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  • BigCommerce Brings Flair to NRF 2022 and Commerce After Dark - To say the BigCommerce team was excited about NRF 2022 would be putting it lightly. Our first booth presence at…
    Topics: texas, commerce, great, happened, nyc, joined, recap, nrf, team, natori, event, talk, bigcommerce, wait, say, brings, dark, flair.
  • Birchbox ownership changes hands after beauty business does recap - Beauty-in-a-box brand Birchbox has changed up its ownership structure. The New York-based startup, which has raised almost $90 million in funding from noted venture firms like Accel Partners and First Round Capital, has a new majority owner in hedge fund Viking Global, sources confirm to TechCrunch. First reported by Recode, Birchbox made some changes to its cap table […]
    Topics: ownership, consumers, birchbox, majority, funding, capital, hands, beauty, business, million, changes, startup, does, viking, round, recap.
  • Charging Forward into 2022 with BigCommerce CEO Brent Bellm - In 2021, ecommerce experienced another year of pandemic-accelerated growth. We hope your business has navigated the changes in our society…
    Topics: selling, templates, bigcommerce, letter, launched, product, including, ecommerce, recap, plans, capabilities, partnerships, brent, bellm, ceo.
  • CommerceCo Recap: 3 R’s Are Changing Targeted Advertising - For years, online sellers large and small have depended on targeted advertising to acquire and engage shoppers. But changes at leading tech companies, legislation, and consumer-privacy concerns are hastening the end of individual tracking and some forms of ad targeting.
    Topics: advertising, rs, changing, changes, tracking, recap, idfa, google, individuals, user, regulation, commerceco, cookies, targeted, ad.
  • CommerceCo Recap: A Process for SEO Link-building - Link building could be the most daunting search engine optimization task. It requires near equal portions of research, creativity, and outreach resembling cold calls. It's also critical for prominent organic search rankings.
    Topics: goal, publishers, wirth, linkbuilding, link, building, approach, process, recap, research, authority, links, seo, commerceco.
  • CommerceCo Recap: Is the Clock Ticking on TikTok Marketing? - Marketing on the popular TikTok platform can attract and engage an audience of potential customers. But like so many social media platforms, as it matures TikTok may become more difficult to earn a following.
    Topics: platform, commerceco, lot, video, content, clock, instagram, recap, ticking, tiktok, marketing, youtube, shanahan, difficult.
  • CommerceCo Recap: SEO Entities vs. Keywords - Some search engine optimizers believe “entities” have supplanted keywords as the foundation for organic rankings. But it doesn’t mean that keywords are irrelevant. Within SEO, entities are the people, places, things,
    Topics: googles, entities, keywords, vs, commerceco, knowledge, harrison, seo, ford, search, graph, things, google, recap.
  • CommerceCo Recap: SEO Link Building Is Hard - Link building is among the most important search engine optimization techniques. It is foundational and essential. Just about every successful commerce business wants or needs to build links, but it is hard to do well. Moreover, there is no easy way to "hack" link building.
    Topics: seo, link, sense, building, links, search, commerceco, pages, site, content, topic, hard, recap.
  • CommerceCo Recap: SMS Marketing Fundamentals - Text messaging can be among the most productive retail marketing channels, provided the workflows are automated and the performance is tracked. Entrepreneur Jordan West, the owner of an ecommerce marketing agency and an apparel company, uses text-message marketing to drive sales. He believes text messages are among his best marketing channels.
    Topics: text, sales, textmessage, dont, automation, fundamentals, sms, west, customer, recap, rate, commerceco, marketing.
  • CommerceCo Recap: Tailor-made Shopping Experiences - When eBay and Amazon were founded, in 1995, ecommerce pioneers worried that pictures of products would never provide the same experience as handling a product on a rack. Ecommerce has generally overcome this challenge, but there are still products that are more difficult to present online.
    Topics: shirt, tailormade, shopping, shirts, press, options, commerceco, products, physical, instore, madetoorder, online, recap, experiences, j.
  • CommerceCo Recap: Winning the Digital Shelf - Consumers with access to physical stores, ecommerce sites, online marketplaces, apps, and social selling seek consistent and frictionless shopping experiences. This makes it tough for brands to maintain product messaging. Call it the dilemma of the digital shelf.
    Topics: products, brand, winning, gaudreau, product, maturity, brands, shelf, commerceco, selling, sales, digital, recap.
