Daily Crunch: Asian and Hispanic e-grocer Weee! bags $425 million Series E

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, February 28, 2022. Today we are bringing exclamation points back. Because it’s Monday, we need the boost, and a startup whose name includes a “!” just raised north of $400 million in a single round. 2022! It’s a whole thing. – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Technology and Ukraine: As you can imagine, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is in part a technology story. For example, Ukraine is accepting crypto donations, which TechCrunch covered here. And Ukrainian citizens are turning to encrypted messaging tools, and even offline maps during the war. But there’s even more going on at the corporate-level, including Twitter marking tweets tied to the Russian state, going as far as limiting their reach. Russia is angry with American social media companies limiting its reach, but, frankly, too bad.
• What’s your BNPL startup really worth? News of a deal between Zap and Sezzle in the BNPL market had us crunching numbers to figure out what smaller buy now, pay later (BNPL) companies are worth. Why do we care? Because a huge number of startups are building companies around the consumer and business credit model. The news is not great.
• Wee! Weee! has raised a huge round! SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 has led a $425 million Series E into Weee!, which provides a way for consumers to buy ingredients for different cuisines, so if you need to find pieces of different “Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian and Latin” dishes, well, it probably has them. The deal doubles the value of the startup to more than $4 billion, and indicates that SoftBank is still a risk-on operation.

Startups/VC

Speaking of huge venture rounds at high prices, OneCard is in talks to raise what we’ve heard is nine-figures worth of capital at a unicorn valuation. Our piece, by our ace India reporter Manish Singh, also notes that the new round comes just a month after FPL Technologies, the company behind OneCard, last announced new capital.

Catching you up, OneCard is a consumer credit card startup in India that also provides credit scoring services.

Moving along, Y Combinator’s push to fund startups around the world is paying off. Data from the well-known startup accelerator indicates that one in six, or about 16% of the companies it has incubated that are now worth $150 million or more – some 267 now – are headquartered outside of the United States.

I’m not surprised at the ratio, and the rising tally of international companies that it implies. My question is how quickly the portion of high-value Y Combinator-backed startups moves towards being majority international.

• Stämm Biotech raises $17M: Have you heard of bioreactors? They are new to me, but are apparently a key piece of kit in the biomanufacturing world. Stämm, which is based in Buenos Aires, just raised a large Series A for its bioreactor product. It looks something like a big, expensive gaming PC. Regardless, if there is enough market demand for a startup to raise to build more bioreactors, I presume that biology is going to be lit in the coming years.
• The Conductor team are building a company around the project: It’s a tale as old as time. A company creates a tool, and later open-sources it. Then some folks build a hosted version of the product as a startup. In this case, the tool is Conductor, which Netflix built. The team that wrote the code at the streaming giant have now cleaved off to build Orkes, which offers, you guessed, a hosted version of Conductor.
• Robin.io sells to Rakuten telco arm: A few things are going on here. First, Rakuten has a telco-focused business called Rakuten Symphony. It’s pretty recent. Also, the group has purchased Robin.io, which TechCrunch describes as a “startup that offers a Kubernetes platform optimized for storage solutions and complex network applications.”
• TikTok raises video length limit: TikTok is owned by Bytedance, which is technically still a private company. So, I guess, TikTok news belongs in this part of the newsletter. Regardless, you can now make 10-minute TikToks. Which, idk, does seem a bit counter to what the service is known for. Perhaps everything becomes YouTube in the end.
• Oribi sells to LinkedIn for $80M-$90M: Another deal for your eyes today, this time involving Oribi, which we write is “a Tel Aviv startup that specializes in marketing attribution technology.” LinkedIn, of course, is a portal where folks in the sales industry can workshop their slam poetry.
• Flashfood is a good startup name: What does Flashfood do? It sells food that is nearly expired, to help combat food waste. Remember flashmobs? The idea was that they were quickly forming gatherings, back when Twitter was New and Cool. Anyway, between flashmobs, and flashfreezing, we can add flashfood to the flash- category. The company just raised $12.3 million.

Leverage early investors when raising a Series A, says DeepScribe’s Akilesh Bapu

Image Credits: Index Ventures / DeepScribe

While raising a Series A for AI-powered medical transcription platform DeepScribe, CEO and co-founder Akilesh Bapu set clear timelines for the investors he approached.

Index Ventures partner Nina Achadjian received Bapu’s pitch deck while she was still on vacation, but the founder wouldn’t let her schedule a meeting for the following week.

As it turned out, Bapu’s instincts served him well. “When I walked out of the meeting, I went immediately to one of my partners, and was like, ‘Finally, I found the company that is following the right approach,” said Achadjian.

Leverage early investors when raising a Series A, says DeepScribe’s Akilesh Bapu

Big Tech Inc.

• Apple will accrete Dutch fines until the heat death of the universe: That’s our takeaway from the news that Apple has been hit with a sixth penalty from the country’s government over a ruling regarding in-app payments, and dating apps inside its borders. Apple, an American company, is seemingly blasé at the Dutch Authority for Consumers & Market charging it another €5 million. It now owes the country some €30 million, and the fines could stretch to €50 million. Apple might have too much money, I think.
• Google disables live traffic data in Ukraine: The Russian invasion of Ukraine is unearthing a host of interesting technology situations, including how some are using live traffic data to track troop movements. Google has cut off certain maps data in the country, though directions will remain accessible.
• The EU wants to ban Russian media: Sputnik and Russia Today are under the ban-hammer in the European Union. TechCrunch writes that that particular regulatory choice means that “social media firms face pressure to act” in a similar fashion.
• Cruise founder back at the wheel: After a GM exec left the CEO role, Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt is back in charge. And he’s also the CTO, so expect him to be a little busy in the coming quarters. Self-driving is nearing the point of commercialization, so it will be interesting to see how Cruise evolves from technology to business.

TechCrunch Experts

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

TechCrunch is recruiting recruiters for TechCrunch Experts, an ongoing project where we ask top professionals about problems and challenges that are common in early-stage startups. If that’s you or someone you know, you can let us know here.

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Ownit helps brands sell products, at the point of discovery, with one click

We’ve all seen a product on social media that looks interesting, so you click the “shop now” button and are taken over to a new site. But wait, you weren’t finished on the social media site, and when you go back, everything has refreshed.

Ownit unveiled a checkout experience today, after testing with 10 companies, that gives direct-to-consumer brands a way to sell their products without that interruption. Its technology connects social, commerce and payment options at the point of discovery so consumers can buy in one tap via an “Ownit Connected Checkout link.”

From the link, consumers go to a web page interface on top of the app and can make purchase choices from their favorite commerce site, including Shopify and Amazon, and pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay or PayPal — features not often available because some social media sites don’t often play well with certain payment options, Ownit co-founder and CEO Payman Nejati told TechCrunch.

Nejati started San Francisco-based Ownit less than a year ago with Evan Shiue and Joel Tan, and all three have vast experience in checkout. This is Nejati’s fifth startup, and most of his experience is in grocery checkout, while Shiue has a background in autonomous checkout at Standard Cognition and Walmart, and Tan in conversational checkout with Amazon’s Alexa.

