Affirm’s CTO talks transparency and the tech that makes BNPL possible

BNPL is not a new concept; it’s just taken off in recent years and become far more mainstream.

Buy now, pay later lets people do exactly what its name suggests — buy something and pay for it later. The difference between BNPL and credit cards is that rather than charge the full amount of a purchase on a card, consumers can choose to pay for an item in installments.

However, there are some that argue BNPL is just another form of debt, which could lead to a discussion on whether companies that enable it are doing it responsibly. In the case of Affirm, one of the space’s largest players, co-founder Max Levchin (who also founded PayPal) has been vocal about what he describes as a “mission-based” approach.

Ukraine-born Levchin started Affirm in January 2012. The fintech went public in 2021, and while it’s trading considerably lower than its 52-week-high (which stock isn’t?), Affirm is today valued at nearly $9 billion, and its executives remain bullish on the company’s future.

TechCrunch sat down with Libor Michalek, president of technology at Affirm, to understand just how the company differentiates itself from its plethora of competitors, what is unique about its technology and strategy, and why he thinks using BNPL is much better than using a credit card to pay for purchases.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

TC: I grew up in the era of layaways, where you could pay in installments for an item but had to wait to take it home. So when I heard about BNPL, I was intrigued. In your view, what makes Affirm stand out?

We have this notion of a vertically integrated stack where we are able to handle the full touchpoint — that really gives us a lot of visibility into the customer, in the transaction, and that lets us underwrite accurately.

Libor Michalek: Our main focus is doing right by the customer. And that really translates into this idea of aligning our interests with that of the customer. So if they get the unexpected or unwanted, then we share in the negative outcomes.

The second pillar for us is building modern technology that enables us to do this. How do you deliver a financial product with no late fees, with no gimmicks and no deferred interest tricks? It’s really the ability to have access to real-time data, deliver it on the phone and do it at e-commerce sites in real time, and then bringing all that together to make real-time decisions and deliver those decisions clearly to the customer.

Another advantage we have is the scale of our merchant network. We work with 170,000 merchants, which enhances our ability to provide access to à la carte credit wherever the customer might want it and need it.

I recently learned that Affirm (and other BNPL players) do charge interest at times, but often at a lower rate than traditional credit card providers. Tell us more about how those decisions are made — how do you decide who is charged interest, and who isn’t?

For us, the most important and biggest difference is that unlike a credit card, the customer knows how much interest in dollars they’re going to pay for that purchase. There’s no way for them to pay more for that purchase, and they will know it upfront before they click.

We’ll communicate it to them obviously, as an interest rate as we’re legally required to, but also in dollars and cents. A lot of times people get surprised when I tell them that a $1,000 purchase at 15% for a year actually translates to $83 because of the amortization schedules. A calculator on our website lets you play with all of those numbers.

I think the transparency part is pretty key, because I feel like with credit cards, you do run that risk of — depending on how long it takes you to pay or what your minimum payments are — how much you pay in interest potentially ranging wildly. With us, it’s a fixed amount that’s communicated to the customer upfront.

And even if they miss a payment, there are no late fees and nothing gets tacked on in any way that would ever result in a different outcome. In fact, if they pay early, the number can be lower, but it won’t ever exceed the figure we give them.

How many people are usually able to use BNPL through Affirm without being charged interest?

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Amazon stock plunges to two-year low following first quarter loss

Amazon stock plunged to a two-year low as shares slid as much as 12% on Friday morning after the company reported its first-quarter results yesterday. The company reported a loss of $3.84 billion, or $7.56 a share, for the first quarter. In the first quarter of last year, Amazon reported a profit of $8.1 billion, or $15.79 a share.

The company said Thursday it projects revenue between $116 billion to $121 billion in the second quarter, which would miss analysts’ average estimate of $125.5 billion, as reported by CNBC. Amazon also reported a $7.6 billion loss on its investment in electric vehicle maker Rivian.

In a statement about the quarterly results, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company is focused on improving productivity and cost efficiencies, but that this will take time as Amazon continues to address inflationary and supply chain pressures.

“The pandemic and subsequent war in Ukraine have brought unusual growth and challenges,” said Jassy. “Today, as we’re no longer chasing physical or staffing capacity, our teams are squarely focused on improving productivity and cost efficiencies throughout our fulfillment network. We know how to do this and have done it before. This may take some time, particularly as we work through ongoing inflationary and supply chain pressures, but we see encouraging progress on a number of customer experience dimensions, including delivery speed performance as we’re now approaching levels not seen since the months immediately preceding the pandemic in early 2020.”

Subscription services, which include Amazon Prime memberships, took in $8.4 billion for the quarter. Last quarter, the company increased the price of Prime, as the monthly fee went up from $12.99 to $14.99 and the annual membership rose from $119 to $139, marking a 17% increase. The e-commerce giant had said the reason for the increase was due to the continued expansion of Prime member benefits and the rise in wages and transportation costs.

Amazon’s results come at a time when the company is seeing a growing push toward unionization from its workforce. Earlier this month, workers at Amazon’s JFK8 fulfillment center voted to unionize, marking a historic day in a hard-fought battle. Following the news, Amazon had said it was “disappointed” and “evaluating [its] options.” Workers at Staten Island’s LDJ5 sort center are currently set to hold their own vote.

As part of its quarterly earnings report, Amazon also announced that Prime Day will take place in July this year in more than 20 countries. The company’s annual deal event has shifted around over the past few years, as it was moved to October for 2020 and then moved back up to June in 2021.

Staten Island Amazon workers vote to unionize

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Pinterest addresses the TikTok threat in its first quarter earnings

Pinterest may have beat on revenue and earnings in the first quarter, but the company is not out of the woods yet when it comes to carving out a place for its service in today’s competitive landscape. In particular, Pinterest is up against a credible threat with the rise of TikTok when it comes to social commerce. The idea that you could be inspired to shop by browsing media shared by others is an experience that Pinterest, in a way, helped pioneer, with its pinboard-style website where users often saved ideas of things they were considering buying or trying.

But these days, the more common refrain among influenced and inspired shoppers is “TikTok made me buy it,” not “I found it on Pinterest.”

That’s a challenge the company understands it must overcome in order to establish its site as a destination for the next generation of online shoppers.

The company on Wednesday reported fairly solid earnings, pulling in $575 million in revenue versus $573 million expected, and delivering earnings per share of 10 cents instead of the 4 cents expected. But one troubling area was its decline in users. The company reported its global monthly active users decreased 9% from the same period last year to 433 million in the quarter, below expectations of 437.9 million.

