Despite the drop, the online-only retailer reported some positive developments for the quarter ended June 30. Revenue was up 4% from the previous quarter. Beyond credited a 35% increase in active customers and an 18% rise in average order value from the same period a year ago. The net loss for the quarter was $42.6 million, an improvement from last year’s $73.5 million loss.

Beyond Inc. is No. 63 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 1000 database of the largest North American online retailers. Bed Bath & Beyond formerly ranked No. 47 before its bankruptcy and Overstock.com previously ranked No. 50. Digital Commerce 360 projects Beyond’s total web sales in 2024 will reach $1.58 billion.

Beyond Inc. web sales by year

Beyond updates on turnaround effort in Q2 earnings report

“We have made significant progress in the past 150 days and will continue to execute on our plan to achieve growth and profitability,” Marcus Lemonis, Beyond’s executive chairman, said in a statement.

After acquiring the intellectual property of bankrupt Bed Bath & Beyond for $21.5 million in June 2023, Overstock.com rebranded as Bed Bath & Beyond. It then shut down the Overstock ecommerce website. By November, the company had rebranded again as Beyond Inc.

In March, Beyond backtracked on its decision and relaunched Overstock.com. It also acquired the intellectual property of ecommerce retailer Zulily for $4.5 million, with the new Zulily website slated to go live on Sept. 10.

Beyond expects profitability in 2025

In Beyond’s Q2 earnings call, Lemonis outlined plans to turn Bed Bath & Beyond into a $1 billion-plus ecommerce brand, emphasizing the need for “thoughtful and creative ways” to expand and leverage the brand’s IP for cash flow.

David Nielsen, president and CEO, highlighted that during the quarter, Bed Bath & Beyond experienced growth in core categories such as bedding, bath, and decor, as well as higher-ticket items like patio and outdoor furniture.

On the Overstock front, the brand’s online relaunch, supported by a new AI-driven marketing campaign, delivered strong performance in traditional categories like area rugs and furniture, Nielsen said. Its ecommerce site has expanded its product lineup and improved the user experience. Additionally, Overstock is set to finalize a deal with a major closeout and reverse logistics company, which could draw in more customers.

Looking ahead, Beyond plans to test a new technology, Vercel. Vercel provides an ecommerce solution that integrates with Shopify to speed up and personalize customer interactions. Over the next 18 months, the company plans to create a global loyalty program that leverages its database and partnerships with non-competing companies, with options to use and transfer reward points.

“Think about it like a Bonvoy at Marriott or a Star Alliance in the airlines,” Lemonis said.

In the coming months, he noted that Bed Bath & Beyond and Overstock typically see Q2 revenue outpace Q3 by about 12% to 14%, with Q3 serving as a transition to the busy Q4 season. The goal is to maintain or surpass this trend and improve gross margins every quarter, he said. Lemonis said he expects Beyond will achieve profitability sometime in 2025.

Other Q2 highlights reported by Beyond

• Active customers numbered 6.2 million, up 35% year over year.
• Orders delivered were 1.9 million, up 8% year over year.
• Gross profit was $80 million or 20.1% of revenue. That’s a 530-basis-point decline year over year but a 70-basis-point improvement from the prior quarter.
• Cash and equivalents totaled $186 million at quarter’s end.

The company is two-thirds of the way through a plan to cut fixed expenses by $45 million annually.

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Piyush Chaudhari, CEO, Salsify

A veteran executive involved in helping brands connect with customers, Piyush Chaudhari joined product experience management company Salsify last month as CEO, succeeding co-founder Jason Purcell as the top executive. Chaudhari joins Salsify as the company invests millions to roll out new technology products, including AI and automation, designed to improve how companies manage and syndicate branded product descriptions and images to attract online customers and boost conversion rates.

In this July 2 interview with Digital Commerce 360, he shares his views from Salsify’s corner office on the future course of product experience management and how brands can win the digital shelf.

Interview with Piyush Chaudhari

Digital Commerce 360: What excites you most about joining Salsify now as CEO? Please comment on one or more of the experiences in your career that will help you bring unique value to Salsify and its customers, including B2B as well as retail companies.

Piyush Chaudhari: I’m two weeks in at Salsify as we speak, and I have spent it talking to Salsify employees (or Salsifarians, as we call them) and Salsify customers in both the U.S. and Europe. These conversations have confirmed what I hoped for coming in — that my colleagues, our customers, and digital commerce are hungry to take advantage of significant growth opportunities on the digital shelf over the next few years. My past experiences at places like Aon Hewitt and IRI, driving continuous improvement in the quality of the products and services, will serve as a great foundation for expanding the business value our customers realize from their Salsify partnership.

DC360: What do you see as Salsify’s most significant strengths, and how do you plan to build on them? Are there particular technology applications and/or services you want to introduce or explore to expand Salisfy’s product suite?

Chaudhari: Our market position starts with our people, and their passion for helping our customers win on the digital shelf. Our customers’ ambitions drive everything we do. There’s a reason that Salsify was named a “Leader” in the most recent Forrester Wave in our space. Since our founding, we have focused on delivering a platform that will enable our customers to optimize the product content on every digital shelf touchpoint.

Salsify lets our customers centralize their product data and be sure it meets the data requirements of every retailer. We then connect that data everywhere it needs to go across an open network that’s continually expanding. Finally, we make sure they can do all this at scale, with automation and AI to drive all this with maximum efficiency.

We have all this in one unified platform — and over the next few years, we are going to continue to innovate by expanding our network and embedding AI throughout the product experience management (PXM) lifecycle to realize the goal of optimizing every touchpoint, everywhere.