The global pandemic was the driver for many people to start an e-commerce brand, and while many tools enable them to start easily, Nejati says the right tools haven’t been there to help those companies grow as easily. In addition, brands still deal with challenges, like cart abandonment rates of 75%.

Needless to say, they’ve thought a lot about what’s going on at the point of purchase, even going so far as to boast that customers will double sales conversion or pay nothing. They knew they were on to something as they saw checkout companies like Bolt, Checkout.com and Rapyd collectively raising over $3 billion investments in the past 18 months.

Image Credits: Ownit

“We knew checkouts at the point of purchase will explode, but we wonder if the user was going to the storefront, and is the company investing in sending them there from another platform, like social media,” Nejati added. “At the same time, the new iOS was making those costs unbearable. So we thought, what if you don’t have to go there, but we could capture someone at the point of discovery — that was the lightbulb moment.”

Proving that checkout continues to be a hot area for investors, Ownit itself announced initial funding Monday, an $8 million seed round from Caffeinated Capital, SciFi VC, GGV Capital, Abstract Ventures and a group of angel investors that include founders and executives of companies including Meta, Pinterest, Honey, Product Hunt, Standard Cognition and Anycart.

Nejati explained Ownit is like the “Plaid of e-commerce;” what it is doing is a “heavy tech lift,” involving connecting people, merchants and payment options seamlessly. The ultimate goal being to become the merchant of record by going after capital to get everything squared away correctly from the beginning versus taking shortcuts that make it difficult to scale.

As such, the new capital will be deployed into what Shiue called “the three Cs”: conversion, which he considers “the North Star for its brands;” customer onboarding; and connections to deepen the three pillars of its tool suite of social, commerce and payment platform relationships.

The company has 11 employees currently and Shiue expects to be at 30 by the end of the year.

Among Ownit’s 10 early beta customers are consumer packaged goods companies, cosmetics and nutrition. Customers were encouraged to test sales through Shopify versus through Ownit, and Shiue said initial results have been positive, showing campaigns saw an average of two times the conversion lift via text marketing and three times conversion via email marketing.

Up next, Nejati and Shuie say they still have some catching up to do in the market as they work to build out this brand new space in checkout.

Checkout is the key to frictionless B2B e-commerce

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Weee! delivers second big funding round in a year, this time backed by SoftBank

Coming off of a year where monthly active users grew 150% year over year, ethnic e-grocer Weee! secured $425 million in Series E funding toward its goal to be “the primary source for food at home,” Larry Liu, Weee!’s founder and CEO, told me.

It’s been a few years since we dug into what the company was doing, but to bring you up to speed, it was founded in 2015 and offers over 10,000 locally sourced and hard-to-find Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian and Latin offerings for customers.

One of Liu’s missions is product assortment, so Weee! typically adds more than 500 new products per week. It also partners with over 1,000 restaurants to offer authentic food-at-home options for customers, many as a result of the company’s acquisition of RICEPO, an Asian food delivery company, in October.

This new monster round not only comes about a year after the company’s $316 million Series D round last March, but boosts Weee!’s valuation to $4.1 billion. It also nearly doubles the company’s total fundraising, bringing it to over $800 million to date, Liu said.

Taking in the new capital was an intentional move for Liu, who wants to grow the business to the next level. While it has made progress, he wants to deepen Weee!’s supply chain, focus on building relationships with vendors, do more direct importing of products to the U.S. and expand into two more ethnicities.

“We have a really powerful and unique value proposition in targeting underserved communities and want to offer the most amazing assortment for the community,” he added. “That is our biggest differentiation, and that strategy is working well for us.”

In addition, the company will also advance its warehouse automation and artificial intelligence technology to offer the most relevant product recommendations.

Weee! Currently has about 1,500 employees and will continue to build out a team to scale, including on the go-to-market side, where Liu said the company had not invested heavily before, saying, “We are a best-kept secret, and a lot of people didn’t know about us, but we want to make sure people know what we are doing.” The company this month hired filmmaker Jon Chu as chief creative officer.

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the financing and was joined by Greyhound Capital. As part of the investment, Lydia Jett, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, will join Weee!’s board of directors.

“The market for ethnic groceries and food is massively underserved in the U.S. and we believe that Weee! is in a prime position to meet the demands of customers,” Jett said in a written statement. “Weee!’s strong execution capabilities and reach across multiple ethnic groups, coupled with a unique customer experience model leveraging AI, has enabled it to scale effectively in a rapidly evolving grocery market.”

For Liu, product assortment and pricing are most important. He is looking to expand into household and beauty items so that Weee! can transition into more of a mainstream store versus only ethnic items.

“We believe convenience is important, too, but that doesn’t mean you have to get items in 30 minutes,” he added. “We are focused on bringing people affordable access to the products they love and see the future being a store where we can offer a wide variety of products.”

What grocery startup Weee! learned from China’s tech giants

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BigCommerce partners with Digital River

BigCommerce have announced a direct integration with Digital River, to provide mid-market to enterprise BigCommerce merchants with an all-in-one global commerce solution that fully manages payments, tax, fraud and compliance to simplify cross-border selling and accelerate global expansion.

Delivering localised checkout experiences and reconciling international sales can be daunting and burdensome. To remove these complexities, we’ve teamed with BigCommerce to manage the financial and legal responsibilities of cross-border selling on behalf of BigCommerce merchants to help them simplify operations and accelerate global expansion at less cost. Together we’re doing the heavy lifting so merchants can focus on what’s most important—global growth.

– Adam Coyle, CEO, Digital River

With a single integration, merchants can integrate Digital River’s Merchant of Record business model to mitigate risks and maximise conversions by delivering localised checkout experiences for both onshore and cross-border sales directly from within their BigCommerce store. As a result, merchants can easily deploy entry into new markets in as little as six weeks and simplify cross-border selling processes that can decrease operational costs by up to 30 percent.

Cross-border ecommerce continues to grow rapidly, and this partnership comes at a time when many merchants are prioritizing expansion to reach international customers. Our partnership with Digital River provides the global commerce solutions needed to go to market faster, at a lower cost and without the risk and complexities typically associated with cross-border commerce.

– Brent Bellm, CEO , BigCommerce

Key benefits include:

• Global payment localisation. Merchants can leverage a number of leading payment providers with local entities to maximize authorizations and give shoppers access to their preferred currencies and payment methods such as local cards, buy-now-pay-later and wallets.
• Minimize financial complexity. Merchants are able to minimize financial risks by managing compliance, fraud mitigation, currency conversion, chargebacks, and global reconciliation all from within their BigCommerce Control Panel.
• Reduce legal risks. Merchants will mitigate risk from new regulations and ensure they adhere to local tax requirements in 240+ markets, overcoming global online selling liabilities ranging from consumer protection laws, collection of tax, duties and tariffs, payments compliance and fraud screening.
• Maximize authorizations. Merchants gain instant access to leading transaction routing technologies and an expansive acquiring network that allow for lower global processing fees and increased authorization rates by up to 15% – saving significant time and expense.
• Streamlined order management processes. Merchants can leverage logistics tools that handle end-to-end fulfillment from either Digital River’s existing partner network or from the merchant’s fulfillment partner of choice.

The post BigCommerce partners with Digital River appeared first on Tamebay.