  • Elastic Path Summer Product Innovation Recap - As the summer continues to wind down and fall begins to creep in, we have a lot of new things to look forward to. Some of us are getting ready to go back into offices; sending our kids back to school; starting new journeys; and long awaiting the normalcy to gather for holidays with our loved ones. But even with all these new beginnings, one thing remains the same, consumers will be SHOPPING - And as such Elastic Path continues to innovate and make updates to our products to ensure that brands are able to provide the best eCommerce shopping experiences for their customers. This summer at Elastic Path, we focused primarily on enhancing existing feature capabilities within Elastic Path Commerce Cloud. These enhancements address a variety of concerns from locale support to advanced pricing. While we have made a plethora of changes, this article focuses on the major updates to the solution. These include: The Launch of Catalog Composer Account Management Enhancements Advanced Pricing Support Product Content Management Enhancements And Promotion Enhancements. With the release of these new innovations, Elastic Path is making it easy to support your complex eCommerce strategy across multiple business models such as B2C, B2B, B2B2C, and DTC. Learn more about all of our product innovations here.   Catalog Composer The traditional catalog management we see today was built over a decade ago, before brands had even begun to think about addressing multiple geographies, deploying multiple touchpoints, and launching multiple brands all under one umbrella. Therefore, there’s no surprise why addressing the aforementioned concerns have been so difficult. Traditional catalog management, until today, has been extremely rigid, and usually results in brands spending excessive time and money to customize their unique catalog needs, only to still delay time to market and hold back the organization. Catalog Composer by Elastic Path, previously introduced as a part of Product Content Management in March, alleviates these complexities by leveraging the industry’s only decoupled catalog architecture, to empower brands to rapidly compose and continuously optimize products and pricing into unlimited, unique catalogs across all your routes-to-market such as multiple brands, accounts, geographies, touchpoints, and business models. Catalog Composer will be key in managing catalogs across your B2B, B2C and B2B2C business models 5x faster than any other eCommerce solution. Learn more about Catalog Composer   Account Management Enhancements Elastic Path Commerce Cloud previously only leveraged Open ID Connect to enable user authentication with external identity providers such as Okta and Ping. However, we have now implemented a new password profile support that enables users to log in using a username and password, instead of only relying on an OpenID Connect profile. Now your team has the ability to create user authentication info to be associated with either Password Profiles or OpenID Connect Profiles. These APIs can also be used for account member authentication. Explore more about Account Members with Password Profiles   Advanced Pricing Support In a competitive market, eCommerce owners are always thinking of ways to stay ahead of the competition and increase their value. One such way we see this done is by deploying a variety of pricing strategies. Elastic Path has released both Volume Pricing and Sales Pricing to help with your strategies. Volume Pricing now allows you to offer different pricing for minimum quantities of items that your customer purchases. This means when a customer has added a sufficient quantity of an item and meets the minimum quantity specified, all items in that cart will be discounted. On the other hand, Sales Pricing grants you the ability to advance-schedule the specific time and date for sale prices books to go live. This will be great for stores that want to schedule season pricing in products without creating a new pricebook or catalog request. Explore more about Volume and Sales Pricing     Product Content Management Enhancements Since the launch of Product Content Management, customers have found it so easy to import, enrich and organize their product data in one central location. To make Product Content Management more customizable, we have added templates and attributes to configurations, support for multi-byte languages and locale support. Templates and attributes allow you to attach a specific set of custom fields to your products in Product Content Management. Multi-byte language support extends Product Content Management to support languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, making your offered languages more inclusive. And lastly, locale support allows you to localize product names, descriptions and other strings if your store supports multiple languages. Explore more about Product Content Management enhancements     Promotion Enhancements Promotional offers play a major role in a customer’s shopping cycle and can make a significant difference in cart value. Elastic Path has updated and added new promotions to be offered throughout your eCommerce journey. Bundle Discount - Bundle discounts allow your team to offer bulk discounts when selected products are purchased together. Free Gift Discount - Free Gift discounts allow your teams to offer a free item when a specific product or a group of products are purchased. Usage Per Line Item - Usage Per Line Item promotions grant your team the ability to set usage per line item for all promotion times. This allows you to limit the buyer to use the promotion for a specific number of times. Max Application Per Cart Limit- This promotion update allows your team to limit the quantity available for purchase at the promotion price.   Elastic Path Commerce Cloud is equipped with a variety of other promotions that you can explore here. We are thrilled to continue innovating here at Elastic Path. If you would like to keep up to date on our newest product innovations, explore our product innovation page for major updates and our product changelog for all major and minor updates.
    Topics: elastic, product, content, summer, multiple, path, recap, innovation, management, catalog, support, pricing, products.