DC360: How well do you think most companies (including existing Salsify clients and prospects) recognize and act on the importance of deploying comprehensive technology systems for effective product data management technology? What can help bring more companies further into effective product data management strategies, including through extended sales and distribution networks?

Chaudhari: There is no question that the period of COVID — when the digital shelf was the only shelf — brought product experience management (PXM) front and center into executive suites for retailers and manufacturers across all categories. They had to invest not only in the right technology, but also reshape the ways in which their cross-functional processes and teams designed, marketed, and sold their products to consumers and B2B buyers.

We have been fortunate enough to be their partners and advisors in the first decade of Salsify, and have witnessed companies like Mars and L’Oreal and many others go from implementing PXM in one team or region to executing global digital shelf excellence in every market. At the same time, retailers like Amazon, Kroger, Wayfair and Intermarché make it seamless for their suppliers to quickly understand and meet their product content requirements through automated APIs rather than outdated spreadsheets.

We are excited to work with B2B distributors like Affiliated Distributors (AD) and Grainger and their suppliers to extend digital shelf best practices into the industrial space. B2B buyers have the same expectations as consumers and want to self-serve their buying experience as much as possible. We believe this industry will transform in half the time of companies adopting PXM in the first decade, given the paths that have already been tread and the impact of AI.

DC360: What are companies (including both merchants and brand suppliers) missing regarding effective technology and strategies for effectively competing for sales and brand recognition through the digital shelf? What are some of the newest and most effective strategies merchants and brands should deploy?

Chaudhari: We believe that the single most important driver of growth that will emerge over the next several years is AI-propelled personalization at scale. We have seen the improvements in conversion in areas such as email marketing when brands are able to apply deep knowledge of the consumer through permission-based first-party data to demographic, behavioral, and other predictive data insights to drive higher click-throughs and conversion.

Imagine the growth potential when a merchant is able to apply similar intelligence at scale to personalize a product detail page (PDP) for each visitor instantaneously.

Achieving this future will require deep data collaboration between retailers and their suppliers to make sure there is the product data necessary to support merchandising that supports the correct persona, occasion, and use case. Retailers must invest in the technology and data infrastructure to power these experiences through collaboration with their suppliers, and suppliers must be testing and learning their way with generative AI and the automated processes to be able to support personalized merchandising at scale through their retailers.

DC360: Are brands and merchants today collaborating more effectively than in the past to build customer loyalty and grow sales and profits? How do you see Salsify helping them along these lines?

Chaudhari: Quality product content is the foundational fuel of two things that modern retailers care very much about.

One, accurate, complete product content powers both search discovery and conversion on the product page. 78% of online shoppers cite product images and descriptions as “extremely” or “very” important to their buying decision.

Two, in recent research from the Digital Shelf Institute and Stratably, 71% of digital leaders from 78 global consumer brands said Product Detail Page (PDP) quality significantly influences their return on ad spend (ROAS). In a time where many retailers hope to boost their balance sheet by monetizing their audience with brands, ad buyers are refusing to increase investments until product data quality is best in class.

In response, leading retailers have invested heavily in the processes and API connections that enable suppliers to meet constantly shifting data requirements in a more automated and reliable fashion. For retailers such as Walmart and Kroger, we are seeing a trend toward OmniConnectors, APIs that are purpose-built to support data ingestion for both digital shelf and brick-and-mortar. Salsify is democratizing these 2-way, automated connections between suppliers and retailers through innovations like our Open Catalog. Continually optimized quality product content will be a minimum requirement for entry into the future world of a personalized digital shelf at scale.

DC360: How will AI and other emerging technologies help companies better engage customers with digital content that is personalized to their needs and will boost conversions and sales? How do you see AI and other emerging technologies adding to Salsify’s product offerings?

Chaudhari: Salsify is a no-hype AI zone. By that I mean that we really try to clearly differentiate between what may become possible in the future, and what is available now for our customers to use on their test, learn, and scale journey. So today, you’ll see from us AI-propelled capabilities like our Grocery Accelerator, which uses AI to rapidly validate grocery suppliers’ against regulatory, industry, and retailer-specific requirements, and proactively surfaces content recommendations to speed accurate and compliant product content to market.

Our customer Uma Home Decor introduces one to four thousand new products a year. Content creation for that many products was a serious impediment to getting to market. With AI connected to Salsify, they were able to reduce their production of content from six months to six weeks!

In the future, you will see AI deployed across the entire PXM lifecycle — data modeling, content creation, data quality validation, automated mapping to each retailer’s requirements, and the ultimate goal of PXM, continuous optimization of every digital touchpoint.

The Salsify App Store will be a busy place over the next several years, where best-in-class AI providers will be able to easily hook their latest capabilities into Salsify and customers can implement the ones that deliver the value they need in the PXM lifecycle. Exciting times ahead!

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.

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By now, you’ve probably heard about how popular cryptocurrency payments are these days. Thanks to the financial benefits that come with digital assets, everyone from mom-and-pop stores to multinationals is starting to accept cryptocurrency for goods and services from their customers. 

And why not? Cryptos can appreciate in value, are faster to send and receive (especially across borders), offer you a high level of privacy, and much more. If you’re a business that is looking to begin taking payments from customers in crypto, you might want to know where to start. Not to worry, the following steps can help:

Do Some Preliminary Market Research
While it might be exciting to jump head-first into the crypto space, you should take a moment to do some research before you get started. First, look into crypto regulations in your region. Crypto is legally banned in some places and you don’t want to put your business in trouble with the law. 

