🛒 retail.tea.leaves//week02.23
Let’s Get Digital
Microsoft has big retail aspirations. It's building its PromoteIQ platform into an omnichannel solution and adding a Retail Advertising Network.
Sell with Amazon from the comfort of your own site. The Everything Store is expanding the Buy with Prime program to all US merchants at the end of the month. And Reviews from Amazon will let Buy with Prime merchants show reviews from Amazon on their site.
Another nail in social commerce’s coffin? Instagram is removing the Shop tab from the main nav. The Once-Upon-A-Photo app will “continue to invest in shopping experiences that provide the most value for people and businesses across feed, stories, reels, ads and more,” but I don’t think Amazon 2.0 is in the cards.
Better ecomm measurement is coming to Google Analytics 4. Big G has added 12 dimensions and metrics and renamed another 7. Each shopping action is now tracked at the item and event level, “enabling you to analyze information about your products or services and separately analyze important ecommerce interactions.” For example, items added to carts and add to cart events.
Your business in more places. BigCommerce sellers can now integrate their store with Microsoft Merchant Center to deliver ads and listings across Bing, Edge, partners like Yahoo! and AOL, and more. And you can (better) put your business on the Apple map.
Retail By The Numbers
Retail job growth bounced back in December.
Holiday spending was up 7% year-over-year, but inflation is likely inflating that. Volumes were flat or down. Good news is inflation deflated a bit in December.
Less good news, a wave of returns may soon be rolling in. Salesforce is predicting 1.4 billion orders will be returned. Since retailers’ inventory finally caught up to consumer demand…after that demand started to dwindle, this “tsunami” should help the glut.