Barbie may have struggled with math in the 1990s, but now she is minting NFT's and logging some entries to the blockchain. Barbie's latest luxury collaboration is with Balmain, but don't expect to find a decked-out plastic doll in the new Macy's-ified TOYS"R"US. If this Barbie is your desire, Mattel is holding an online auction where you can bid on a digitized one-of-a-kind replicant, with a doll-sized equivalent of the clothes to dress your own Barbie if you place the winning bid. There are three Barbie/NFT items being auctioned. The site …
Technology
Five Takeaways for Retailers from CES 2022
Well, that was interesting. When CES 2022 came to a close, one day ahead of schedule; attendees were dismissed early as “an additional safety measure” for minimizing the risks of Covid-19. (Apparently the brain trust at the Consumer Technology Association – the entity which produces the annual Las Vegas extravaganza – didn’t think that the risks of Covid-19 would be all that high on the first few days of the show.) The Show Must Go On Granted, show organizers were pretty much in a no-win situation. The pandemic had already forced the …
Livestream Selling: Channel Agnostic Nirvana
QVC managed to hook the baby boom generation 35 years ago to buy things on TV. It became the birth of “retailtainment” and proved to be highly addicting. Now, three and a half decades later, millennial’s and Gen Z are going down a digital rabbit hole with livestream shopping; some are calling it Next Gen Commerce. China’s Alibaba pioneered livestream selling as a marketing tool five years ago, and its growth has been ginormous, even by Alibaba standards. Livestream selling accounted for 10 percent of the $1.5 trillion spent on Chinese …
Let the Games Begin
The breathless hype of Facebook's name-change announcement, Microsoft's Mesh introduction, and Nvidia's Omniverse keynote leave us in anticipation of a big metaverse reveal one day in the future. But the metaverse has been out there for some time now. The experimentation and activations currently underway by technology-forward retailers, fashion brands, and gaming platforms have begun to seep into the commercial landscape. Ecommerce will be complemented by M-commerce as the technology develops. For now, meta-hype has nearly snuffed out the …
Autonomous Trucks Won’t Save the Supply Chain Anytime Soon
The global economy has encountered massive supply chain disruptions as it has struggled to bounce back from the Covid-19 pandemic. In the U.S., a shortage of truck drivers (especially long-haul truck drivers) has become one of the biggest bottlenecks. Several companies are racing to address this problem by developing autonomous trucks. In some areas, autonomous trucks have been operating regularly on public roads for two years or more, albeit with a safety driver available to take over if necessary. Recently, Walmart and self-driving truck …
Autonomous Trucks Won’t Save the Supply Chain Anytime SoonRead More
Analytics Done Right
As ecommerce grows in complexity, brands need new ways to grow sales and market share. Right now, brands face urgent market pressures like out-of-stocks, an influx of new competitors and rising inflation, all of which erode profitability. As online marketplaces mature, more brands need to make daily changes to their digital marketing strategies in response to these market pressures, shifts in demand, and competitive trends. Digital Shelf Analytics Breakthrough eMarketer forecasts that 2021 U.S. ecommerce will rise nearly 18 percent …
Auto Checkout: Oops, They Let Amazon Do It Again
You would think they would have learned their lesson. After giving Amazon a 10-year (really closer to 15 when you come right down to it) head start in the ecommerce business and then failing to understand how important both the Prime program and free shipping were to the success of buying online, traditional retailers are once again losing out to Amazon’s enormous advantage when it comes to automatic checkout stores that use AI technology. Closing in on three decades since Jeff Bezos sold his first book out of a local warehouse, the rest …
Prioritizing Brand Protection Before the Holiday Rush
Counterfeits pose a dangerous threat to any retail brand. Since every single sale is a pivotal branding opportunity, especially for young, burgeoning eCommerce brands, an online marketplace flooded with counterfeits can be particularly dangerous. One in five customers will boycott a brand after mistakenly purchasing a counterfeit product, and that’s not the kind of ratio that any retailer –– from the smallest Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) site to the behemoths like Amazon –– can afford to ignore. In the age of online reviews, it’s especially …
Prioritizing Brand Protection Before the Holiday RushRead More