Investors drilled into the user decline on the subsequent earnings call with a focus on better understanding how Pinterest was standing up to the TikTok threat.

Pinterest explained it’s been investing over the past year and a half in its new video-powered features, like Idea Pins — a sort of video-first mashup of both TikTok-stye short-form video content and tappable Stories.

Pinterest introduces Idea Pins, a video-first feature aimed at creators

These Pins are aimed at attracting creators to Pinterest’s site, allowing them to record and edit creative videos with common tools like voiceover recording, background music, transitions, and other interactive elements. But the Pins can also include pages of content where creators can add instructions, like the steps to perform a DIY project or the ingredient lists for a recipe. This makes the Pins more purpose-driven and actionable compared with some of the content on primarily entertainment-focused destinations, like TikTok or Instagram Reels.

Pinterest acknowledged it had to do a significant amount of work to catch up to where the market was headed with video, but believed it’s now starting to see some traction.

The company said its shift in focus to video had come at the expense of some monthly active users in the short term, but it’s taking the risk in order to get the new video-focused ecosystem off the ground. As a result, it’s seen the number of video Idea Pinners increase 15x year-over-year, and noted the feature was attracting a more engaged audience. Pinterest also said it’s seen over 25% growth in the save rate of Idea Pins quarter-over-quarter. And Pinterest users who follow multiple video creators on the site tend to visit Pinterest more often than those who do not, the company shared.

“This is also strategically important because we think video as a format is just fundamental to the way people get inspired and take action in the future,” noted Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann.

Pinterest is also planning to further develop new publishing features for video, including by leveraging its most recent acquisition Vochi, which will help creators make better videos that are more likely to inspire action. It’s said it’s planning to expand its creator rewards, had launched a Pinterest API for shopping, and began beta testing a new feature called Your Shop, which offers a personalized experience to users by connecting them with products they may like.

Pinterest invests in creator tools with acquisition of video creation and editing app Vochi

But Pinterest also said it felt the impacts from lower search traffic and from “time spent by people on competitive platforms.” While the former was attributed to a Google search algorithm adjustment in the quarter, the latter was more of a veiled reference to TikTok, in addition to other social apps.

The company pointed out that the U.S. is its most mature market and one where a number of social media, entertainment, and news apps are competing for users’ time spent on mobile devices.

“We called out [the] competition just because there is a tremendous amount of options for consumers on the phone at any given time,” said Silbermann, without specifically saying the word “TikTok.”

“That said…what we’ve heard from Pinners and what we see is that we have a pretty differentiated use case…that’s the use case of actually using Pinterest to plan, get ready for major events, and then, eventually, to make considered purchases. And that’s quite different from an entertainment and news use case,” he added.

But investors were clearly interested in understanding how TikTok, specifically, was impacting Pinterest’s business, prompting a direct question about the growing threat of the short-form video giant whose mobile app just saw the most downloads worldwide in the quarter.

TikTok was the top app by worldwide downloads in Q1 2022

“We don’t have exact fidelity into where people are spending their time,” Silbermann responded. “But obviously the story of the last couple of years in terms of time shift has been the rise of TikTok as a major place that people are spending their time,” he admitted, before reiterating that Pinterest’s focus is on content that inspires action — not just entertainment.

“That’s going to have to be reflected in the way that we provide incentives for creators, but also the way that we rank content on Pinterest,” he said, before laying out the vision for how Pinterest will compete with TikTok.

“The reason that a feed on Pinterest feels different than a feed on a social network, or a feed on a pure entertainment network, is that the content is ranked taking into account how useful that idea will be to getting something done in the future,” the CEO continued. “As we think about things like creator rewards and roll out new ad formats, like Idea Pins that are sponsored, that’s the sort of central thesis behind it. And it’s in line with the central thesis of Pinterest overall, where this isn’t a platform to talk to your friends. It’s not a platform to keep up with the news. It’s a platform for you to articulate things that you want to do in your life [and] for us to help you visualize what that end state looks like,” he said.

Pinterest also said it will work to improve its home fee recommendation and search result quality, while making Pinterest easier to access and use even for logged-out visitors.

But the company stopped short of admitting its monthly active user [MAU] loss was due to TikTok or other competitive threats.

Instead, it largely blamed the global decline in users on the Russia-Ukraine war and lower engagement from other regions across Europe — an impact of about 5 million MAUs. Excluding that situation, Pinterest believed its MAU count would have been modestly up from earlier estimates.

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Snap further invests in AR Shopping with dedicated in-app feature, new tools for retailers

At Snap’s Partner Summit on Thursday, the Snapchat maker announced a number of new initiatives focused on using its AR technology to aid with online shopping. Most notably, the company is introducing a new in-app destination within Snapchat called “Dress Up” that will feature AR fashion and virtual try-on experiences, and it’s launching tools that will allow retailers to integrate with Snapchat’s AR shopping technology within their own websites and apps, among other updates designed to ease the process of AR asset creation.

The company has been making strides with AR-powered e-commerce over the past year, having given its computer vision-based “Scan” feature a more prominent placement inside the Camera section of the app and upgrading it with commerce capabilities. Earlier in 2022, Snap also rolled out support for real-time pricing and product details to enhance its AR shopping listings.

These improvements have yielded increased consumer engagement with AR commerce, Snap says. Since January 2021, more than 250 million Snapchat users have engaged with AR shopping Lenses more than 5 billion times, the company notes.

Today, Snap announced it will put AR technology more directly into retailers’ own hands by allowing them to use Snap’s AR try-on technology within their own mobile apps and websites, with Camera Kit for AR Shopping.

This AR SDK (software development kit) will bring catalog-powered shopping lenses into the retailer’s own product pages to allow their customers to virtually try on their clothing, accessories, shoes, and more. At launch, the feature works on iOS and Android apps, but Snap says it will work “soon” on websites, as well.

Its first global partner to use the technology is Puma, which will allow shoppers to virtually try on its sneakers using the Camera Kit integration. Shoppers would simply point their phone at their feet to see the sneakers they’re considering appear in an AR view.

Retailers will also gain access to a new AR Image Processing technology in Snap’s 3D asset manager which Snap says will make it easier and faster to build augmented reality shopping experiences. Through a web interface, brands will be able to select their product SKUs and then turn them into Shopping Lenses, allowing them to create new Lenses in seconds, and for no additional cost, Snap claims.

To do so, partners will upload their existing product photography for the SKUs they sell, which Snap’s tech will then process using a deep-learning module that turns them into AR Image assets. This process uses A.I. to segment the garment from the brand’s model photography, essentially turning standard photos into AR assets.