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Future Retail, Amazon’s estranged partner in India, scales down operations

Future Retail, India’s second largest retail chain, is scaling down its operations to reduce losses, it said, the latest casualty in its years-long battle with estranged partner Amazon.

The firm, led by Kishore Biyani, said in filings to the stock exchanges that it has been finding it “difficult to finance the working capital needs,” and its losses at store level are “increasing” and of “grave concern.”

Future Retail has lost about $593 million in the last four quarters, it said in the filings.

The admission follows a local media report that said Reliance Industries – which entered into a now-hotly contested $3.4 billion deal to acquire several operations of Future Retail – was taking over about 200 of Future’s 1,700 stores and absorbing as many as 30,000 workers of the smaller retail giant after brokering deals with landlords.

Reliance will rebrand those outlets as its own, Business Standard reported. Reliance Industries had no comment.

India’s Future Retail operates over 1,700 stores across brands including Big Bazaar. On Sunday, Big Bazaar told customers that its stores were not operational for two days.

Reliance Retail operates the largest retail chain in India. Shortly after it announced that it will acquire Future Group’s retail, wholesale, logistics and warehousing businesses, things started to get complicated.

Amazon, which had invested in one of Future Group’s units three years ago, accused Future Retail of violating its contract and approached the Singapore arbitrator to halt the deal between the Indian firms.

At the time of the partnership with Amazon, a Future Group spokesperson said the American giant’s investment “provides an opportunity for us to learn global trends in digital-payments solutions and launch new products.”

Amazon’s deal with Future Retail had given the American e-commerce giant the first right to refusal on purchase of more stakes in Future Retail, Amazon has argued.

The Indian firms, in return, said in 2020 that the Singapore’s court order wasn’t valid in the South Asian market. India’s watchdog Competition Commission of India also approved the deal between the Indian firms.

In August last year, India’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of Amazon to stall the sale of Future Retail.

“The ongoing litigation initiated by Amazon in October 2020, and which is continuing for the last one and a half years, has created serious impediments in the implementation of the Scheme, resulting in severe adverse impact on the working of the company,” Future Retail told  (PDF) the stock exchange.

Amazon identifies India as a key overseas market. The firm, which has invested over $6.5 billion in its India operations, has also bought stakes in More chain of supermarkets and hypermarkets and department-store chain Shoppers Stop in the country.

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Fresh from new round, Egypt’s proptech Nawy plans full-suite offering

Egyptian proptech startup Nawy, which began life in 2016 as an AI-driven property listing has grown to offer brokerage services, supporting the closing of property deals. It is now looking for its next path of growth after connecting 40,000 buyers to sellers last year alone, winning the confidence of the Sawiris family – Egypt’s wealthiest family, who, earlier this month, led a $5 million seed round to support their growth.

Nawy is now set to introduce in its catalog a mortgage service for pre-owned property, to serve a market that is predominantly shunned by traditional lenders.

The startup’s co-founder and CEO, Mostafa El-Beltagy told TechCrunch that the mortgage financing plan is part of their strategy to introduce new products that are aligned with clients’ needs, ensuring sustainability for their business.

The mortgage industry in Egypt is dominated by banks, most of which prefer to support buyers of new property over those seeking pre-owned ones. This leaves a financing gap for pre-owned mortgages that Nawy now aims to bridge.

“If you go into the resale market, it’s primarily cash. What we want to do is to build for the resale market, a very similar kind of process where we are continuing to own the house, but letting people pay in installments, rather than pay fully upfront,” said El-Betagy.

Nawy’s growth has been supported by investments in its internal and outward-facing technologies, including some that use machine learning to pair clients with property. The startup also uses AI to manage its sales force of more than 200 people by matching them with suitable property, and providing the market insights that quicken the closing process.

In the long-term, the proptech plans to use the data it collects to offer real estate advisory services, forge funding partnerships, and provide insights into the trends and other market factors.

“Once we have visibility on the rental market, the primary markets for resale property, we can start to answer some of those fundamental questions …like what is the forecast of the appreciation? Which properties are probably underpriced or overpriced? And using all of that information, we can start to give some very real financial advice,” said El-Beltagy.

“Within the coming years, we’re definitely going to go into the other components of the businesses like rentals and property management. That would kind of complete the suite of what we do – by offering core real estate products,” said El-Beltagy.

The startup is looking to tap the booming property market in Egypt, which has for a long time been a preferred venture option and a safe hedge against inflation — reasons why the sector is amongst the fastest growing segments of the country’s economy. The real estate sector contributed 10.3% to Egypt’s GDP during the 2019/2020 financial year while the construction sector accounted for 4.9%.

Nawy was founded by Beltagy, a former executive at Vodafone and Vodacom telcos, together with Ahmed Rafea (CBDO), Mohamed Abou Ghanima (COO), Abdel Azim Osman (CMO), Aly Rafea (CPO) and Mostafa Moro (CTO). The company was initially known as Cooing Real Estate before rebranding in June 2021.

The founders injected $200,000 into the startup, which averaged a growth rate of 30% year over year until 2021, when, buoyed by new funding, shot up 400%, with its gross merchandise value climbing to $200 million, up from $40 million the previous year.

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Cococart sweetens the process for e-commerce companies to take orders immediately

Two years ago, entrepreneur Derek Low lost his hotel in Bali and began selling homemade cheesecakes online to make ends meet. However, he found it difficult to find an easy e-commerce tool that enabled him to quickly get up-and-running to take orders.

Low noticed that 200 million businesses rely on the phone or messaging apps, like WhatsApp or Instagram, to take orders, a process that he found hard to track and to collect payments. He also saw that a professional e-commerce website takes weeks to set up and is costly for new businesses.

Derek Low, co-founder and CEO, Cococart. Image Credits: Cococart

Pairing up with Zhicong Lim, they founded the Singapore-based Cococart, a tool to enable merchants to set up an online store in minutes with no code, no design and no app downloads. The store comes with everything from order management to mobile payment solutions. Merchants can manage their own sales without apps or marketplaces that charge unsustainable fees and commissions, Low added.

“Honestly, managing orders is hard,” he said. “Most local businesses are still taking orders on WhatsApp and managing their orders using spreadsheets. It sucks up so many hours of time, which could be better spent growing the business. We’re at the forefront of a new wave of local entrepreneurs. We’re inspired every day by stories of our merchants who started from selling food from their kitchen, but are now running retail stores with commercial kitchens. Our mission is to transform local businesses and empower business owners to pursue their passion.”

Many of Cococart’s merchants are just like him, he said. The pandemic created a new generation of independent business owners, and they represent a fast-growing segment in e-commerce. What’s also helping is that people are now more used to ordering online, a behavior Low doesn’t see going away.

“Like myself, many people who lost their jobs turned to side hustles online, which then became their main source of income,” Low added. “These entrepreneurs realized that running their own business was both more profitable and fulfilling than working for others.”

Since its launch, Cococart is a profitable company with over 20,000 merchants in 90 countries signed up that have collectively taken over 500,000 orders and earned more than $15 million.

For example, one of the company’s top merchants is INDOCIN, a company providing on-demand artisan Indonesian cuisine. Low said when the owner started with Cococart a year ago, she was selling her homemade food from her kitchen. Today, she employs a team of 24 staff and owns a retail outlet.