  • Fast-Tracking the Future of Commerce: A Recap of Shopify Reunite - If you couldn't catch the live event or want to get more details on what we announced, here are all the highlights from Reunite 2020.More
    Topics: available, fasttracking, shopify, soon, reunite, online, merchants, recap, products, future, commerce, customers, local, business, store.
  • Prime Day Recap: Lessons Learned in Keeping Customers for Life - How to make the most of peak days and keep the new customers they bring
    Topics: customers, prime, business, sales, small, amazon, learned, shoppers, recap, thirdparty, revenue, retailers, lessons, life, keeping, day.
  • Shoptalk 2022 Recap: What We Heard and Saw in Vegas - Shoptalk was back in 2022, a four-day event that's has been dubbed the 'biggest retail conference of the year.' Considering the years we all spent in various states of separation, getting back to in-person events was a welcome change of pace. It was full of long-overdue meetings between old friends and colleagues in the industry, a chance to make new connections, and be inspired by the passion, dedication, and ingenuity of the players in the industry.  Elastic Path was in the thick of it, even taking over the Vegas strip. On the show floor, we enjoyed hosting some fireside chats with our fabulous customers Serena & Lily, Pella, and Deckers Brands at our booth. Our customer Serena & Lily shared some of what they are looking to accomplish in creating new customer experiences online. “Part of the fun of design and our brand is putting together a room that feels very you. We want our website to replicate the experience in our design shops, where design advisors help customers through the design process. We don’t currently have that online, so we want to create experiences that allow for that. That is a future goal for us.” Check out the full live stream here   or see how Pella is looking at establish a new direct to consumer model. “As the consumer expectation is shifting and digital is becoming more influential on how a customer learns about our products and ultimately configures and purchases, we want to be on the forefront of that by being one of the first national windows & doors distributors to have that presence and own that space online." Keep an eye out for a few others coming soon. Beyond sharing the stories of our customers, we met and heard from a variety of brands, partners, and thought leaders in the commerce space. This post will run through some key takeaways and predictions about the future of retail that were making waves at Shoptalk 2022.  What We Heard on The Show Floor The excitement on the show floor was palpable. Brands shared their challenges and latest wins, vendors demoed their latest technology, and industry experts predicted the future. Let's dive into a few common themes we heard: Composable Commerce is Here The first was that the Composable Commerce Movement is now firmly established and is here to stay. Brands have recognized the benefits of this approach by leveraging best-of-breed solutions to quickly launch and optimize brand-centric experiences. Learn more about the Composable Commerce Movement here. It is no longer a question of when it will take over as the de-facto commerce approach. Instead, some of the brands still on older monolithic architecture (all-in-one solutions) were trying to get to grips with how they could break free of the restrictions and innovate with new experiences that their customers have come to expect.  Partner-First For Commerce Success The second theme was best-of-breed partners critical to a successful Composable Commerce approach to deliver innovative experiences. These partnerships were heavily represented in two ways, first from the presence of some of our partners like Vue Storefront, Bloomreach, and Amplience championing a headless Composable Commerce approach by showcasing the experiences they were instrumental in delivering.  Along with Elastic Path, we work with our partners are crucial in powering a complete solution, like our new Pre-Composed Solution™ to deliver best-of-breed merchandising & commerce experience management.  And secondly, exciting development backing a Composable Commerce approach was seeing the litany of new technology providers that fill essential gaps in existing commerce technology stacks.  From AI vision powered solutions to create product data to live streaming partners that will be a crucial new channel in the coming years for retail brands to deliver their messages and products in a seamless and frictionless way. I would be remiss not to mention the buzz around the possibilities the Metaverse offers. Though exciting, the consensus was that it was one for the three to five-year vision. Some brands like Forever 21 & Pacsun are already experimenting with NFTs for the Metaverse. Watch this space to see how the strategies shake out and where retail is headed in the Metaverse.  Brands Are Outgrowing Monolithic Solutions A third theme was hearing from numerous brands that they struggle with their existing commerce platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud. To highlight three common complaints: 1. Brands are suffering from complicated catalog management due to the restrictive design of these traditional solutions. If this sounds familiar, learn how Catalog Composer  can help alleviate those ailments with a faster, easier, and infinitely more flexible solution to a core commerce capability. 