These assets can then be used to create new try-on Lenses which can be used by shoppers at home who take a full-body selfie photo.

Image Credits: Snap; virtual try-on using full-body images

The company is also adding new AR Shopping templates in its Lens Web Builder to turn those assets into Lense more quickly, without the need to understand AR development. Select partners in apparel, eyewear, and footwear can try this out in beta today, and Snap will later expand the feature to include furniture and handbags.

Related to this, Snap is giving AR shopping a bigger spot within its own app for consumers.

Snapchat will introduce a new in-app destination called “Dress Up,” where users can browse and discover new try-on experiences from creators, retailers, and fashion brands in one place. “Dress Up” will be first available in Lens Explorer, but will soon be added one tap away from the Camera in the AR Bar.

Image Credits: Snap’s Dress Up feature

Users will be able to return to outfits and other products they liked by navigating to a new shopping section from within their Profile, where they can view the items they’ve favorited, recently viewed, and added to a cart.

As another example, Snap says that Zenni Optical’s AR Lenses have been tried on over 60 million times by users, and Lenses that used Snap’s “true size” technology were shown to have driven a 42% higher return on ad spend compared to Lenses without the feature.

Finally, in the realm of virtual fashion, Snap’s Bitmoji is getting an update, too. There are now over 1 billion of these mini avatars created to date, which people like to dress up in virtual fashion items. Snap says fashion brand partners will now be able to drop “Limited Edition” fashion items for Bitmoji exclusively for Snapchat users.

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Two years after Lemon Perfect was spotted in Beyoncé’s limo, the superstar is now a backer

Lemon Perfect founder and CEO Yanni Hufnagel didn’t know it yet, but his hydrating lemon water brand was about to go viral in 2020, all thanks to an unexpected appearance of the Dragon Fruit Mango bottle in the door of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s limo.

“She had posted a photo with it in her limo, and all of a sudden my phone blew up,” Hufnagel said. “We came to learn that she was an authentic fan of the brand. A year later, one of our investors was in her house and saw her stash in the fridge and helped us build the bridge with her. It is beyond my wildest dreams to have someone of her influence being a fan of the brand.”

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A post shared by Beyoncé (@beyonce)

The company announced Thursday that Knowles-Carter is a backer in its $31 million Series A alongside Beechwood Capital, Goat Rodeo Capital, Melitas Ventures, NNS Capital and Trousdale Ventures.

“I don’t typically enjoy drinks without added sugar, but Lemon Perfect is delicious,” said Knowles-Carter in a statement. “It was an easy decision to invest in something that not only tastes great and is healthy, but also, and most importantly, allows choosing a healthier lifestyle to be affordable and accessible to everyone.”

Hufnagel started the Atlanta-based company in 2017 after a career as a college basketball coach for University of Nevada, Reno. After an unexpected encounter with a store owner who dreamed of being a coach, the store owner ended up sending Hufnagel a draft of a book he was writing about the Keto diet, which included recipes for lemon water.

After seeing his basketball players drinking Bai in the locker room, it got Hufnagel thinking about taking lemon water and giving it the same foundation as Bai and to go after the multibillion-dollar enhanced water category that he thought was ripe for disruption. This market is expected to grow nearly 9% annually over the next five years.

Today, Lemon Perfect is in direct competition with drinks like Bai, Vitamin Water and Hint. It comes in flavors, including Beyoncé’s favorite Dragon Fruit Mango, Just Lemon, Blueberry Acai and Peach Raspberry. The drinks have five calories, contain potassium and vitamin C, but zero sugar and no artificial flavors or sweeteners.

“Nothing with our flavor and health profile is on the market today,” Hufnagel added. “And, our price point is at where a consumer anywhere and anytime can become a customer. It is very rare that you can have a total addressable market like we do.”

The Series A announced today is a combination of a $16.5 million initial round and a $14 million extension, Hufnagel said. The new investment gives Lemon Perfect total funding to date of $42.2 million and a total valuation to over $100 million.

The company previously raised funding two years ago, but the driver for this new financing was simple: growth. Hufnagel wants to scale the brand to more than 40,000 points of distribution by the end of 2022, which will require a substantial field sales team. Currently it is sitting at 25,000 points of distribution, including its website, Amazon and retailers across the country like Publix, Fred Meyer and Mariano’s. Lemon Perfect is also poised to launch in Costco in the summer.

In 2021, Lemon Perfect quadrupled its revenue to $21 million, and Hufnagel estimates the company will do $60 million in retail sales in 2022, up from $25 million last year. He also expects to more than double the business in terms of revenue this year. Along with that growth has come a boost in headcount, which stands at 70, up from 38 employees a year ago.

“Beverage is an expensive game, and access to capital is the only way to drive a fast-scaling brand forward,” Hufnagel said. “We want to be a disruptive player in a large category and want to put fuel on the fire. We felt like we were able to drive great execution, but still have room to grow and want to build a big margin story for tomorrow.”

Data-driven iteration helped China’s Genki Forest become a $6B beverage giant in 5 years

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Target2Sell personalisation vendor acquired by Mirakl

Mirakl have announced the acquisition of ecommerce personalisation vendor Target2Sell, accelerating online marketplace growth by making it easier for customers to discover and purchase the products they want from automatically vetted and curated third-party sellers.

Mirakl also have more announcements today:-

• Payout, a new solution for enterprise marketplaces that dramatically simplifies the financial complexity of international expansion is coming in late 2022
• New Marketplace Platform capabilities, including new AI-powered Product Data Mapping and Customer Care Intelligence
• FastTrack onboarding to accelerate the activation of sellers
• One Creditor to meet the needs of large corporate buyers

You can read more on these enhancements here.

Unlocking Curation at Scale with Target2Sell

The marketplace model makes it possible for digital commerce businesses to deliver increased value to their customers through vastly expanded assortments reaching more than 100 million products, competitive prices, and an exceptional buying experience. However, one of the most common challenges for new marketplaces is maintaining brand identity and personalized customer experiences while dramatically scaling those assortments. Marketplace success depends on the ability to propose the right products to the right customers at the right time, leading to increased conversions and improved customer satisfaction.