Also, look into what accepting cryptocurrency will mean in terms of taxes and accounting. How much will it also cost to set up infrastructure to accept cryptocurrency? How much money in crypto do you expect to make when you begin? Ideally, you should speak to your finance team to decide if accepting crypto payments is financially feasible and beneficial for you. 

Consider Your Platform
One of the things you need to do before you can accept crypto is to have the necessary platforms and infrastructure. If you are a physical business, you will need to create a crypto wallet and integrate it with your POS systems. That way, customers can pay in crypto with ease.

If you are an online business, you’ll need to set up your backend to accept crypto payments. Platforms like Shopify already offer support to enable crypto payments but you will have to confirm with your eCommerce solutions provider. Either way, you will need to make sure that you have the systems in place to accept these tokens.

Consider Your Tokens
The phrase ‘accepting cryptocurrency’ is rather vague considering the fact that there are tens of thousands of cryptos in the market at any given time. Because there are so many, not all of them will be suitable for your business and you need to figure out which ones are. 

A good idea would be to follow crypto market news and see the trajectory of each token. Is the price of Solana going up? Is Dogecoin in a decline? Doing this will help you know which tokens are the most worthwhile to hold and which you might want to steer clear of.

Seek Out the Professionals
Businesses deciding to accept cryptocurrency is not as novel as it used to be. This means that there are resources in place to make the transition easier. For example, there are tax firms and experts who specialize in crypto and these can help you stay compliant. 

There are backend developers that can optimize your business website to accept crypto. There are tools that can automatically convert your crypto balances to fiat and vice versa. Any business that is serious about accepting crypto should seek out these experts for every aspect of their crypto journey. This will save you a lot of time and effort.

Consider the Risks
Like any other business move, there are some potential risks to consider before you begin accepting cryptocurrency. First, there is volatility. Unlike fiat currencies, cryptos see their values often rise and fall dramatically and you need to make sure you can handle this. If there is a market crash and some of your stock loses value, can your business survive until a recovery? 

Another risk is token storage. Crypto is decentralized and transactions completed on a blockchain cannot be reversed. This means that you’ll need to have the best token storage possible to avoid loss or theft. All these risks need to be weighed before you move forward. 

Create Awareness
If your business successfully accepts crypto, you’ll need to drive awareness among new and existing customers. Send out newsletters letting people know that they can pay in crypto. Make sure this change is announced on your social media feeds and prominently posted on your website.

You could even opt to run a promotional program to get people paying in crypto. Also, don’t forget to have your business listed in directories of merchants that accept crypto. All these will drive awareness which will, in turn, bring more crypto-based purchases to your business. 

Conclusion
Accepting crypto payments for your business’s goods and services can be very profitable but often intimidating to get started with. The above steps should help you get started and determine what such a move will cost in terms of time, money, and effort. It will also give you a clearer idea of how you want to accept crypto, the cryptos you want to accept, and how you will manage the backend logistics of it.

The post [Sponsored Content] How to Implement Crypto Payments in Your Business appeared first on Digital Commerce 360.

Without constant learning and adoption, existing biases can prevent product managers from identifying the most persistent and intense challenges for clearly defined user personas that other products in the market have not addressed. As a result, many product managers build for the “average user” since this approach increases the total addressable opportunity during early assessment. This approach results in products that lack differentiation and scalability that create a durable competitive advantage over a period of time and are easily replaceable.

In today’s market, the most successful company leaders and product managers understand that product development starts with a deep understanding of previously unarticulated customer needs captured by closely observing customers in their workflow. An essential product competency is familiarity with new technologies like generative AI when approaching customer discovery, including at the earliest stages when diving deep into targeted user personas and identifying potential opportunities to address specific pain points.

The value of using extensive amounts of data from various user settings during discovery becomes magnified when the same datasets funnel into the development of personalized solutions. One powerful example of AI revolutionizing product development is the last-mile delivery systems companies develop and utilize for organizations’ delivery fleets, which they even sell as delivery-as-a-service white-label solutions. Fueled by massive growth in online shopping, the last-mile delivery market is expected to grow to more than $200 billion by 2027.

Using AI to make last-mile delivery more efficient

Not long ago, using generic routing algorithms and mapping technology and identifying the fastest, most efficient delivery routes with a simple “traveling salesperson problem” was considered sufficient in delivery systems.

Now, machine learning, advanced optimization techniques, and AI have enabled product managers to go deeper into each part of the driver’s delivery journey and create last-mile delivery products using the most optimal routing constructs for dynamic factors that influence driver’s on-road decisions, like the predictability of parking in dense metro areas, weather conditions, a customer promise to deliver within certain hours, street-crossing safety, and more. These enriched, real-world datasets combined with the ability to “productionize” them to optimize each delivery or pickup make last-mile deliveries more reliable, efficient, and much safer.

For instance, with today’s routing algorithms and advanced optimization techniques, it is possible to determine whether it is more efficient for each driver to park in a central location and walk to multiple delivery addresses or drive to each address. With historical datasets and generative AI, drivers can also access specific information about where they are making deliveries, including access codes, business hours, customer notes, and even photos of buildings.

With AI and other advanced technologies incorporated into delivery workflows, drivers can receive details on connected devices from past successful deliveries, along with important information such as guidance on the presence of lockers and directions for alternative delivery locations, which could be spread across multiple floors. Because of these advancements, uncertainty and inefficiency are replaced by streamlined operations that ensure packages are received optimally based on up-to-the-minute delivery conditions.