In 2021 alone, Cococart grew its merchant count 30 times and customer growth by 46 times, according to Low. During that same time, the company grew the team from just the two founders to 22 people across 12 countries.

To keep the momentum going, Cococart raised $4.2 million from Forerunner Ventures and Sequoia, with additional investors including Y Combinator, Uncommon Capital, Soma Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Fitbit CEO James Park and Curated CEO Eduardo Vivas.

Low intends to use the new funding to continue hiring and customer acquisition.

“We’re just getting started,” he added. “Our goal is to define the next generation of commerce. There are still so many challenges in starting and running a business that we want to solve, from deliveries to supply chain to financing. We see a massive opportunity in front of us and we want to bring Cococart to 200 million businesses worldwide.”

4 trends that will define e-commerce in 2022

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Retailers must adapt to buying without borders – or risk getting left behind

Buying without borders is the topic addressed today by Tony Preedy, Managing Director of Fruugo. As we exit the pandemic it’s time to start focussing on growth once again and global selling is essential to take full advantage of ecommerce opportunities.

If you’d like to discover more about Fruugo, watch their session at the recent 2022 Tamebay Live

Buying Without Borders

The internet has in many ways allowed the world to grow smaller. Trends in one country often spread rapidly online around the globe, meaning the pace of change in consumer demands has continued to speed up.

Also, thanks to the internet, retailers in one country are no longer constrained to only reaching locals. With the right platforms and tools in place, they can easily sell to customers all over the world. So how can sellers ensure they not only adapt to rapidly changing consumer tastes, but truly capitalise on the opportunities it offers?

The importance of inventory

While buying across borders was already mainstream prior to the pandemic, global lockdowns and unpredictable markets catalysed the mass shift towards shopping online, as well as driving consumers to be more attuned to what’s in the public consciousness than ever before.

As a result, today’s post-pandemic buyers are far savvier. Shoppers are increasingly finding and buying exactly what they need online, without thinking about who or where they are buying from. If they can’t find a product from one retailer, online searches will quickly reveal an alternative supplier that has stock, which with supply chains remaining disrupted by the Covid pandemic, are increasingly retailers in a different country to the shopper.

As such, agility and availability are now the key to winning the sale, meaning the rapid synchronisation of inventory with search engines is mission critical for effective retailing.

Keeping up with consumers

Data shows an increasingly rapid correlation between global events and product purchases. For example, when the pandemic first hit the Western world, there was mass demand for products such as masks and sanitizer, leading to shortages. In fact, hand sanitizer sales soared by 1,807% in the week ending February 15 2020 in Italy compared to the same week a year earlier while in the UK, hand sanitizer sales saw a year-on-year increase of 255% throughout the whole of February 2020

While populations reacting to a global pandemic come as no surprise, consumers have also reacted to cultural media phenomena like never seen before, amplified by time spent under lockdown. The Korean Netflix phenomenon Squid Game saw sales of white slip-on Vans shoes worn by the show’s main characters spike by a whopping 7,800%. Here at Fruugo, Squid Game cosplay outfits became the best-selling item on the global marketplace, illustrating the opportunities available for retailers who are equipped to instantly take advantage of trends and expand their audience on a global scale.

Pockets of demand for goods can occur from anywhere at anytime. A good example is the 2021 Olympics, which saw the arrival of several new sports like skateboarding to the competition. In the weeks that followed, Fruugo saw a 250% increase in the sales of skateboards, and a 102% increase in sports products in general, with demand for different products from various sports occurring in different countries around the world. Retailers able to ship internationally were able to capitalise.

Meanwhile,there are key dates that have long been in every retailer’s calendar, such as Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day. Yet with the growth in cross-border selling, sellers can now maximise their brand awareness no matter where they are in the world. This year for example, Fruugo saw Sweden top its list of most romantic consumers, taking up over one-quarter (28%) of all its sales on all Valentine’s related gifts and items – yet the top-performing sellers to Sweden were across the globe in China and Singapore.

Simplifying cross-border selling

Selling across borders can sound like a very tall order as it requires resources and tools many sellers do not have to deal with the various complexities. However, cross-border selling has been enabled by the growth of digital marketplaces. In fact, the majority of cross-border online sales are now through these platforms.  

For sellers, marketplaces are a saviour as they can take on a lot of the technical work for sellers and help optimise marketing. For example, marketplaces are responsible in many jurisdictions for the calculation and remittance of sales taxes according to the type of goods and location of the customer. They also integrate with local payment providers, screen those orders for fraud, and take on the cost of currency conversion. And many go beyond simply facilitating transactions, they work on behalf of the retailer by actively marketing their products to generate sales from customers across global markets. Sellers then just have to organise to ship the parcels, made simple by the active market in international ecommerce logistics. While small and light items are still the most commonly traded type of goods across borders, even heavy and bulky items can now be shipped economically to neighbouring markets, making it possible and practical to sell most types of consumer goods internationally.

Furthermore, some marketplaces handle the translation of content into foreign languages, provide multi-lingual customer service and account management, capture funds using locally essential payment methods, localise pricing, as well as handling other cross-border issues such as local retail regulations.

Diversification is key

Today’s retailers cannot bank on just having one digital platform or route to market. To capture some of the booming market in cross-border transactions requires focus on generating more reach and visibility for their products. Marketplaces offer incremental sales from across the globe at a low marginal cost, and the more marketplaces sellers list on, the greater their total digital presence and the higher their overall sales. This diversification of channels to market also helps to reduce the risk created when they are dependent on one, such as sole reliance on Amazon.

Sellers of any kind must evaluate whether their digital marketing is sufficiently dynamic, flexible and global to take advantage of the massive ongoing trend towards globalisation of buying and selling – capitalising on the rising online demand for their products, wherever those customers are located.

For more tips on cross-border selling, be sure to check out Tamebay Live sessions here.

The post Retailers must adapt to buying without borders – or risk getting left behind appeared first on Tamebay.

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Headless commerce company fabric sews up unicorn milestone following new round

Fabric, a five-year-old company providing composable API-driven technology for digital commerce, secured $140 million in Series C funding on a $1.5 billion valuation.

The Seattle-based modular and headless commerce company offers more than 300 commerce APIs and associated framework to connect a company’s sales channel to one place and the ability to use the entire commerce platform or individual products.

While similar companies target small businesses, fabric is going after bigger brands that have difficulty creating good online stores, in part because they are running their online commerce via mega, monolithic legacy software that CEO Faisal Masud said “anchors them into draconian platforms.”

“Not that Amazon is much better at merchandising, but they built an API-first platform, notably the first headless one where they can be flexible as the need arises,” he added. “The burden of other brands is their platform. You don’t have to replatform, but you should be peeling off commerce domains in pieces and move to a microservice approach.”

While Masud believes marketplaces like Shopify are great for small businesses, he also thinks it is the wrong platform for anyone else doing business-to-business, over $50 million in gross merchandise value annually or looking for fewer restrictions, flexibility and composability of their sales channel.

Fabric’s latest round is the third for the company in a year, following a $43 million Series A last February and a $100 million Series B last July that valued the company at $850 million, Masud said.