2. Another common complaint from brands on traditional commerce platforms was the fear of re-platforming. We often heard, "we just re-platformed; we're not ready to do it all over again yet." Thankfully, the answer is it's easier than ever to get started on a Composable Commerce journey. You can replace the pieces causing the most headaches first and follow that up with others at your own pace. We like to call this approach "progressive re-platforming," a solution to start using highly extensible modern technology so your brand can be ready for the rapid and seismic changes the retail space will see soon.  3. The third common complaint we heard was around speed. This problem is twofold, first is the speed of adoption of new channels and experiences. Slow innovation and adoption on traditional monolithic platforms apply to both established cases (like venturing into the B2B space, new geographies, etc.) and innovation with new channels like live-streaming and eventually even into the Metaverse. With a Composable Approach, adopting these new channels is significantly more accessible since new integrations can be delivered in weeks rather than running a complicated months-long project on a monolith.    Get hands on with an Elastic Path Free Trial Start building the commerce experience your unique business demands with a free Elastic Path Commerce Cloud account. Get in touch with us and we will setup a Free Trial store for you for six weeks. Sign up for a free trial The second aspect of the speed complaints is overall site speed. In traditional monolithic architecture, there are limits on the results from site speed optimizations that developers can hope to achieve. The limiting factor is often the monolithic architecture in itself. Fortunately, these performance limits do not exist with a Composable Commerce approach's decoupled architecture. To learn more about how site speed can impact your brand, check out our blog. Key Predictions About The Future Of Commerce Beyond the chatter on the floor, there were more general points of discussion on the future of retail.  1) Stores Are Back!  With much of the world emerging from the pandemic, brick-and-mortar stores are beginning to regain prominence. Some brands like Warby Parker, which started as an online-only glasses shop, now is seeing the positive impact of having physical stores. However, where these stores are delivering value is removed from traditional values like location and access to customers. An interesting theme emerged around the "influencer potential" that people in-store could have. By having store associates be a touchpoint to build the voice and identity of a brand, they can be an instrumental part of telling a brand’s story. Particularly as brand authenticity continues to gain momentum as a central pillar in positioning strategy as it resonates well with today's customers as gen Z becomes a more active part of the overall retail picture.    2) New Customers = New Expectations. Beyond the usual tropes of customers who "want it now," an exciting theme developed around delivering context-relevant solutions—for example, someone looking for a summer dress during the peaks of winter. A search like this signals the current mindset of that buyer. They are looking forward to the near future. Tomorrow's customers expect a buying journey that is relevant to that context and introduces complexity and nuance to strategies brands can adopt to provide such a buyer journey. Whether this spans multiple channels and touches, a Composable Commerce approach is well suited to solve for such complexity by empowering brands to incorporate best-of-breed personalization and content management system (CMS) vendors into their composed solution. 3) Customer Loyalty is Evolving. "Personalization is the new loyalty" was a phrase repeated in multiple sessions. What does that mean? Like the context-relevant buyer journey, providing a frictionless shopping experience relevant to an individual shopper is going to be a vital part of building customer loyalty. As customer expectations evolve, two points: personal relevance and brand authenticity, will be the key drivers of loyalty. As with most hot button issues in the commerce world, plenty of vendors offer personalization solutions that can be incorporated into your brand's Composable Commerce solution.  4) Investors are Focusing on Profits Again.  This new focus will be crucial to the success of any retail brand in the future. It is a significant shift away from recent years, where customer adoption was the main focus, and the high 'burn rates' fuel those adoption numbers being a side note. With profitability coming to the forefront, ensuring that your costs are manageable from an eCommerce perspective will be vital as brands endeavor to deliver customer-centric experiences into the future. Check out our Total Cost of Ownership guide to learn more about using a Composable Commerce approach can help reduce costs compared to traditional monolithic platforms.   Shoptalk was an exciting return to in-person events, packed with enthusiasm and innovative ideas. Is your brand ready for the future of retail?  Chat with us today to see how we can help your brand or see how our Pre-Composed Solutions™ can kick-start your Composable Commerce journey.
    Topics: retail, brands, commerce, recap, approach, experiences, future, customers, customer, brand, shoptalk, saw, composable, heard, vegas.