Drivers will consider various delivery applications and unit economics when delivering in various marketplaces. If all factors are equal, they are more likely to choose the companies that make delivering packages as convenient and reliable as possible. McKinsey & Co. reports that AI-based delivery solutions can save companies up to 15% in logistics costs, 35% in inventory levels, and 65% in service expenses. In one recent example, OYAK Cement used an AI-based solution to lower fuel and other delivery costs by $39 million annually.

Generic solutions for average users are no longer enough

The same degree of product specificity occurring in the delivery market is also happening in other areas of product management. As AI advances rapidly, the key to success for product managers today is “going deeper,” or using advanced technology to identify actionable insights from detailed datasets about users in their workflow.

Product managers leverage that information to create expansive lists of pain points organized by themes, test and validate hypotheses, and analyze results from surveys and focus groups to ultimately work backward from the user when envisioning product prototypes that achieve a higher level of differentiation.

Effective product managers understand that the most critical skill they bring to software development teams is acting as the user’s voice in the room. In this role, they prioritize product ideas likely to make the most significant difference to the user journey and ensure the development team designs features and solutions using the most advanced technologies that resonate deeply with consumers.

One example of this is a recent agreement between Mars, which creates a variety of food and pet care products, and PIPA LLC, a company that accelerates nutrition science and innovation by embedding AI in R&D, manufacturing, and commercial businesses. The partnership allows Mars to utilize PIPA’s advanced AI technology to design new products that meet the health benefits demanded by customers. The technology taps into clinical trial data, biomedical databases, scientific publications, and additional sources to identify market trends. The partnership and AI technology access have already led Mars to create a state-of-the-art diagnostic tool that predicts cat kidney disease.

The most effective product managers leverage AI, ML, and deep learning techniques to build specific customer personas and craft innovative solutions that meet their needs. On the other hand, product managers who stubbornly continue to focus on the average customer will likely see suboptimal user growth and retention by delivering products that fail to stand out and satisfy specific user needs.

Designing for the average customer is a mistake in most industries because increased competition has divided demand among many players and made differentiation necessary for product-driven growth. AI and other advanced technologies complement existing techniques that product managers can leverage to ultimately become faster and more effective in their jobs.

With the tools now widely available, differentiation has become more important than ever for product managers. In a recent Fictiv survey, 97% of senior decision-makers said AI will impact their organization’s future product development and manufacturing processes. In that same survey, 78% of respondents said they are currently evaluating technology tools to develop new products more efficiently.

AI is quickly changing the way product managers work

Advanced technologies are transforming the entire product development process. AI empowers product managers to make better, more informed decisions and design highly personalized products for users. There is almost no limit to how granular product managers can understand user needs as they strive to improve and grow their products.

In last-mile delivery, for example, product managers use enhanced map datasets driven by ML models to optimize delivery based on traffic lights, predicted street traffic, and parking availability instead of just determining the shortest map route for deliveries — a capability that is easily available in consumer map products. These capabilities are why 83% of CEOs say AI and advanced technology are critical to the success of their companies.

Paul Daugherty, chief technology and innovation officer at global information technology consulting firm Accenture, recently said, “The playing field is poised to become a lot more competitive, and businesses that don’t deploy AI and data to help them innovate in everything they do will be at a disadvantage.”

About the author:

Hrishikesh Paranjape is a senior product manager with experience across ecommerce, real estate, customer service and financial industries.

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Piyush Chaudhari, CEO, Salsify

Piyush Chaudhari, a former CEO of global brand services firm SGS & Co., is the new top executive of product experience management company Salsify.

He succeeds Jason Purcell, a Salsify co-founder who has been the company’s CEO for the past 12 years and will remain as a board member and company advisor. “I am personally excited about the vision, energy, and experience Piyush will bring to power the next decade of accelerating growth for Salsify and our customers,” Purcell said in the company’s announcement of Chaudhari’s appointment as CEO.

Chaudhari is joining Salsify at a time when the company is  rolling out new technology products designed to improve how companies can manage and syndicate branded product descriptions and images to attract online customers and boost conversion rates.

Last year, Salsify invested $38 million in production innovation across several areas, including AI and automation, to enhance its product experience management technology for engaging and converting online buyers with helpful digital product content across multiple channels. And in this year’s first quarter, Salsify announced the general availability of Salsify PXM Advance, the newest version of its Product Experience Management platform.

“But in truth we have only scratched the surface of the business impact and global scale that Salsify is capable of,” Chaudhari said in a statement announcing his new position.

He added, “I am humbled and thrilled to assume leadership towards the next phase of growth that Salsify’s Board and entire team of Salsifarians are ready to invest in.”

Jason Purcell, co-founder and former CEO, Salsify

The company says it’s in good financial condition to invest in its growth. “Purcell leaves the company in the best financial shape of its history,” Salsify said in a statement. “It is growing, profitable, and holds over $300 million in cash and no debt.”

Chaudhari most recently was CEO of SGS & Co., which provides brands with advertising services across more than 30 countries. Prior to SGS, he was president, Americas and global strategy, at IRI (now known as Circana), which provides companies data on consumer demand to foster sales growth. Chaudhari has also held senior executive positions at Aon Hewitt, a provider of human capital and management consulting services. In addition, he has worked at Aon Consulting, Motorola and IBM, according to his LinkedIn page.

Salsify works with thousands of brand manufacturers, distributors and retailers worldwide to develop technology designed to help companies produce and share product content that wins over online buyers.