SoftBank led the Series C and was joined by Forerunner Ventures, Glynn Capital and existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Norwest Ventures and Stripes, which led the Series B. The new capital gives fabric $293 million in total funding raised to date.

Masud attributes the quick succession in funding rounds to fabric’s “substantial growth,” much of it organic. Since the company’s seed round in 2020, fabric went from two customers to more than 60 today — including new client Honest Co. — and grew its headcount six times during the same period, from 45 to 280.

He explained that the seed round was the last time that fabric drove the investment process. After that, investors were the ones leaning in. This most recent round was the result of “pent up investor interest and growth outperforming the company’s plans again.”

“We met with SoftBank, and they are investing in a big way in commerce,” Masud added. “They believe fabric is in pole position for modular and headless commerce. I feel the timing is important for us. If you look at the market right now, there is a meltdown, but us raising is validation of the product and the team. There is going to be rapid development in this space in the next 12 to 18 months, and we don’t want to be left behind due to capital or product constraints.”

4 trends that will define e-commerce in 2022

In 2021, fabric experienced 4.5 times year over year revenue growth and launched its scalable commerce platform for B2B, which enables online sales transactions for manufacturing, distribution or wholesale businesses.

The company also rounded out its leadership team, most notably bringing on Karen Brewer, who previously worked at Cisco, as chief marketing officer, and Stacy Saal, who previously worked at Amazon, as chief operating officer. Masud also teased that a chief revenue officer announcement was coming soon.

Masud plans to deploy the new capital into automation and intelligence to accelerate product development and geographic expansion. He is looking to internationalize fabric’s product and also building native capabilities into APIs and co-pilot apps in areas where he wants to expand, like Europe and the Middle East. Funds will also be invested in additional technology hires and building a robots team around the revenue and sales side.

As part of the investment, Robert Kaplan, investment director at SoftBank Investment Advisers, is joining fabric’s board of directors.

“Retailers need to meet modern consumers wherever they are — whether online, offline, mobile, social, or any future entry point,” Kaplan said in a written statement. “This means merchants of all sizes, and especially mid-market and enterprise, need the right commerce platform to keep pace with evolving trends. We believe that fabric has built the industry’s best API-first modular commerce platform and accompanying commerce applications to give merchants unrivaled power and flexibility, all in a manner that reduces the pain of migrating over from legacy, outdated commerce platforms.”

Even startups on tight budgets can maximize their marketing impact

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Clutter merges with MakeSpace to add scale to the business of moving and storage

Some consolidation is afoot in the world of moving and storage startups: Clutter and MakeSpace, two erstwhile rivals in the market, are merging to form a single company, which will operate under the Clutter brand, serving some 6,500 towns in the U.S. that together cover about 60% of the total population in the country, with operations also in Canada, covering services like on-demand moving, storage, self-storage, and disposal.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, Clutter founder and CEO Ari Mir told me in an interview, but he confirmed that the company combined will be clearing close to $200 million in revenue annually, that it will break even this year, and that it’s planning for an IPO in 2023. Mir will continue with his role and will also be CEO of the merged business, while MakeSpace’s CEO Rahul Gandhi will become president.

The combined, enlarged Clutter does not have any plans to raise any more funding before then, Mir said. It’s unclear how many employees will be at the combined company. Clutter has around 1,000 and Mir said they made offers to some but not all MakeSpace employees to join the merged firm. Both companies operated on a model of employing all of their delivery drivers, rather than employing gig workers.

“It was a natural culture fit for us,” Mir said.

I have confirmed that Clutter was valued at around $580 million when it last raised money, back in 2019, a $200 million round led by SoftBank. MakeSpace last raised in 2021, a $55 million round when the pandemic was well under way, with its investors including strategic backer IronSource and a number of others. MakeSpace has never disclosed its valuation. Both companies have grown since then.

Mir said that the deal caps off a long-held ambition of his to make Clutter a consolidator in the space and he’d been eyeing up MakeSpace for a while now.

“I’ve always been a big fan of building relationships and have been working on the relationship with MakeSpace for years now,” he said in an interview. He said he’d periodically reached out “once or twice a year” before the latter company finally bit. Indeed, I heard about this deal going down several months ago, although both companies declined to comment on the situation at the time.

The deal underscores a couple of bring trends that are moving the market, one that is estimated at $38 billion for storage alone annually.

One of these is the effects of the pandemic.

Covid-19 has been a period of social distancing and staying put, but not for everyone: a lot of us took the moment to pause, think about how and where we are living, and in many cases take action by relocating, downsizing or simply rethinking our living spaces. All of that has had a big impact on companies like Clutter and MakeSpace, both of which saw business continue to grow in the last two years. Clutter, Mir told me, was designated an essential service and continued all operations as normal, while MakeSpace’s Gandhi told me last year that it was outpacing its growth forecasts for the period by 30%.

The other is economy of scale.

As with any logistics-based business — the wider category of e-commerce being one prime other example — ultimately the most successful players are those that have grown to a big enough size that they are maximizing their network of operations with as many customers and orders as possible for the best margins on that model.

That is very much the case here, too. Clutter, Mir told me, was profitable in its bigger markets but not everywhere; this merger will give it, and MakeSpace, the ability to aim for positive unit economics and better margins in more places. And, it will also cut out one more competitor in places where they overlapped, meaning less money to spend on marketing and promotions.

This is not Clutter’s first acquisition and consolidation move. It acquired The Storage Fox in 2019 for $152 million also as part of that strategy. It also bought assets from failed storage startup Omni in the same year, and has also picked up assets from Handy, Livible, Shed, and Callbox. MakeSpace has also been doing some consolidating, acquiring Stashable from Iron Mountain when it raised its Series D led by the business storage giant.

“The moving and storage industries are fragmented, and a really frustrating experience for a lot of customers. There is clear demand for a brand that consumers know they can trust nationwide, and the combination of MakeSpace and Clutter will put the company in an excellent position to offer convenient storage and moving services nationwide, with plenty of room to grow,” said Gandhi in a statement.

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Depict.ai raises $17M to give e-commerce sites Amazon-level product recommendation muscle

Amazon rules the roost when it comes to e-commerce, not just because of its size but because of how it uses that to amass large amounts information that it in turn uses to continue feeding the machine with sophisticated product recommendations, relevant advertising, and more to keep people finding things to buy, and buying them. Today, a Stockholm-based startup called Depict.ai that has also built a product recommendation tool — which it believes can help any retailer sell like Amazon — is announcing funding of $17 million to feed its own growth in the U.S. an Europe, after picking up 60 customers including Office Depot and Staples.

The Series A is being led by Tiger Global, with Initialized Capital, EQT Ventures, Y Combinator, and a longish-list of high-profile angels. It follows a seed funding round of $2.8 million that the company raised last year from Initialized, EQT Ventures, Northzone and Y Combinator, where Depict.ai was part of the first cohort to go through the program during a Covid-19 lockdown.

As CEO Oliver Edholm  (who co-founded the company with CTO Anton Osika) describes it, Depit.ai’s basic premise is that Amazon’s algorithms work so well because they have so much data on their platform about what you, and people similar to you, are buying. On a platform with millions of products, it gives Amazon the power to figure out what to show you, and also what to stock and develop as product categories, and how to price those products. That’s a paradigm that most other retailers have adopted too, he said.