Target2Sell has developed an innovative, AI-driven suite of products, complemented with deep expertise, that enable eCommerce operators to immediately offer advanced personalisation capabilities. Target2Sell’s products are trusted by more than 100 enterprise customers worldwide. With the acquisition of Target2Sell, Mirakl-powered Marketplaces will gain new solutions to expand their assortment easily and exponentially to meet the changing needs of a much wider customer base. Target2Sell’s AI-driven products ensure that customers are presented with relevant, personalized experiences proven to drive as much as 15% higher conversion rates through a tailored shopping experience. The integration of Target2Sell into Mirakl’s industry-leading enterprise marketplace platform will open new revenue streams for Mirakl and drive immediate and tangible performance increases for customers through the ability to instantly achieve curation at scale.

Mirakl’s vision has always been to make it easy and fast for our customers to launch and scale the world’s leading online marketplaces. The acquisition of Target2Sell and our new platform innovations represent the next step in providing Mirakl-powered Marketplaces with the technology, ecosystem and expertise to scale without limits, all while maintaining their unique brand DNA. By expanding our suite of industry-leading marketplace solutions, only Mirakl can provide businesses with everything they need to take full advantage of the marketplace economy. 

– Adrien Nussenbaum, co-founder and co-CEO, Mirakl

Target2Sell’s technology is designed in a way that allows business users to make the most of the embedded AI by implementing their custom objectives while delivering real business outcomes, making it a perfect match for Mirakl’s industry-leading marketplace solution. By joining the Mirakl team, we’re looking forward to raising the bar for the platform model and solidifying Mirakl’s position as the only marketplace solution that enables enterprises to deliver the highest quality, most profitable interactions with buyers and sellers at scale. In the months ahead, we will also collaborate to develop the next wave of innovative products to ensure Mirakl customers continue to grow without limits and operate the world’s most successful enterprise marketplaces.

– Johan Lambert, CEO, Target2Sell

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Madison Reed, which made DTC hair color a thing, is now going after larger retail footprint

Madison Reed proved that women will buy hair color online, but over the years, the company, founded by Amy Errett, opened more than 60 hair color bars across the country, established a wholesale presence with Ulta and later got in on Ulta’s deal with Target while also operating website and Amazon sales.

We last checked in on Errett two years ago, when she discussed Madison Reed’s hair color bars, how the pandemic affected the business and a possibility of creating a men’s color category.

Now with both the direct-to-consumer, national retail and hair color bars doing well, the eight-year-old company wants to establish even more of a local relationship with customers by expanding the number of color bars it operates across the country and having a presence in retailers where they typically shop. At the color bars, the hair color is applied by a licensed professional more quickly and more cost-effectively than traditional salons, the company said.

“I have been doing this for a while, and I don’t believe consumer brands can solely be in one channel and succeed,” Errett told TechCrunch. “We are serving the consumer, and they shop everywhere. We realized we need to follow where the customers are, and then our business exploded.”

Fast-growing Madison Reed is eyeing men’s hair next; “We’re going to blow the doors off that market”

Buoyed by a new $33 million investment, plans are in the works to add another 20 color bar locations and hire 850 new colorists by the end of the year, Errett said. She forecasts the company will have 100 stores by 2023. The company is targeting areas including New York, South Florida, California, Chicago, Washington, DC and Texas.

The new financing, which gives Madison Reed some $250 million in total funding to date, was led by Sandbridge Capital, with participation from Marcy Venture Partners.

Errett described the funding as “very opportunistic” because the company was now actively raising money, but as she got to know Sandbridge, which is an investor in beauty companies like ILIA Beauty and Youth to the People, she felt they understood the consumer and the market. Same with Marcy Venture, Jay-Z’s fund, which invested in Savage X Fenty — also known as singer Rihanna’s company — and is tapped into media channels.

“We are excited to have both of them on board,” she said.

In addition to the new color bars, Madison Reed will invest the new financing in additional product launches; unfortunately, Errett stayed mum on what those were, but we can only assume that the men’s color might be back on the table.

“We already had capital in the bank, but this gives us the arsenal to keep our head down and execute. This is now where the rubber meets the road,” she added.

Meanwhile, Errett said there was more opportunity out there for the global hair color industry, which is expected to be valued at over $40 billion in 2023. Within that sector, it was estimated that 40 million Americans used permanent color hair coloring products in 2020.

As such, Madison Reed saw its gross product margins grow to over 80% and revenue double over the past two years. Errett believes the company has made a dent in the at-home market and is now starting to gain market share in the salon market.

Meanwhile, in March, Madison Reed hired Jose Zuniga as its CFO. Zuniga was previously with Dollar Shave Club and is leading the company’s omnichannel expansion.

“We were focused on finding someone with a consumer packaged goods background, but not the traditional way of doing it,” Errett said. “Dollar Shave Club disrupted an industry no one was paying attention to. As I got to know Jose, he understood the financial model, understood retailers shelves and had the content skills. We thought he would be a wonderful culture fit.”

It may not be as glamorous as D2C, but beauty tech is big money

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Mirakl Payout, and additional capabilities announded

As well as the acquisition of ecommerce personalisation vendor Target2Sell, Mirakl Payout has also been announced – a new solution for enterprise marketplaces that dramatically simplifies the financial complexity of international expansion, to be released with early access in the second half of 2022. The new solutions will broaden Mirakl’s unmatched ability to provide online marketplaces the technology and expertise necessary to scale without limits.

And, Mirakl are introducing new Marketplace Platform capabilities, including new AI-powered Product Data Mapping and Customer Care Intelligence, that take the quality of marketplace customer experience to the next level. Mirakl is also announcing FastTrack onboarding to accelerate the activation of sellers and the integration of their catalogues in Mirakl Connect. And with the introduction of One Creditor, a new platform business model, Mirakl customers will be able to meet the needs of large corporate buyers with a single transaction.

Mirakl Payout Simplifies International Marketplace Expansion

In a highly competitive eCommerce environment, online marketplaces must stay ahead by attracting and retaining the highest quality sellers regardless of their location. Integrating international sellers presents new challenges with regard to financial complexity, regulatory compliance and licensing, foreign exchange and other nuances that vary from market to market. Mirakl Payout, the new global payout platform, streamlines marketplace payment activities to meet the needs of marketplace operators and sellers. Unlike current fintech solutions, Mirakl’s new payout tool is tailored to meet the specific needs of marketplace operators and sellers and will be seamlessly integrated into the Mirakl Marketplace Platform and workflow, increasing operational efficiencies.

Payout simplifies the global payout process for operators, allowing them to increase gross merchandise value (GMV) by adding more top global sellers without dealing with regulatory compliance bottlenecks and the burden of regional licensing and management. Payout efficiently handles seller onboarding and Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements, regulated escrow, currency exchange and refund reserve management, maintaining compliance regardless of the region of the operator or seller.  Initial solution availability will begin in the fall of 2022 via an early access program.