The company’s clients include brand manufacturers Mars, L’Oreal, Coca-Cola, Bosch, McCormick, Kenvue, Danone and ASICS; and such retailers and distributors as Albertsons, Carrefour, Metro, Glass Warehouse and DoorDash.

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.

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The recommendations will come from The Shopping Muse, a next-generation retail assistant from Dynamic Yield, which Mastercard owns. Shopping Muse uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to help customers choose items such as accessories or shirts.

Online clothing shopping has been somewhat slow to move from bricks and mortar to online because people like the in-person experience of trying on clothes. However, according to Mastercard, Muse recreates the in-store experience — as much as possible virtually — by translating consumers’ everyday language into tailored product recommendations.

How Michael Kors will deploy Mastercard’s Shopping Muse

“As a trailblazer in ready-to-wear fashion, Michael Kors is a perfect example of how to put our ready-to-use technology to use,” said Ori Bauer, the CEO at Dynamic Yield. “Shopping Muse is helping translate the signature Michael Kors service to the digital world, delivering a satisfying shopping experience as singular and impactful as the brand’s aesthetic.”

Shopping Muse first launched at the end of 2023, with fashion retailers, including Michael Kors, getting early access. Next, Dynamic Yield is looking at use cases for furniture retailers, expanding to other categories thereafter.

Daniel Citron, CEO of tech company AI.Fashion, which specializes in creating fashion imagery with AI, tells Digital Commerce 360 that AI has a future in the apparel shopping experience.

“In the fashion industry, AI opens up new opportunities for creativity and innovation,” Citron said. “It empowers brands to deliver highly personalized shopping experiences consumers increasingly desire.”

Citron says AI can help bridge the gap between the virtual and in-person clothing shopping experience.

“Embracing AI is not just about efficiency,” Citron said. “It’s about enhancing the human touch in fashion, ensuring that creativity and technology work hand in hand.”

What it’s like to use Shopping Muse

Not everyone is convinced Mastercard’s Shopping Muse technology is ready for prime time. Currently, for example, the tool returns dozens of results for a request to see a comfortable shirt to wear while playing golf and was given dozens of choices. A search for a pair of “brown flip-flops,” meanwhile, also yielded many choices while also bringing up swimwear and sandals.

“Even at total capacity, I don’t believe this will be the future of shopping,” says Greg Zakowicz, senior ecommerce expert at the marketing automation platform Omnisend.

Zakowicz tested searches, refining results by height, weight and the description of a long torso. Those queries and additional changes produced similar results, albeit reordered.

“I see virtual assistants like this being useful for recommending similar products based on something you are currently viewing,” Zakowicz adds. “Still, mass adoption of tools like this seems unlikely, especially for something so individually nuanced as personal style.”

Still, other major retailers are looking for AI solutions in apparel use cases as well. Amazon, for example, is looking to it for fit recommendations and improving conversions. Meanwhile, eBay is leveraging AI to upgrade its discovery experience. In furniture, Ikea is also deploying a shopping assistant, which is powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

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The smaller screen size can make it more difficult to find products, so Casio UK and its G-Shock watch website, have been using content personalization and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search in an effort to boost conversion. So far, it seems to be working.

One way has been through creating a sense of urgency. Casio UK has tested FOMO (fear of missing out) messaging on its website. Monique Green, ecommerce manager at Casio UK, told Digital Commerce 360 that an SKU with less than 10 remaining units for sale will display messages such as “last chance” or “only five left in stock.” This has driven conversion rates up to 18%, according to Casio.

Using technology from Nosto, Casio UK’s website will display how many times a product has been viewed (on its Casio site) or purchased (on its G-Shock website) in the past 24 hours. Nosto is a commerce experience platform (CXP) that offers automation and AI tools to provide insights on ecommerce data.

Casio sells watches, calculators and musical instruments. It has different ecommerce websites for:

• North America
• Latin America
• Europe (including a separate website for the UK and Ireland)
• The Middle East and Africa
• Asia and Oceania

Casio UK taps Nosto for personalization tools

Although Casio sells wholesale, it said it wants to encourage shoppers to buy directly from both its Casio and G-Shock websites. Using a Nosto feature, Casio and G-Shock’s UK websites have achieved a 40% conversion rate on a retention campaign that triggers a pop-up message offering consumers a discount code. The catch is that it appears when a shopper copies and pastes product details to potentially search online for the same product elsewhere.

Danny Power, head of digital at Casio UK, told Digital Commerce 360 that the retailer’s focus “has been on DTC improvements in the past 5 years anyway, to understand the customer more and serve content that fits.”

He added that Casio UK had “a lot” of customers shopping directly on its websites during the pandemic, but that tailed off over the past few years and is building back up toward peak levels.

“Stock was difficult to move to retailers as their warehouses shut, so customers had to come direct during [the COVID-19] pandemic,” Powers said.

Additionally, Green said, Nosto will generate a pop-up on Casio UK’s site suggesting returning visitors pick up where they left off. That pop-up would take consumers to pages they’ve already visited, nudging them to convert.

“If I want to put a banner on the site, that’s a bit different,” she said. “I would go in and manually do that. But a lot of the things like PLP, products gone out of stock, that would drop to the last page. No one wants to see an out-of-stock product they can’t buy. So that’s, I’d say, like 90% just working in the background.”

Product recommendations

Casio UK said it also uses Nosto’s product recommendations feature “to help consumers find the right products quickly.” The retailer said it uses A/B testing to optimize where those recommendations appear across its site. That can include triggering a notification on a product listing page that a newer model of a product is available. This is driving 26% of sales on G-Shock’s UK site and 11% on Casio UK’s.