“This is the same system that everyone else has adopted, but they are usually only looking at their own historical data,” Endholm said, which will never be as extensive as the dataset that Amazon has, and also doesn’t provide information about active purchases.

Depict.ai’s solution has been to amass a much bigger trove of information by aggregating data from across the internet; building its own deep learning-based platform to “read” it in relevant ways (for example in a search for recommendations after someone searches for a dress, identifying data that relates to other dresses, rather than to models that look like the model in the initial search a customer made); and then ordering it to fit searches made on its customers’ sites, to produce relevant recommendations.

It amasses the data initially by scraping a wide array of sites across the web, Edholm tells me. Scraping has had its share of controversy — a number of sites go to great lengths to make it hard or outright prohibit it, and some have gone so far as to take legal action against those who scrape — but Edholm notes that it’s not illegal and is actually quite standard practice in the world of commerce.

“We train on scraped quantities of data from the web, but a lot of models that do that,” he said. “You can learn pretty good abstractions.”

And, in any case, Depict.ai is scraping such a wide range of sites that even if one or two or 10 blocked it, there would still be a huge trove to tap, and Depict.ai already has amassed a huge amount of data.

“We’re not dependent on any specific site like LInkedIn or Craigslist,” he said, referring to two platforms that have been extensively scraped over the years for primary data that gets repurposed by others. “We generally want to find a lot of e-commerce product information and there are a lot of ways to do that, so I’m not worried about blocks. And we’ve already trained our models and can do it again and can drastically change the data set if we need to.”

The recommendation engine then can be integrated into its customers’ backends by way of an API. It claims that its tech can increase customers’ e-commerce revenue by between 4% and 6% “without needing any sales data at all.”

Catch Edholm if you can

Edholm’s resourcefulness and willingness to quickly change up the means to achieve Depict’s ends is a trait that is actually part and parcel of the person himself.

A computer whizkid, Edholm is a self-taught programmer who first got interested in coding after building customized Minecraft experiences as a 12 year-old. He then moved on to building mobile apps after realizing that they, like Minecraft, also used java.

After finishing middle school, Edholm left formal education and turned to home schooling (he credited his parents multiple times for being “super open minded” during our interview; boy, are they). He first came up with the idea for Depict.ai when he was working as a data scientist at Klarna, the buy now, pay later e-commerce powerhouse also based out of Stockholm, where he first started working when he was only 15. (Klarna had to pull a lot of strings to get him working there, he said, and he describes his work there perhaps because of that as “consulting.”)

While there, he became obsessed with artificial intelligence.

“What was super clear was that modern machine learning needs tons of data to function properly,” he said. “When you think you have enough, even more is better. That’s how modern machine learning works. But in e-commerce Amazon has a monopoly on data. The rest of the e-commerce industry doesn’t have the same alternatives. They u lack the quantity of data of an Amazon.”

But between noticing and figuring out (using AI) how to fix that gap between Amazon and the rest of the commerce world when it came to product data, and actually starting Depict.ai to turn that into a business, Edholm had another detour.

When he was 16 he’d saved up enough money from his Klarna work and selling apps in the app store, and he up and bought a ticket to Singapore, where he decided he needed to live to build a different startup: an AI-based accessibility platform for the web, to help those with visual impairments experience the internet.

Singapore was in his sights, he said, because he’d read a few research papers about accessibility that were published by academics in the country on the subject, so he thought that it would be best to be on the ground there to build out his ideas.

“I was very naive. I was inspired by the film Catch Me If You Can,” he said. “I understand that it was dramatic for my parents. I guess I have a track record of booking spontaneous flights.” (In fact, my interview with him was conducted while he was not in Stockholm, but Antwerp, Belgium — where he’d spontaneously flown that morning to try to woo a potential hire that he really wanted to join the team.)

He stayed in Singapore for six months on a short-term visa working on the idea, financing his time there by doing more consultancy work. Eventually he realized that it would be a huge challenge to build this out as a business. (Indeed, I think such products probably do have currency, but perhaps more as platform plays than accessibility-as-a-service for end users.)

So, for a Plan B, he also applied to join Y Combinator, now to work on Depict.ai, which had yet to launch. By the time he got a slot to interview, he’d moved back to Stockholm, but hadn’t told YC, so in fact had to fly back to Asia, to Bangalore, for the actual in-person meeting before eventually getting accepted, only to eventually go through the program remotely because of Covid-19.

Since starting Depict.ai, Edholm’s own star as an individual and founder of renown has only gone up: no surprise here, but he’s also now a Thiel Fellow.

Edholm is now only 19, and reading through what he’s done so far, it’s hard to imagine him sitting still for too long, but with Depict.ai still in the building phase, there is a lot of potential still to tap. For starters, it can pick up more customers. It can also diversify what it uses its data for, both to serve e-commerce companies but also in applying that same framework to other verticals.

In that regard, it’s interesting to see an investor like Tiger leading this round. The VC has increasingly been appearing in smaller, earlier stages of funding — in contrast to its early days and perhaps highest-profile investments where it sinks hundreds of millions into already-scaled businesses. The idea here is that Tiger itself is also learning more and wanting to get in on the ground level to make better returns on bets that it thinks might be good ones. In this case, that could just as easily apply to backing Depict.ai as it could to backing Edholm himself.

“Depict.ai’s AI-based product recommendation platform, is completely novel because it does not require historical sales data, enables online retailers of any size to deliver high-quality recommendations, a key driver of increased revenues,” said John Curtius, Partner, Tiger Global, in a statement. “We believe Depict.ai’s technology is poised to be a leader in this space, and we are excited to partner with Oliver and his team as they continue to expand into new markets.”

“At EQT Ventures we generally observe two trends in e-commerce innovation. Entrepreneurs either build tools to “arm the rebels” or create services for incumbents to keep up with the speed of more nimble players. When meeting with Oliver and his team we immediately bought his vision of providing top-tier product recommendation for the masses. Multiple members on our team have experienced the problem first-hand as founders, the Depict.ai technology is both a direct enabler of revenue growth and a time-saver from a development capacity standpoint. We’re excited to continue backing them on their journey from seed to Series A and beyond as they build one of the future giants in the e-commerce infrastructure space,” added Rania Belkahia, a partner at EQT Ventures.

(The angel list includes Fredrik Hjelm, CEO & Co-founder of Voi, Johannes Schildt, CEO & Co-founder of Kry, Carl Rivera, CEO & Co-founder of Tictail, Erik Bernhardsson, creator of the Spotify recommendation engine, Northzone, Nicolas Dessaigne, CEO & Co-founder of Algolia, Vidit Aatrey, CEO & Co-founder of Meesho, Joshua Browder, CEO & Founder of DoNotPay, Finbarr Taylor, CEO & Co-founder of Shogun.)

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NayaPay secures $13 million, largest seed funding in South Asia for its messaging and payment app

Pakistan-based fintech platform, NayaPay, has raised $13 million in a seed round to rollout its multi-service messaging and payment app, and to build payment acceptance and financial management tools for businesses in the South Asian country.