Payout is the first product in a suite of future financial service products aimed to help marketplace operators and sellers run, scale and grow their businesses while producing additional durable revenue streams for Mirakl.

New Capabilities Drive Rapid Marketplace Growth

Mirakl’s second annual Enterprise Marketplace Index showed that online marketplaces grew at twice the rate of traditional eCommerce, while the number of businesses that began selling on marketplaces increased by 46% from 2020 to 2021. To make it easier for organizations to build on this rapid growth, Mirakl is extending its core platform with the following must-have new capabilities:

Manage Data Quality and Customer Care at Scale

• Product Data Mapping AI: New artificial intelligence developed by Mirakl helps sellers cut product catalog data mapping time in half while improving the accuracy of product catalog data for online marketplaces. Product Data Mapping eases product discovery for customers: products are better categorized on marketplace front pages, reducing the time and complexity of onboarding third-party sellers’ catalogs. Built from Mirakl’s deep expertise in catalog management, Product Data Mapping has been enriched with a proprietary AI to detect syntax similarities and define characteristics from product descriptions. With these enhancements, the Mirakl platform will automatically map categories and subcategories for sellers while improving speed and accuracy during the critical seller onboarding process. 
• Customer Care Intelligence: Mirakl’s new customer care tool empowers online marketplaces to deliver a high quality marketplace shopping experience at scale with powerful new AI to quickly identify escalating customer cases and intervene as needed to mitigate incidents before they arise.The new machine learning algorithms, developed by Mirakl, automatically distinguish between positive, negative and neutral sentiments within customer messages. Messages requiring immediate intervention are automatically flagged, allowing online marketplaces to manage a much larger seller base and volume of orders with fewer dedicated resources. 

Both Product Data Mapping and Customer Care Intelligence enhancements will be available in May 2022 for existing customers to use. 

Extend Marketplace Benefits to Large Corporate Buyers

• One Creditor: To bring the benefits of the marketplace model to large corporate buyers, Mirakl is introducing One Creditor, enabling businesses to act as the central creditor for all transactions. Coming soon to Mirakl’s B2B customers in the European Union, One Creditor simplifies vendor management and overall buying experiences to accommodate specialized supplier or client relationships while helping broaden their digital commerce business. Current B2B customers in the EU will receive access to the solution in the fall of 2022 with general availability to follow at a date to be announced later.

Accelerate the Onboarding Of Sellers and Their Catalogs

• FastTrack Onboarding: Online marketplaces can easily add hundreds of relevant, high-quality third-party sellers to their marketplace in minutes with FastTrack onboarding, boosting assortment and meeting the evolving needs of customers. The new solution accelerates seller matching to relevant marketplaces, automates store creation, and creates offers for existing products in minutes. These enhancements allow Mirakl customers to deliver the differentiated assortment needed to satisfy customers and accelerate growth. Availability for FastTrack onboarding is planned for Fall 2022 and will start with B2C customers.

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Frustrations of a marketplace seller and how to overcome them

In this guest post today, Hugh Craigie Halkett, Managing Director of Stamp Free discusses some of the frustrations marketplace sellers face on a daily basis and how these issues may soon be solved.

Can a mobile app revolutionise sending and returning items?

As a marketplace seller, we’ve all experienced a multitude of frustrations, from data security to supply chain stock issues to economic uncertainty and unplanned price increases.

But quite often, the simplest of steps in the journey of sending our parcels can leave us banging our heads against the wall and wondering why there aren’t simpler solutions available in this day and age. In this blog, we’ll look at some of the most frustrating elements of the ecommerce journey for both rookies and seasoned veterans and highlight just one of the ways this is being tackled via smart technology.

You’ve got great products and manage your stock with pride. You’re in a great marketplace. Customers are finding you. They want your product, and they place an order. Hooray – you’re an ecommerce winner! Until you realise that your printer has run out of ink (if you even have a printer), you can’t print the address label, let alone the returns label that your customer may or may not use. Or you’ve run out of labels, or even worse, get a paper jam on the last label that you need to print! What about the added frustration of your returning customer getting to a parcel shop only for the print-on-demand not to be working. Plus, you’ve accepted an order with a delivery promise that you can’t afford to fail.

The humble label can often be one of the most stressful parts of the whole process, and that’s before your customer has had to grapple with labels for the return too. The label contains a plethora of information, including location and price. It is a vital source of information for the carrier or postal. But in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and new technology companies, there must be a simpler solution for marketplace sellers to manage the sending of parcels and the management of returns. One that reduces the stresses and inconvenience of the label whilst still giving carriers all the information needed to get a parcel safely from A to B.

The answer may just lie in the ubiquitous smartphone. After all, 97% of the UK population have one compared to only 82% of the population having a printer (and it’s a sure bet that not all those printers are updated like we do our smartphones).

But how can a smartphone replace a label and provide more convenient shipping and returns?

The answer is in the rapid pace of advancement in AI made usable within a smartphone app.

AI is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines and deep learning, capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. We all use it daily, from our Netflix recommendations to Alexa around our homes. And it is the power of AI that is now playing its part in the transformation of the postal and logistics industry.

Challenger sector technology innovators like Stamp Free have harnessed AI handwriting recognition technology delivered via a smartphone app to free small businesses and marketplace sellers from needing any label at all. No need for labels, printers or even queuing!

The technology may be AI, but it is super simple. It requires no stamps or labels, just a pen and a mobile phone. You’ll never need any form of paper receipt ever again, either, when they can be stored neatly in the app for hassle-free peace of mind.

Via the app, anyone from an individual to an ecommerce seller can pay for postage and be issued a unique ‘Digicode’ that is then handwritten onto the parcel. The app scans the handwriting to verify the code, and then the parcel is good to head off on its journey. And there are no issues with accuracy as the advancements in AI technology mean that all handwriting, even the messiest, can be scanned accurately in the blink of an eye. So, when it enters a postal or carrier network, they can be assured that address details are correct and that the data in their systems is too.

Crucially, the same returns technology is also available for paid or free return options providing a simpler, hassle and label-free process for customers wishing to return an item.

One simple code, generated by an app and written on a parcel, contains all the information that a seller, customer and carrier need to get that parcel to its destination. And it’s good news for the environment too. Over 4bn parcels and their respective labels were shipped in 2021, according to Statista. Making even a small dent can be good news.

And, if it sounds like this is future technology, it’s not; and it’s ready to get going on a path of ecommerce convenience, smartphone simplicity and personal productivity.