Green said Casio UK doesn’t have options on its site to save a product for later or to compare it with another product. However, the site shows recently viewed products at the bottom of the page as consumers are browsing.

“So for example, our GA 2100 is our best seller, and we have it in like four different colors,” Green said. “So before, you would only see that product when you clicked on it. Now, when you click on that product, you can see the different colors also on the PDP.”

Improving search functionality

Casio said Nosto’s AI-powered search makes it easier for consumers — especially those on mobile — to find products on its website by entering attributes including color, shape, or product names.

12% of Casio and G-Shock UK’s site visitors use the search bar during their buying journey. But Casio said its “previous search functionality suffered from a lack of advanced product data processing, meaning it couldn’t provide relevant matches to complex queries unless the team spent time manually linking attributes for each product.”

Other technology Casio UK uses

Green said Casio UK also uses Yotpo for user-generated content. Yotpo is a retention marketing platform that retailers can use to produce reviews, text messages, email, subscriptions and more. Casio UK also uses Hotjar, which offers website heatmaps and behavior-analytics tools.

Heat maps are “really useful, especially when you’re trying to see what’s annoying people or bugs,” Green said. “Or if someone’s clicking on something loads and it’s not working, it helps you pick up things on the website. … But because it requires you to go back and watch it, it’s quite time consuming.”

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Mirakl describes the tool, which uses large language model artificial intelligence, or LLM, as “the first and only LLM-powered technology that allows companies to start listing products on marketplaces and drop-ship platforms.”

Nagi Letaifa, Mirakl’s chief technology officer, said in an email reply to Digital Commerce 360 that the tool will become available later this year in the Mirakl marketplace platform and the Mirakl Connect marketplace network of more than 13,000 brands, sellers and suppliers.

“With the Catalog Transformer, Mirakl is enhancing its multichannel feed management capabilities on Mirakl Connect, establishing it as a central hub for brands and resellers to easily find, integrate, and manage new Mirakl-powered marketplace and dropship channels,” Letaifa said.

“Brands, sellers, and suppliers of all sizes can centralize their offerings and begin selling on 400-plus Mirakl-powered marketplace and drop-ship platforms in one click, enabling them to focus resources on business impact rather than complex technical processes,” Mirakl says. It adds that Catalog Transformer supports catalog import methods ranging from Excel and CSV to API, SFTP and purpose-built, turnkey connectors with platforms including Shopify, Adobe, Amazon and Salesforce.”

Jonathan Attali, chief digital officer at fashion apparel merchant Zadig & Voltaire, says in a Mirakl press release that the new tool mitigates the cost of selling through new channels.

“With other feed management solutions, we typically need to invest $100,000 and four months up front to sell on a new channel, which hinders our ability to scale,” he says. “Catalog onboarding represents a massive part of this cost.” Zadig & Voltaire is a seller on the Mirakl Connect network of marketplaces.

He adds: “Thanks to Mirakl Connect’s Catalog Transformer and easy integration with the Magento [ecommerce software] connector, it took us less than 24 hours to import our full catalog data, and start listing products. We carefully reviewed the data from Mirakl’s AI-powered conversion, and it required little to no changes.”

Letaifa said Catalog Transformer uses AI technology from Mistral AI and OpenAI as well as Mirakl’s proprietary AI technology “to automatically align product data from sellers’ catalogs with the specific requirements of marketplace or drop-ship platforms.”

He added, “It improves data quality by correcting inaccuracies and completing missing information, while providing rewriting and translation features to enhance user experience, boost product discoverability, and improve SEO rankings.”

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.

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Dale Edman

I’m sure many of us have seen Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk “Start with the Why.”

In the talk, he introduces the golden circle, which consists of what, how, and why.  Sinek suggested that every company knows what they do; some can even articulate how they do it, but few get to Why they do it.

Companies looking to replace their ecommerce system often know what they are doing: replacing their ecommerce system. Some even get to the how, deciding on technologies and partners. But from my experience, few understand why they are replacing their platform. The re-platforming project will be complicated and expensive, and you will need a ‘Why’ to align everyone in the company.

Here are some of the whys that I have heard over the years:

• Legacy systems that are no longer supported.
• Security concerns.
• Increasing total cost of ownership.
• Looking for modern functionality.
• Board/CEO/CIO/CMO — want something new and shiny.

There are other reasons why, so make sure you understand yours. Often, it will have multiple layers. For example, who doesn’t want modern functionality? However, you need to ask yourself what you think you are getting.

Is it enough for the investment? Technical debt and legacy systems can force your hand, but your Why must be bigger than “we have to do it” to get you through the difficulty of the project.

One last word of caution: while having your C-suite on board might be enough, wanting something new or shiny is not enough to sustain your project over the long run.  Your Why is likely to be multi-faceted, and the better you can get to the bottom of it and get transparent with all stakeholders, the more you will set yourself up for success.

Setting Requirements

To accomplish your Why, you must decide on what you are building and establish requirements.  Requirements are an iterative process, starting with high-level requirements often defined by your Why.

For example, I have been a part of many projects that required analytics. “Enable Google Analytics” would be recorded as a project requirement. That is a high-level requirement from the Why, but you will need to define what types of data you need, what you want your dashboards to look like, and whether you have internal resources to build them. There are a couple of other watch-outs when defining requirements; over- and under-engineering.