  • Shoptalk 2023 Recap: Key Trends and Learnings - Shoptalk is an annual tradeshow where thousands of retailers come together to discuss the latest trends, technology, and future of retail. Our team was thrilled to attend once again in Las Vegas this year- meeting partners, prospects, and clients to talk about the state of the retail industry and discuss their digital vision and initiatives for the upcoming year. In this blog, I’ll share some of the key trends and learnings from the showfloor. Brands Need More Education On Composable Commerce While the idea of Composable Commerce is becoming more prevalent in discussions  from prospects, partners, and sessions, the understanding of the general concepts of what it entails and the benefits for brands is still lacking. There is a general understanding of headless commerce, from sessions explaining the agility and flexibility to increase speed-to-market and lower TCO. However, there still needs to be more clarity in the market on the difference between headless and Composable Commerce.  In short, Composable Commerce builds upon a headless commerce architecture. We have a Composable Commerce Architecture Guide which explains the nuances and differentiation between the approaches. Get hands on with an Elastic Path Free Trial Start building the commerce experience your unique business demands with a free Elastic Path Commerce Cloud account. Get in touch with us and we will setup a Free Trial store for you for six weeks. Sign up for a free trial Omnichannel Experiences Are Shifting To Unified Commerce The idea of omnichannel experiences is nothing new for retailers. Today’s market requires the flexibility to reach customers across touchpoints and channels whether through mobile, in-person, or in-store. However, the conversation has now shifted from not just reaching the various touchpoints, but to creating a unified experience across channels. What does a unified customer experience look like? It’s more than just creating a seamless experience across touchpoints. It’s understanding the customers and creating experiences that align with their needs. This also looks like making a concerted effort to provide assistance through AI chatboxes and video on your brand’s websites and through mobile. There is a growing expectation for customers to be helped throughout the buying experience and those means are a notable strategy to assist with this.  In the more traditional omnichannel perspective, unified commerce also looks like providing platform support for social selling and curating personalized content that suits their needs. Agile Merchandising Strategies Must Be Implemented As we’ve seen over the last couple of years with a global pandemic, inflation, economic uncertainty and more, a merchandiser’s ability to pivot is a required skill to meet market changes.  Whether you’re weathering the changes between pre-pandemic and post-pandemic shopping patterns or dealing with cultural or socio-economic shifts for consumers, brands need to leverage flexible and agile merchandising strategies to make changes and iterate at speed. That starts with having a deep understanding of the customer through data and by utilizing a platform that will give you the best-in-class digital experiences. Elastic Path’s Show Presence Last but not least, the energy at Shoptalk was impeccable. Meeting hundreds of retailers and chatting it up about how we’re de-risking Composable Commerce for brands was exciting and purposeful. The first day of Shoptalk we announced Integrations Hub. Integrations Hub is a library of no-code, instant–on integrations that reduce the time and cost of implementations so you can get live faster and vastly reduce your TCO. This is a game-changer for some many brands who are concerned about the cost and work to manage a multi-vendor solution. We handle the hosting, management and monitoring. Integrations are enabled so quickly that we even held a competition at the booth challenging people to enable one of our integrations within 5 minutes or less. Our booth also featured our customer Vivrelle, a first-of-a-kind luxury membership club that gives customers the opportunity to borrow luxury handbags, jewelry and accessories. At the booth, we demonstrated how we power their membership business model and enable one-click checkout through our EP Payments solution. We even raffled off one of the Vivrelle luxury handbags to those who participated in our demo.   Overall, Shoptalk was one for the books with many lessons and valuable conversations. It was a great way to get excited about the future of retail. We’re looking forward to attending again in the future.
    Topics: understanding, customers, shoptalk, recap, free, commerce, experience, brands, composable, key, integrations, trends, learnings, unified.
  • Taking ecommerce innovation to the next level: a Savant eCommerce Barcelona recap - Award-winning marketer and thought leader, Oisin Lunny, recently chaired the Savant eCommerce Barcelona event. Read on for his insightful recap of the two immersive days of networking and learning.
    Topics: innovation, director, savant, sales, omnichannel, customer, head, level, digital, experience, ecommerce, taking, recap, barcelona, business, online.
  • TechCrunch+ roundup: Credit Karma post-exit, recruiting developers, re:Invent recap - The very day in Feb. 2020 that Credit Karma planned to announce that it had been acquired by Intuit for over $7 billion, the stock market tanked, spooked by news that a virus could start a pandemic.
    Topics: recap, karma, company, market, recruiting, writes, roundup, credit, developers, techcrunch, ipo, billion, ceo, reinvent, weeks, aws, postexit.
  • eCommerceFuel Live 2020 Recap - eCommerceFuel Live 2020 is in the books! Now that we’ve had a few days to recover, I sit down with Bill D’Alessandro to recap the highlights of the event and our major takeaways from our 6th Annual Community Gathering. Listen in as we touch on the importance of investing in companies you truly understand, the [...]
    Topics: recap, touch, dalessandro, importance, weve, truly, ecommercefuel, ways, understand, way, bill, youderian, live.