So, the potential is there to say goodbye to label frustrations for good, whether you’re generating a parcel or a customer sending back a return; all you’ll need to do is find a pen that works!

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Ex-Chime engineers raise $4M for B2B payments infrastructure startup Streamlined

While working as the head of treasury at Braintree, Boris de Souza once discovered a $90 million payment that went “missing” for over two weeks because of poor payments infrastructure.

“It was my first week on the job, and I received an email from a client saying ‘I think you shorted us $90 million,’” he recalls. “I looked into it, and they were right. I figured out there was a bug in the system, fixed it and wired the money. But it was incredible to me that it took them 2 ½ weeks to know they were missing $90 million.”

For de Souza, who was also a founding engineer at digital bank Chime and a product manager at Slack, the whole business payments space “has not really evolved” over the past several decades.

“Most business payments are still very much done in paper check and unintelligible ACH payments,” he said.

To set about helping solve that problem, he left Braintree in 2019 and teamed up with fellow former Chime software engineer Zhuo Huang to found Streamlined, an Oakland-based startup that is emerging from stealth today with a total of $4 million in funding. Streamlined raised $1 million in a pre-seed round led by SignalFire in 2020 and recently closed a $3 million seed financing co-led by Greycroft and SignalFire. Unusual Ventures and others put money in the latest round.

A lot of B2B payments tech is built on top of B2C tech, such as Stripe, that was engineered to handle consumer card transactions, according to de Souza. But Streamlined is different, he claims, in that it has “custom built” transaction infrastructure for B2B “from the ground up.”

Many businesses today still pay via paper checks and ACH, mainly for record-keeping and compliance reasons. Meanwhile, payment cycles remain “messy and prone to irregularities,” he says. As such, according to de Souza, a company’s accounting department can waste time manually searching for payments, and then even more time trying to reconcile individual invoices.

Streamlined’s mission is straightforward: to give businesses the ability to accept payments from their business customers “how they want and when they want,” whether it be via paper check, ACH or credit card.

“We are making it possible for us to accept payments, regardless of how the payment comes in,” de Souza told TechCrunch, “and then make it available to the recipient electronically and in the time that they decide.” This, he said, can also help merchants and their customers be compliant and up to date.

The company also touts that its infrastructure is designed to allow for faster merchant payouts and to “dramatically simplify” reconciliation, which he believes is one of the company’s biggest differentiators.

“Where Streamlined really anchors itself against anybody else,” he told TechCrunch, “is that we focus on this problem of reconciliation.”

Initially, the startup is working with fast-growing e-commerce companies, which have grown significantly in number and size since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and currently handles “tens of thousands” of merchants’ payments daily.  It’s targeting businesses with $10 million to $100 million in GMV, and “a strong desire to scale wholesale,” de Souza said. But the company’s long-term goal “is to make B2B payments of any size and complexity simple.”

“Unlike retail transactions, B2B commerce is relationship-oriented, and every relationship is different,” de Souza added. “The method by which a buyer prefers to pay, or the timing for that payment, comes down to the way the relationship is defined between buyer and seller, and this is a major reason why B2B payments is so fragmented, so complex and is still so hands-on. We’re approaching this challenge with a deep understanding of both buyers and sellers.”

Streamlined, he says, can sync with Quickbooks and Shopify and customers can create invoices in Streamlined or directly on Shopify.

Image Credits: Streamlined

De Souza declined to share revenue growth metrics, saying only that some of its recent growth “has been strongly tied to the recent changes in e-commerce and a push for more wholesale.” It makes money by charging a processing fee per payment.

The company plans to use its new capital to beef up its 10-person staff, particularly its engineering team. It is open to hiring people who don’t have experience in the payments industry.

“I think it’s important for people without a payments background to consider the space, and it’s exciting, because you’re bringing a new lens to a problem that people have stared at for years,” de Souza said.

SignalFire founding partner and CTO Ilya Kirnos believes that the growth of B2B e-commerce has created a need for better payment and reconciliation tools. Brick-and-mortar retailers who had to shift their business online when COVID hit had plenty of options when setting up an e-commerce storefront, he points out.

“There are tons of modern tools for B2C e-commerce payments, whether it’s Shopify, Stripe, etc.…,” Kirnos told TechCrunch. “…But B2B commerce is very different — more parties are involved in a transaction, you have to match the invoice to the payment, most payments are still made by check or ACH, and not credit card. There is no straightforward way to do this today as a merchant online, and this is the gap Streamlined is addressing.”

Greycroft partner John Elton agrees that the “consumerization of B2B payments is here.”

“It’s not just about the payment — it’s the whole experience a business has dealing with payments,” he said. “The status quo is often a manual, paper-driven process that is disconnected…With Streamlined, businesses don’t have to worry about payments and get paid faster, more accurately, in a process that is seamlessly tied into the existing finance and accounting applications.”

Topi is building a new payment solution designed for B2B transactions

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Inventa poised to enter Mexico, Colombia with its supplier marketplace

When Inventa sees a good opportunity to grab some extra capital, it takes it. However, as you will see, it is on a trajectory of fast growth, and not unlike other startups, the new capital is to pave the way for that to continue.

The Brazil-based company offers a digital marketplace to connect small and medium-sized companies with suppliers to discover and purchase new inventory. Its technology aims to provide an easier purchasing process for small businesses by recommending products based on actual transaction data and then also providing credit, in 30-, 60- and 90-day increments, to retailers. On the supplier side, they can upload products, manage pricing and see what is selling and what isn’t.

We first profiled Inventa, co-founded by Marcos Salama, Fernando Carrasco and Laura Camargo, in January when it raised $20 million in Series A financing, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Monashees. That capital had come just three months after a $5.5 million seed round.

a16z, Monashees lead new round into inventory discovery startup Inventa

At the time of the Series A, CEO Salama told TechCrunch Inventa was growing 100% month over month. Since January, he revealed that Inventa essentially doubled its metrics, going from 400 brands, 7,000 products and 20,000 stores to 800 brands, 18,000 products and more than 40,000 stores.

It also grew its headcount from around 100 to over 250 people, and brought on some key executives, including a head of data, head of engineering and head of product.

“We have doubled down on both the company and our engineering team; we now have around 90 people, many of whom have done this before,” Salama said. “We are going to maintain our strategy of helping suppliers and retailers have a better life.”

Looking to leverage that growth, Inventa has now completed a $55 million Series B round — its third round in the 12 months since Inventa was founded in 2021. Greylock led the round and was joined by Greenoaks, Andreessen Horowitz, Monashees, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, NXTP, ONEVC, MAYA, Pear VC, Avenir Growth and A* Capital. This brings the company’s total fundraising to date to $80 million.