Once you start to understand your requirements, it is important to consider prioritization. One question that an architect on one of my projects used to ask was, “If this was the only thing not ready, would you still go live?” You will eventually have to make those decisions, so understanding what is necessary versus nice will make the project smoother.

Over-Engineering

As you define your requirements, you may over-engineer the problem. Industry trends, such as “composable or headless commerce,” can cause additional work and overhead.

I worked on a re-platforming project to implement headless commerce.  We needed a high-level strategic resource to design the system, then an architect for the front-end work, an architect for the commerce work, and two or three developers for both the front- and back-end work. Requiring a headless commerce system added overhead to the project. You may have an excellent Why for using more complicated architecture, but make sure you know what you are gaining and what it will cost you.

Another common reason for over-engineering is to future-proof your platform by ensuring you get every requirement in the first build. Not understanding or prioritizing your requirements can lead to everything being important and nothing being important. It also could prevent you from seeing times when an “out-of-the-box” solution could have been adopted with a few tweaks to the requirements, saving costly customization. Remember, you don’t just build these systems; they must be maintained and expanded to meet your consumers’ needs.

Under-Engineering

Under-engineering can also be problematic; phrases like “Lift and Shift” or “Out of the Box” are often used to simplify requirements. With “lift and shift,” you focus on moving the existing site’s functionality into the new technology platform. It may seem the easiest way to avoid scope creep and constrain the project. But it doesn’t work because not every requirement can be ported over.

Most legacy systems were engineered over a decade ago, and there is a reason you are considering a re-platform. At the same time, you may have built those into your legacy system, but the new system tends to handle them differently. Another common mistake is using the “Out of the Box” functionality. You should select a modern ecommerce platform because they have already figured out many of the challenges you are dealing with.

Technology Platform and Partners

You have your team identified; they are clear about the Why and have started the hard work of defining the requirements. The question is, have you already decided on a technology platform? It is tempting to lean heavily on the IT department to make this decision. They will, after all, be responsible for maintaining it, so shouldn’t they have the final say? Since a re-platforming involves more than IT, it should be more than their decision. Your chosen platform has business, merchant, and marketing implications, so you must ensure everyone is comfortable with the decision.

Some things to consider as you look at different platforms:

1. Are you B2C or B2B? Do you need to support other marketplace channels?
2. How do your requirements line up with the functionality of the platform?
3. Will this platform scale with your growth?
4. Support and community: are there resources to turn to? What does the broader partnership ecosystem look like?
5. Interfaces and integration: will this platform integrate with your back-end systems?
6. What is the total cost of ownership, and what do maintenance, licensing, and support costs look like? How do they increase over time?

One last thought on platform selection: Make sure you talk to customers using the platform. Ask the vendor for references, but also do your homework. Reach out to folks in your network to get a sense of how people use the platform, what challenges they have had, and how they feel about it post-launch. You can’t have too many of these calls; they will help you understand what and how the platform works day to day.

Funding and ROI

You will need to understand the total cost of ownership and the benefits or gains the new system will bring. If your Why is technological debt, and you have been in a maintenance mode, it’s more than likely that your new system will cost more. Your old system doesn’t cost anything and feels like a freebie. Not since the early days of commerce have I seen a new system with double conversion rates, so you will need to get creative about what benefits the business and your customers will derive from the project. Having the team bought into the Why will pay dividends. Hopefully, they will  see the benefits, which could be as simple as freeing up your sales teams to have more time to sell and not take orders.

Once you understand your ROI, you can decide how to structure your project and its costs. I have seen two different ways.

1. Only fund the upfront work, requirements gathering, and UI/UX that informs the cost of the development portion of the project. I prefer this method, but most CFOs/CEOs won’t sign off on a project if they don’t have at least some idea of the total cost.
2. Get a bid for the entire project up front. If you have done enough requirements gathering, you can look to get a bid for everything. Your system integrator should know what they typically charge, although none are typical builds. If you go this route, add 40% internal contingency to your request so that you have room for surprises. The last thing you want to do is have to go back and ask for more money.

The other way to manage costs is to be flexible with your requirements. From my experience, this is hard to manage. Most people feel they will never get the functionality if it doesn’t happen at launch. At one company, there was an internal joke that there “was no 2.0,” meaning that once something launched, it was there for good, and nothing would change or get upgraded.

Conclusion

The decision to re-platform your ecommerce business is always a challenging one.  As technology author Rick Watson once said, “No one ever got fired for not re-platforming, but plenty of people have been fired for botched re-platforms.”

Starting with the Why, getting clear about your requirements, resisting the urge to over-/under-engineer, and selecting the right technology platform are crucial to having a successful re-platform project. Hopefully, this will help you understand the importance of firmly setting the foundation for your project.

About the author:

Dale Edman is an independent adviser on B2B and retail ecommerce and digital transformation. He has held ecommerce executive positions at companies including West Marine, Newell Brands and The Wasserstrom Co. He posted an earlier version of this article on LinkedIn.

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There are “islands of trapped data,” Salesforce president and chief marketing officer Ariel Kelman said at the main keynote on May 22. And when it comes to using data for AI processes, everything starts with getting it all in one place.

“All of us are struggling with islands of trapped data across the enterprise,” Kelman said. “A lot of us have our core customer data in Salesforce, but a lot of us also have tons of customer data in different places. … If we’re going to have the ability to ground the AI in trusted data, we need to be able to have access to all of it.”