NayaPay CEO and founder Danish Lakhani told TechCrunch that the super-app allows people residing in Pakistan to send and receive money, split bills and make payments conveniently from smartphones. They have also issued virtual and physical Visa cards linked to the NayaPay wallet further allowing its users to make POS payments, and businesses to accept payments.

Lakhani said that NayaPay is leading a digital payment revolution in Pakistan, a cash-heavy economy, where only 1% of $4 trillion payments are done electronically. This is in a country of 220 million people. But NayaPay’s goal is even bigger; to bank millions of adults that remain unbanked, with women affected the most — only one in three women holds a bank account. The youth and freelance communities in Pakistan are also majorly locked out by traditional banks. About 100 million people are unbanked in Pakistan, according to this World Bank report.

“Students and freelancers are among the most underbanked population, and they are our first target market. They find it very difficult to open bank accounts because they don’t have a sense of income. Bank compliance departments consider them very high risk, but we see them as a group with the highest lifetime value,” said Lakhani.

The round was led by Zayn Capital; London-based investment firm, MSA Novo; global fund manager and Graph Ventures; an early-stage VC from Silicon Valley. It had the participation of Singapore-based Saison Capital, Waleed Saigol’s Maple Leaf Capital and Warren Hogarth; CEO Empower Finance and sponsors of the Lakson Group – a Pakistani conglomerate. The seed round is the largest seed financing round in the South Asian market leapfrogging Tag, a banking and financial services platform that raised $12 million last year.

“We are very bullish on fintech in Pakistan. While just beginning to emerge, Pakistani fintechs have the advantage of learning from peers and placing better informed strategic bets. We were impressed by the completeness of the vision of the founding team at NayaPay, and their differentiated platform-based strategy– first focused on servicing the needs of underbanked consumers and SMBs with specific use cases and building out from there,” said Zayn Capital Fronteir, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Faisal Aftab.

Image Credits: NayaPay

“With a proven ability to execute on the ground, the founder has an impressive track record of building and scaling businesses in Pakistan, including the country’s largest fiber broadband service (StormFiber a subsidiary of Cybernet),” said Aftab.

The idea to launch NayaPay was born during Lakhani’s visits to China, where social messaging and payments apps like WeChat Pay and AliPay are commonly used. He was at the time leading Cybernet, a broadband company he helped build from scratch, and which has grown to be the largest Internet and Data Communication Network Service Provider.

He says he was inspired by the ease in use of the Chinese super apps and decided to replicate the model with NayaPay, which he says is going to revolutionize the payments landscape in Pakistan.

Lakhani, who grew up in Pakistan, returned to build Cybernet after his undergraduate and graduate studies in the US, where he pursued a degree in Applied Mathematics at Brown University, a graduate degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

NayaPay has already acquired the requisite authorizations including the E-Money Institution license from the State Bank of Pakistan.

It targets to have 5 million users over the next five years and grow the number of digital payments, which he says will impact other sectors like e-commerce as more people use the NayaPay wallet to make online transactions.

“Online shopping accounts for only 2% of retail in Pakistan and is growing at a 15% CAGR, so there’s a massive demand which has been accelerated because of COVID. For example, restaurants that used to depend mostly on a POS terminal for acceptance, are now requiring payment gateway for their online sales,” he said.

They also plan to introduce other digital financial services like lending and investment in future.

“We will grow this platform to give them the ability to invest in money market funds, stock trading and buying other digital assets.”

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Inclusive live commerce: Engaging live agents to move beyond captioning

Dragorad Knezi Contributor

Dragorad Knezi is the CEO and co-founder of eyezon, an on-demand human-centric social shopping platform.

The inclusive shopping market may just be the largest untapped opportunity in the e-commerce world today.

By one estimate, it totals a staggering $8 trillion. It’s also not as fragmented as you might think. For example, more than 2.2 billion people experience vision impairments, while nearly half a billion have hearing loss.

As a result, brands need to start looking at this as an opportunity, rather than a box to check on their way to social responsibility. The problem is that the various organizations that set the standards for accessibility, such as the W3C, may be well-meaning, but their guidelines are minimal and often unimaginative.

For example, most of them call for tags to describe images. But no tag is going to tell a blind shopper if a scarf would look good on them. Brands can solve this problem — and I’ll get to that — but not through any metadata strategy.

Inclusive design, the kind that meets people where they are, requires innovation, not standards. It has been the unheralded impetus for some of the most widely used inventions in the world, including email, touchscreens and even typewriters. Innovation and inclusive designs have long outstripped the imaginations of regulators and delivered benefits to people far beyond the intended audience.

Today, we can see something similar developing with live commerce, though it has yet to be fully tapped for this purpose. Like many powerful ideas, live commerce is simple at its core: an interface that quickly connects a digital shopper with a live agent. Brands are using it today on a limited basis to demonstrate products, answer questions and provide alternative options, much like a shop assistant might do in a physical store.

Innovation and inclusive designs have long outstripped the imaginations of regulators and delivered benefits to people far beyond the intended audience.

While not necessarily an inclusive solution itself, if live commerce is combined with other off-the-shelf technologies, it can become a very powerful platform for innovation. To understand why, let me run through a number of scenarios that take it well beyond current accessibility standards. In doing so, I’ll show why solving for the widest possible range of abilities tends to create unintended benefits for all.

Captioning

Most people today are familiar with live captioning thanks to YouTube, which automatically translates any voice into text. Coupled with a live agent, it can create an experience in which anyone, regardless of hearing ability, can easily communicate with a knowledgeable agent.

Interestingly, when my company piloted this technology in Moscow, a much broader use case evolved. It turned out that subways and other environments tend to be quite noisy, and voice communication becomes difficult. People found they could use captioning during their commutes to overcome this.

The broader applications of such a technology are clear: Whether shopping or not, having the option for captioning can certainly ease communication in plenty of noisy situations, or ones in which people do not want to be overheard.

Inclusive shopping experiences

One of the challenges in addressing the inclusive community is that it’s quite diverse. For example, my company currently works with 16 different advocacy organizations, each representing people with specific challenges. While live commerce cannot solve all of these issues by itself, human beings are much more flexible and adaptable than any technological solution we have yet devised.

For example, some people may need larger images to see better. Others may need the agent to talk louder, slow down when speaking or give them advice specific to their abilities. Unlike digital agents, human beings can strategize with other humans, allowing them to put their heads together on what solutions might work for them. This is a unique advantage of live agents that applies really to anyone, including those with different abilities.

Cooperative shopping

Live commerce also gives us the ability to bring others into the shopping experience. To show how this can work, I want to return to the earlier example of the blind shopper and a scarf. In Eastern Europe, there are free services that connect visually impaired shoppers with stylists who help them select clothing and accessories. Of course, e-commerce would be much more convenient for both, so live services have the potential to connect the two with an e-commerce agent as needed. In this scenario, the agent demonstrates products, while the stylist consults with the shopper to make selections.

Live connections are not only, of course, for the visually impaired. They are also valuable for anyone who needs outside input on their shopping. If you trust friends and family to help you make decisions, you can invite them along on a virtual shopping trip.

Enhanced curation

Currently, e-commerce sites do a good job of categorizing and surfacing products according to particular criteria. They can help you find five-star products, ones within certain price ranges and even ones from particular brands. But none of them can sort according to abilities.

