MCM CommerceChat

Micro fulfillment centers have become all the rage in the e-grocery world. An MFC is a highly automated system that can fit in a small space in the rear area of a grocery store, away from the sales floor, or in an adjacent or nearby building. It taps the power of robotics to grab items for online orders in a matter of a minute or two.

The model received huge validation last week when it was revealed that Amazon is installing an MFC in its new supermarket outside Los Angeles, powered by Dematic. To unpack what’s happening with this capability, and contrast it with the approach taken by Kroger and Ocado, Multichannel Merchant spoke with Neil Stern, a senior partner with consultancy McMillonDoolittle in our latest MCM CommerceChat podcast.

Neil will be presenting on this topic at Ecommerce Operations Summit 2020 (April 14-16, Orlando), in a session entitled “MFCs for E-Grocery: Getting Around Fulfillment Challenges.” He will be joined by speakers from Takeoff Technologies and Swisslog. You can register for the event here; sign up before Feb. 29 using promo code LEAPYEAR and you can bring a colleague for $99.

Earlier this year, subscription apparel rental startup Le Tote surprised the retail world by acquiring storied luxury retailer Lord & Taylor from Hudson’s Bay Co. for $100 million, including 38 store locations, its digital channels, inventory, data and technology. Then in another bold move, the company announced this week Lord & Taylor’s physical return to New York in the form of a holiday popup store.

Le Tote also has plans to modernize Lord & Taylor’s assets, including integration with Le Tote’s rental business to drive upselling. Behind the scenes, retail industry veteran Robert Escobar has signed on to help Le Tote create a roadmap for a supply chain makeover in order to meet its business objectives. To learn more about what’s in the works, we caught up with Robert in an MCM CommerceChat podcast interview.

How a retailer handles its customer interactions – responding to issues, answering questions and updating a status, to name a few common examples – is a critical function for cultivating brand loyalty and driving sales.

And fast response times are table stakes as well. But often, customer support agents are handicapped by a lack of visibility into a customer’s information across channels and the history of interactions.

JOANN Stores, a specialty retailer of crafts and fabrics, has seen better and faster issue resolution by upgrading its customer care platform. Ruth Jones, manager of customer care for JOANN Stores and Mike McCarron, VP of customers for Gladly, talk about how JOANN improved its customer care metrics, including reducing email backlog and speeding up response times, in this MCM CommerceChat podcast.

 

 

It’s hard to think of an apparel category that’s more competitive than jeans, with many legacy and upstart brands all vying for casual fashion dollars. One newer entrant looking to disrupt things is Revtown.

The Pittsburgh-based company, founded in 2018 by former executives of Under Armour, has just branched out into a woman’s line, and in support of that has inked a deal with Gwyneth Paltrow’s popular lifestyle website Goop.

The deal includes a retail integration at Goop’s pop-up shops in Chicago and NY as well as on goop.com, inclusion in its holiday gift guide, custom native ads and editorial integration across the site and in Facebook and Instagram. This is on top of a channel partnership early in 2019 with luxury retailer Nordstrom.

In this latest MCM CommerceChat podcast, we talk to Revtown co-founder Henry Stafford about the company’s disruptive approach, its DTC roots, recent partnership moves and where it’s headed.

In an era of heightened expectations, merchants are taking a hard look at their overall ecommerce operations including how orders are received on the front end, fulfilled and shipped to customers. Facing stiff competition, they’re looking for ways to efficiently deliver a two-day (or sooner) experience without breaking the bank.

Getting there isn’t easy. In many cases, the risks of racing Amazon have literally turned into liabilities, effectively slowing progress and forcing companies to rethink everything from their online order interfaces to cart conversion to final-mile fulfillment.

In our latest MCM CommerceChat podcast, we talk to Robyn Meyer, partner, enterprise solutions at Transportation Insight, about challenges and opportunities in this disruptive environment, as well as some strategy, process and system changes companies can make to improve profitability and performance.

MCM is also hosting a free webinar on this topic with Transportation Insight, “Managing Transportation Risk in the Age of Amazon,” on Wednesday, Nov. 20 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT. You can find out more and register here.

For many years, major carriers UPS and FedEx were in virtual lockstep in terms of pricing and service offerings. That is until recently. In the past couple years, the two major carriers have begun to pursue more divergent paths as they seek to differentiate and carve out different market strategies.

To help us understand these changes, what they mean and the factors driving this divergence, we spoke with Mark Taylor, manager of consulting at enVista, for this MCM CommerceChat podcast.

Sears ran two influencer marketing campaigns in 2019 which were coordinated around two key holiday sales, Memorial Day and Fourth of July, with each supported by broader digital marketing. Sears worked with Viral Nation to engage three to four mid-tier social influencers and three to four macro-influencers for the campaign.

The goal was to drive click-throughs, targeting U.S. millennials. The influencers told stories about how Sears can assist in renovation projects, tying in Sears content. Viral Nation created briefs to guide the influencers with various links while still giving them creative control.

Interactions with the influencer posts showed legitimate interest in the content, with shoppers discovering home appliances they don’t buy frequently. Along the way, Sears gained key insights about brand perception. As a result, Sears saw twice the engagement level it was projecting and recorded 10,000+ visits in a 3-5-day period.

In this latest edition of the MCM CommerceChat podcast, Brett Geeser Director of Digital for Transform Holdco, formerly Sears Holdings, and Joe Gagliese, co-founder and CEO of Viral Nation, talk about the success of the campaigns.

Swanson Health Products and its 50-year-old private label supplement brand worked with Feedvisor to implement dynamic pricing into its business model.  For the past six months, Swanson Health Products has been using Feedvisor’s AI-powered pricing technology to help boost sales and profitability. As a result, Swanson’s ecommerce revenue is up 60% year-over-year and total sales through Amazon are up 35%.

In this latest edition of the MCM CommerceChat podcast, Patrick Yatskis, Senior Digital Marketing Manager of Swanson’s Health Products and Victor Rosenman, CEO of Feedvisor discuss how it helped the brand stand out among the competition.

With the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) opting for an 18-month phased implementation of the Secure Customer Authentication rules for ecommerce transactions, instead of an action date of Sept. 14 as originally planned, how will this play out?

Not surprisingly, the Payment Service Directive (PSD2) security regulation from the EU – which SCA comes under – has rocked the payments industry, and the SCA slowdown should ease frustrations and help ensure a timely migration, balancing both convenience and security.

To better understand the implications of the SCA decision to take a phased approach and provide some needed context, we caught up with Eric Christensen, Vice President of Product, Payments, Fraud and Financial Services for Digital River in our latest MCM CommerceChat podcast.

It’s been over a year since the Supreme Court’s landmark South Dakota vs. Wayfair decision changed out-of-state ecommerce taxation forever. Many of the implications are still being worked out in terms of state legislation, tax collection and remittance, plus monitoring and compliance auditing of sellers by states.

There’s also a great deal of complexity in terms of registration within a given state, tracking sales to ensure correct tax collection and remittance, and staying on top of ever-changing tax rules and rates.

“To help ecommerce sellers better understand the shifting landscape post-Wayfair decision, Multichannel Merchant spoke with Mark Sieczkowski, senior product manager at Vertex, as part of our MCM CommerceChat podcast series. Sieczkowski addresses jurisdiction registration, reporting and filing requirements, the challenges of state auditing, the movement away from manual and paper-based processes and the benefits of sales tax automation.

Sponsored by:

Thank you for completing the form. Click on the Player below to play or download the Podcast.