.
Save for fintech and cleantech, B2B e-commerce and retail was the leading destination for venture capital dollars over the last five years.
Most B2B e-commerce startups have struggled to keep subsidizing their products and expanding operations, leading to retreats, closures, downsizing and mergers.
Building a B2B e-commerce business in tech winterB2B e-commerce platforms provide convenience to FMCG manufacturers like Unilever and P&G for distributing their products to the last mile.
As a result, many B2B e-commerce startups have opted for asset-heavy models to reach their customer base.
The Lagos-based B2B e-commerce startup is currently in the middle of securing a new round of equity and debt to propel its expansion.
Total returns for the industry amounted to $743 billion in merchandise in 2023, according to the National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail.
Startups have also come in with new technologies to manage the delivery and return experience.
Returnmates, now rebranded as Sway, is the latest to attract new venture capital for its approach to delivery and returns that focuses on the customer.
The company rebranded to Sway as a way to show its evolution beyond returns to last-mile delivery capabilities, company co-founder and CEO Eric Wimer told TechCrunch via email.
Sway is currently active in California, Texas, Washington, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, New York and Florida.
To coincide with the National Retailer Association’s annual conference in NYC, Google Cloud today unveiled new gen AI products designed to help retailers personalize their online shopping experiences and streamline their back-office operations.
But the slew of announcements show, if nothing else, how aggressively Google is attempting to court gen AI customers.
(Google’s long offered Distributed Cloud Edge as a service, but it’s now targeting retailers more directly.)
My question after being pre-briefed on all this was, frankly, are retailers really clamoring for gen AI?
But considering some of the rocky rollouts of gen AI in retail recently (see: Amazon’s review summaries exaggerating negative feedback), I can’t say I’m convinced that the retail industry will rush to adopt gen AI en masse — from Google Cloud or any other provider.
E-commerce and fintech company Bolt, which was at one time the subject of a federal probe, confirmed it laid off 29% of its staff, according to a company spokesperson.
This latest round of layoffs, which the spokesperson said happened last week, follow a handful of other layoffs made by the company since 2022.
It’s not clear how many employees the company had at the time of the layoffs or which roles were impacted.
The company, which provides software to retailers to speed up checkout, raised around $1 billion in total venture-backed funding and at one time was valued at $11 billion.
The company announced partnerships with retailers, including Saks OFF 5TH, Shinola, Filson, Lafayette 148 and Toys”R”Us, in November.