Inventa currently focuses on the categories of cosmetics, healthy foods and home decor, but the new funding enables it to add some new categories that customers have been asking for, including accessories, jewelry and pets. And, after establishing a footprint in Brazil, the company is accelerating its international expansion to Mexico and Colombia later this year.

Much of the company’s growth is organic, driven in part by the company’s referral program where brands can recommend their customers to the site and earn $50 for every customer that makes their first purchase, Salama says. Referrals are also how new suppliers are added — a retailer will recommend a supplier they use, and after the supplier is brought on board, the supplier is introduced to new retailers using Inventa.

Next up, Salama wants to bring on a head of credit in the next six months to round out the leadership team.

“At the end of the day, most retailers in Latin America don’t have a credit card, and we are already giving them a flexible payment option, but as we grow, there is a lot more to be done there and done better,” he added. “We play an important role to offer better solutions to our stores.”

Will Brazil’s Roaring 20s see the rise of early-stage startups?

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Eurora raises $40M for its AI-based system to automate EU e-commerce shipping compliance

The e-commerce market has boomed in the last several years, and with that so has the appetite of tax collectors to do their bidding: make rules that make sure their countries are getting a cut. That’s spelled more red tape and more customs hoops (and costs) for those shipping and receiving goods, and also delays when there is any kind of hitch. All that has been bad news for the e-commerce market overall.

Today, a startup out of Estonia called Eurora that’s built an AI-based system to help ease all of this along more smoothly in the EU region is announcing $40 million (£31 million) in funding as it finds a lot of traction for its solution, with more than 200 paying customers globally. Those numbers are projected to go up: in Europe alone, by 2026 there will be more than 260 billion parcels delivered annually.

Connected Capital, a firm based out of Amsterdam, led the round, with previous backers Change Ventures and Equity United, and Eurora’s founder and Marko Lastik, also participating. (The company had only raised a modest $3 million in four years before this.) Eurora is not disclosing its valuation but the round is one of the biggest Series A rounds for a startup out of Tallinn to date.

Eurora has been around since 2018 but it’s really come into its own in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic — an interesting detail in itself, considering how so much of the e-commerce story in the last few years has been about how companies boomed during the pandemic and because of direct changes in how people were living and operating.

The event that’s really spurred a lot of its business has been that e-commerce, already on a growth trajectory, accelerated after 2020 due to that pandemic, and catching up to that, in the EU, regulators last July (2021) made a series of changes to how e-commerce items imported from abroad — specifically ending a €22 import VAT exemption, and putting in place new trading regulations between the EU region and other countries, not just China, but also the U.S. and even the UK.

Goods are now no longer protected to any value ceiling and are now taxed based on their final destination (not point of import). This was in part to make sure that funding was being recovered where it was due, but also, in classic EU style, to create what they see as a more level playing field for domestic (EU-based) sellers.

The issue with all this is that it’s essentially been a de-simplification of the previous system. Each country has different sales tax codes, and different items have different classifications, and now there is more paperwork for those sending and taking receipt of items to attend to, and usually more money to be collected. All more complex, and ultimately resulting in delays and likely non-compliance that might catch up with those companies in the longer term.

Eurora’s approach has been to build a platform that operates as a kind of AI-based tax maven, more technically referred to as a “VAT intermediary.”

“If you are buying online, the tax and duties are [often filled out] wrong. Our machine makes sure it’s right,” said Lastik in an interview. “Everything going before and after declaration is right. This is a machine. You no longer need to ensure you have every parcel declared correctly.”

The company says that it’s worked with 22 scientists that have contributed to building its platform, which uses big data to help track and trace the origin of packages and make sense of how customs forms, which might indicate something as vague as “tool”, are an electric or manual tool, what kind and from what materials and the purpose and so on. It then assigns a product-specific HS code, calculates VAT and duty, creates customs declarations and more — all of which a customer can integrate with their other accounting and shipping software by way of APIs.

It claims to be able to process 5,000 requests per second with up to 96% accuracy.

“We are excited to lead the investment into Eurora and actively support the team in scaling the platform globally,” said Shaffy Roell, an investment manager at Connected Capital, in a statement. “The founder and the full management team have impressed us with their quality, domain expertise, and vision for the company. We have seen a clear push from regulators to improve transparency and reporting for the increasing number of goods that enter through customs. We believe that Eurora has built a truly unique AI/ML-based platform, significantly improving compliance while reducing package delays and lowering costs for e-commerce parcels shipped into Europe.”

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Zippedi is using robots to digitize inventory for last-mile delivery

Luis Vera believes the third time is the charm. The self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur admits that his vision for digitizing retail was a decade or two early when he started his journey in the 90s. Through a pair of startups — Prospect and Scopex — he tried a variety of methods to help capture store inventory, including placings cameras on shelves and a ceiling-based system where one ran on tracks.

He was, effectively, attempting to compete with Amazon well before Amazon was, well, Amazon — at least in any meaningful sense. Computer vision, machine learning and the like have caught up a lot since then, of course. The notion of competing directly against Amazon is a seemingly impossible order, but Zippedi’s vision utilizes the geographical benefit of brick and mortal locations to help facilitate last-mile deliveries.

Image Credits: Zippedi

The company utilizes an inventory robot to keep tabs of what’s on shelves, creating a “digital twin” online. When someone orders something for, say, DoorDash, a shopper knows not only what is on the shelf, but where to find it. The system can both offer direction to items and provide a prioritized shopping list, so they can be in and out as quickly as possible. It’s easy to see how the company could incorporate AR in the future (and that’s on the roadmap), but we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit here.

“A good example is when Uber was coming out, if there was a company to help the taxis,” says Vera. “Brick and mortar stores are here to stay. There’s going to be a big swath of people buying in the store, so I think the best way to approach this is to digitize the store and do all of these things that will make your customers happy. Whether it’s last-mile delivery, whether it’s shopping in the store — once you have the digital twin, you can do a whole bunch of stuff. ”

Today, the Bay Area-based firm announced that it’s raised a $12.5 million Series A, led by Transpose Platform. That joins a $6.9 million seed round announced in September of last year, led by early-stage robotics investor, Grep VC.