Salesforce president and chief marketing officer Ariel Kelman breaks down the steps that come with using artificial intelligence at an enterprise level at Connections 2024 in Chicago. Image credit: Digital Commerce 360

Salesforce Connections 2024 focuses on data integration

Kelman said this is why Salesforce created Einstein 1. Einstein refers to Salesforce’s platform that allows users to connect their data, customer relationship management and more using artificial intelligence. It takes all of Salesforce’s applications and AI capabilities and brings them together with Data Cloud. It also reaches out to data outside of Salesforce, he said.

“If you’ve done the work to organize your data in a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift, great, we can reach out to that data, and it can reside in those systems, but you can use it in Salesforce just like it was a standard object,” Kelman said.

The new AI and Data Cloud features include:

• Einstein Copilot for Merchants
• Einstein Copilot for Marketers
• Einstein Personalization
• Data Cloud

Meanwhile, Commerce Cloud updates include new features for:

• Salesforce Checkout
• Headless commerce capabilities for B2B
• Composable commerce enhancements for B2C
• Digital Engagement enhancements

Salesforce said its shoppable copilot will be generally available to customers starting in June. It will make its marketing copilot generally available in July and its merchant copilot in October, it said.

In North America, 76 of the top 2000 online retailers use Salesforce as their ecommerce platform, according to Digital Commerce 360 data. In 2022, those 76 online retailers combined for more than $116.97 billion in web sales.

Einstein trust layer

The Einstein trust layer is “a single platform that sits underneath every copilot experience you’re going to have,” said Michael Affronti, senior vice president and general manager of Commerce Cloud, at the main keynote on May 22.

Its main goal is to protect customer data, he said. Once a user enters a prompt, he said, Salesforce data masking and security “ensure that none of your raw customer information is ever passed outside your organizational boundary.”

The trust layer also includes a zero-retention policy, Affronti said. That means that once Salesforce software generates a response using a third-party large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT, “they discard everything that was sent to them. So they never retain or train their models on your obfuscated customer data.”

New Salesforce AI and Data Cloud features

Among the features is a conversational AI tool that Salesforce referred to as a personal shopping assistant.

Salesforce displayed an example of its personal shopping assistant at Connections 2024 as one of the new features in its generative AI suite. Image credit: Salesforce

The tool, which appears on the front end of an ecommerce site, is a chatbot that can take shoppers directly to product detail pages (PDPs) and help them check out.

Salesforce says its Einstein Copilot for Merchants features an AI assistant that helps:

• Optimizes sales
• Guide storefront setup
• Generate personalized promotions
• Build web pages by using natural language prompts

A technology demo Digital Commerce 360 attended showed that the copilot provides insights based on all the data Einstein gathers across Salesforce assets to show merchants which products are selling well, which aren’t, and what actions the merchants can take to address these differences in sales. Those actions include both front-end and back-end changes to merchants’ websites.

The Einstein Copilot for Marketers allows users to include brand guidelines and produce AI-generated content for campaigns. Also on the marketing spectrum, Einstein Personalization uses real-time customer profiles — tied to Data Cloud — to identify consumers’ preferences and recommend digital marketing experiences that drive conversion.

Digital marketing via WhatsApp

Among the digital marketing experiences Salesforce displayed at Connections 2024 is an abandoned cart alert via WhatsApp. A merchant can trigger notifications to consumers via WhatsApp, offering a product that a consumer has viewed on a Salesforce-powered ecommerce platform. The Salesforce marketing software will then send a product recommendation with accompanying text, asking if the consumer would like to buy the product.

An example Salesforce displayed at a May 22 keynote was of a Solo Stove bonfire product. In the example, Solo Stove sends an AI-generated message with a picture of an outdoor bonfire. The consumer can then interact with the generative AI chatbot on WhatsApp. She can send a picture of her patio and ask if the bonfire will fit. The generative AI chatbot can then send an augmented reality (AR) image back to the consumer that displays the bonfire on the patio. From there, the chatbot asks if the consumer would like to buy the product, and she can make a purchase directly from WhatsApp using store credit card information via Salesforce Checkout.

Commerce Cloud updates for B2B and B2C

Among Salesforce’s updates to its Commerce Cloud is an update to Salesforce Checkout. With it, consumers can check out in one click, as Salesforce connects customers’ data using its Einstein 1 Platform. It gives the example that a consumer can purchase an air conditioner from a company’s website. Then, while someone from the company is installing the air conditioner, the customer can pay for the installation using the same checkout experience, with a stored payment method.

Salesforce also announced updates to its composable commerce offering for business-to-consumer (B2C) users. Composable commerce is an approach to ecommerce that allows businesses to combine software from different vendors into a unified website.

“Developers can combine or create templated, composable, and customizable headless approaches to B2C ecommerce site development” using Salesforce APIs (application programming interfaces).

This includes implementing:

• Personalization features on product listing pages (PLPs)
• Sitemap generation
• Store locators
• Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS)

Developers can pick from these offerings, adding to their ecommerce websites as they see fit.

On the B2B side, developers can implement headless commerce using APIs in Commerce Cloud.

Headless commerce is a type of ecommerce website structure that effectually separates the front end of a website (the user experience) from the back end of a website (the content management system where administrators typically make changes). In doing so, it allows brands to work on the front ends of their websites without going through web developers and IT teams, which often requires filing a service ticket.

“B2B commerce companies can also integrate with hundreds of apps developed by the Salesforce partner ecosystem on AppExchange, to build and scale headless commerce projects in record time with less complexity,” Salesforce says.

Salesforce says it will make the new checkout, composable commerce and headless B2B commerce capabilities available this summer.

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