Such a capability is not too far off, especially if we use live commerce to jump-start the process. Inclusive sorting could begin with a rough idea of what might work or not. Then, the data collected during live interactions could also refine the criteria moving forward. And given that inclusive solutions tend to make things easier for everyone, it’s likely that these criteria could improve the experience for all, not just the intended audience.

Inclusive shopping was never going to be an easy challenge, but it’s surprising that such a large opportunity remains untapped. Until now, companies have too often seen accessibility standards as bars to jump over. It’s time for innovative approaches instead, and most often this means not inventing anything new but rather creatively combining existing capabilities into new solutions.

Today, the technology to bring live humans in contact with shoppers on a one-to-one basis exists. Brands can build on this to greatly expand the possibilities of the shopping experience and bring them not merely to those who need them but to everyone who could benefit from them. Which, history proves, is very likely all of us.

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Jumia reports record orders and revenue but investors remain unconvinced

Share sell-offs continued today in the wake of public companies’ earnings reports, proving especially significant amongst firms that benefited from the pandemic.

While new and established public companies in market categories like software, fintech, gaming and social media witnessed significant declines in recent weeks amidst rising interest rates, growth-oriented e-commerce companies like Jumia are not exactly proving themselves exempt from the larger rout.

Shares of the Africa-focused but U.S.-headquartered e-commerce company fell 32% in November after it posted an unconvincing third-quarter earnings report. Its share price, trading at $7.92 before the opening bell, fell 4% further despite posting improved fourth-quarter earnings today.

Gross merchandise volume (GMV) at Jumia in the fourth quarter grew 20% year-over-year to $330 million, while revenue grew to $62.0 million, up 26% over the same time frame. Quarterly active users and orders rose 29% and 40% to 3.8 million and 11.3 million year-over-year, respectively.

The metrics improved thanks to Jumia’s Q2 2021 decision to push frequent purchases of fast-moving consumer goods (FCMGs) rather than larger-ticket electronics and appliances, and increased in sales and marketing spend.

Sales and advertising expenses at Jumia grew 159% year-over-year in the final quarter of 2021, a significant slowdown from the previous quarter, which posted a staggering 228% expansion in the expense category.

Jumia’s marketplace revenue fell 1%, declining to $32.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Turning to the bottom line, Jumia’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) loss was $70 million in Q4 2021. That’s a 107% year-over-year increase. What drove the rising adjusted loss? Gross profit only advanced 2%, which didn’t square well in accounting terms with the aforementioned boost to Jumia’s sales and marketing spend. 

The company’s fintech arm, Jumia Pay, saw its total payment volume (TPV) grow by 29% year-over-year to $90.5 million in Q4 2021. Jumia also said its transactions reached 3.9 million, expanding 46% year-over-year. The final quarter of 2021 was the company’s fastest in terms of growth for nearly two years.

Jumia shipped 3.3 million packages for 996 partners via its logistics arm in Q4 2021. It sent 2.9 million packages for 766 clients the previous quarter. Altogether, Jumia got 8.3 million packages in the hands of 1,489 clients throughout last year, generating a revenue of over $3 million.

In its guidance, Jumia said it plans to upgrade its logistics capacity, which will cost between $15 million to $25 million this year.

The company also expects continued year-over-year GMV growth, spending up to $55 million in sales and advertising in the first half of 2022. That works out to an anticipated EBITDA loss of not more than $220 million this year, an increase from the $196 million adjusted loss it recorded in 2021.

Jumia finished 2021 with $512.8 million ($117.1 million of cash and cash equivalents and $395.7 million of term deposits and other financial assets). While there are a number positives from Jumia’s fourth-quarter performance, it appears Jumia’s long-term strategy — one which is investing hard in sales and expenses while banking on FMCG goods to cover ground — isn’t strong enough for its investors yet.

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Target to add Starbucks orders and returns to its curbside pickup service

Target is preparing a series of changes to make its curbside pickup service called Drive Up more appealing to consumers. The retailer announced on Wednesday it will begin testing an option that will allow customers to add Starbucks orders to their pickup as well as the ability to bring back items they want to return, among other changes.

The new additions are not yet available but instead are a part of a planned expansion of the Drive Up service in fall 2022 (Q3), Target said.

Initially, the enhancements will be piloted by store employees before rolling out to Target customers in select test markets, the company told TechCrunch. Likely, Target’s hometown market of Minneapolis will be among the first testers. However, Target declined to say which cities or how many stores would gain the features or when it expected the changes to roll out more broadly.

When available, customers will see the new options appear with the Target mobile app, which today powers Target’s Drive Up service. Here, customers today can place orders for curbside pickup, then alert the store when they’re on their way. That real-time notification about the customer’s location could tie into the Starbucks ordering option, as the company will know when to begin preparing the drink orders.

Target first partnered with Starbucks in 1999, and has at least 1,300+ Starbucks cafés inside its U.S. stores, to give a sense of the potential scale of this feature long-term. (In total, Target has over 1,900 U.S. stores, and a spokesperson noted “the vast majority” now include a Starbucks café.)

While grabbing a coffee during curbside pickup is a nice perk, the ability to manage returns without having to get out of the car is a highly competitive addition. Currently, most retailers require shoppers to come inside the store and visit the customer service counter to make a return, or ship their items back directly. Amazon offers a variety of destinations that shoppers can bring their returns to in person, like Whole Foods stores and Kohl’s. Walmart, meanwhile, rolled out support for online returns in-store in 2017. It then added support for marketplace items in fall 2018.

In addition to these changes, Target said it will expand its “backup item” functionality in more categories, including beauty and household items. This allows customers to pick a suitable replacement in the case their first choice is not available.

“Our guests continue to tell us they love the ease and convenience of Drive Up, and have been asking us to add even more of the Target experience to the service. Adding Starbucks ordering and easy returns, while expanding our backup item options, will give guests even more of what they love about shopping at Target, quickly and easily,” said Mark Schindele, Target’s chief stores officer, in a statement. “Ongoing investments in our same-day services have built trust and relevance with our guests, while meeting their needs — no matter how they choose to shop,” he added.

Drive Up is one of several same-day services Target offers, alongside its traditional online Order Pickup and its grocery-focused online shopping service Shipt, which is available both inside Target’s app, on Target.com and on its own branded website and app where users can shop non-Target stores, as well.

During Target’s third-quarter 2021 earnings, the company announced that its same-day services combined grew nearly 60% this year, on top of the 200% growth they saw during the year prior. The latter, of course, was amid the height of the coronavirus pandemic, which gave retailers’ curbside pickup options a massive boost. But while many consumers tried out curbside pickup for the first time to avoid shopping in-store during the outbreak, industry experts predict consumer adoption will remain high even as customers return to stores for in-person shopping.

Target has been adding new capabilities to Drive Up since its launch, including support for features like its Adult Beverage pickup, support for “Shopping Partners” (for customers who want to send someone else to pick up their order); “Forgot Something” for add-ons after orders were placed; and others. It’s also invested in capital projects to add more permanent storage capacity in more than 200 high-volume stores, plus flexible fixtures to provide temporary storage areas to support seasonal peak, the company noted in November.

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