“Having invested in later stage companies in the Retail Tech sector, we have been thrilled to see how Zippedi has managed to do what predecessors have tried and failed and in a very capital efficient way,” says Transpose’s Alex Bangash. “What Zippedi is doing in terms of digitizing the retail space is so transformative that we have no doubt that the tech stack they are building will be used by every modern retailer that wants an excellent shopping experience for their consumers as well as to operate profitably”

The company has been pilot testing the system for a while now, including trials in Vera’s native Chile. It has since struck a deal with the largest home improvement store. The company can reveal that much, without saying the retailer’s actual name. It’s fairly easy to extrapolate from there, however. The chain provided a contract to utilize 100+ Zippedi robots. The startup is careful not to put all of its eggs in that single basket, so as to not meet a similar fate at the Bossa Nova – Walmart deal.

It’s signing additional partners that don’t compete directly with the home improvement giant. Given the tight margins at many retailers, Zippedi is seeking to split the cost of utilizing the robots and also partnering with brands within those stores.

“We’re working with Unilever, S. C. Johnson, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi and Colgate, to name to name a few,” says Vera. “We’ve actually cracked the nut on how to generate value for them. So the next step is to bring that into the U.S.”

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Food Rocket blasts off after securing funding, grocery delivery deal with Circle K parent

Many grocery delivery startups begin small, in one city, building up locations to cater to a certain neighborhood. Food Rocket has taken an unconventional route, striking a funding deal with Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. that puts its 15-minute grocery delivery service in more than 14,000 Circle K convenience stores and Couche-Tard locations.

We first met the Chicago-based company and its founder and CEO Vitaly Alexandrov last year when we reported that Food Rocket launched in the Bay Area, going up against the likes of Amazon Fresh, DoorDash, Instacart and Gopuff, which is no easy feat given each of the company’s footprint.

At the time, the company raised $2 million, and Alexandrov said about the perceived competition, “The level of competition in this market in the U.S. is still manageable, which is why we have the opportunity to become leaders in the sphere of fast delivery of basic products and household goods. We aim to replace brick-and-mortar supermarkets and to change consumers’ current habits in regards to grocery shopping.”

Food Rocket uses AI-enabled technologies to manage warehouse stocks, forecast demand and optimize delivery time by predicting the closest store that offers the fastest delivery time and the lowest costs of putting together and delivering the order.

On-demand grocery startup Food Rocket launches in the Bay Area, goes up against delivery giants

“We understand the business model is not about delivering just groceries,” Alexandrov told TechCrunch. “We are creating new habits of customers. From day one, we’ve had the idea of eventually converting all of our dark stores to micro fulfillment centers that will have local marketplaces to deliver their items.”

The new $25 million in Series A investment, led by Alimentation Couche-Tard via its Circle K Venture Fund, will enable Food Rocket to deliver in 26 countries and territories, including more than 7,000 U.S. locations. In all, the company has raised $30 million to date.

Discussing the plan for Circle K, Alexandrov revealed that it was a partnership that enabled the company to grow faster and more efficient and be able to reach profitability faster than others. It will also be able to leverage Circle K’s size and scale, consumer insights, marketing expertise, procurement network and supply chain, while Circle K can tap into Food Rocket’s proprietary software for forecasting stock levels and employee workloads.

Alexandrov also said the funding will be invested into expanding its service in both Chicago — to open around 15 stores there — and San Francisco, and into other cities, including Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Food Rocket plans to create over 2,000 jobs in new areas and continues to be one of the few startups offering full-time employment to all of its riders, he added.

In addition, he plans to launch a dark kitchen aspect of the business that will deliver foods that can be prepared in minutes — think coffee, bagels and pizza, that could still be delivered within 15 minutes. He also wants to take a step further eventually and deliver other items like phones.

The company typically carries around 3,500 products, and since launching in California in 2021, it sees 60% of customers order a second time after their first purchase, while the cart size averages $30 per order. Revenue-wise, Food Rocket has steadily grown about 40% month over month.

“We aim to provide grocery delivery in a different way,” Alexandrov said. “Gopuff is mostly focused on snacks and beverages, but we want ours to be more like perishables, fresh food and ready-to-eat meals, and we want to support local suppliers and brands.”

Are rivals snacking on Instacart’s core grocery delivery market?

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Pinterest for WooCommerce turns catalogues into shoppable Pins

A new Pinterest for WooCommerce extension gives more than three million merchants the power to turn their product catalogues into shoppable Product Pins on Pinterest. It’s one more way that Pinterest is becoming easier for merchants to use to build their audience and drive more sales.

This makes selling your products on Pinterest a whole lot easier. If you use WooCommerce to power your online shop, there’s now a Pinterest extension that turns your entire product catalogueinto shoppable Product Pins. Shoes, home decor, apparel, appliances—it doesn’t matter what you sell. With this new integration, each product listing becomes a shoppable Pin.

Today’s update gives the more than one million merchants using WooCommerce an easier way to get their products in front of Pinners. And for merchants that aren’t already using WooCommerce, it’s easy to install.   

Using the Pinterest for WooCommerce extension

The extension makes selling on Pinterest simple and quick. Once you install the WooCommerce Pinterest extension, your entire product catalog uploads to Pinterest. Your shoppable Pins will show up in people’s feeds as they search and browse for things to buy. The extension also logs when customers interact with your products on Pinterest, so you can track your best-selling or most saved items. 

If you’ve already manually uploaded your shop to Pinterest another way, we still recommend switching to the extension instead. It’s the best, easiest way to keep your products current on Pinterest, since it automatically updates details like pricing and product availability.  

By partnering together we provide the best integrated Pinterest shopping experience possible for WooCommerce merchants to be on the cutting edge of social commerce. WooCommerce is highly invested in our merchants’ success. Merchants need the right options to reach the right audiences–this integration with Pinterest helps them do that.

– Aleksandra Bettin, VP of Business Development, WooCommerce

Starting today, the Pinterest for WooCommerce integration is available in the United Kingdom, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Japan will gain access later this year.

Creating a more shoppable platform

Pinterest’s integration with WooCommerce is part of a broader commitment to becoming the most inspiring shopping destination on the internet. At Pinterest Presents, several new shopping features were announced that will launch this year as we continue to create new solutions for merchants of every size.

Every day, more merchants are finding that Pinterest is a great place to find new customers. A whopping 97% of the top searches on Pinterest are unbranded. What that means for you is that Pinterest shoppers haven’t made up their minds—they’re open to learning about your products. And when Pinterest shoppers do decide, they spend 2x more than people on other platforms. To learn even more on how to boost your store’s reach and audience with Pinterest, check out their shopping solutions.

Download Pinterest for WooCommerce

Whatever you’re selling, there’s definitely an audience looking for it on Pinterest. Download the Pinterest for WooCommerce extension to start finding your shoppers today. 

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