New Look has returned to profit, thanks to stellar growth in its ecommerce operations following a fraught two years. While revenues were down in stores, the company has seen 43% growth in ecommerce help to drag it to a £108m profit.
Meanwhile, IKEA continues to cement its role as a forward-thinking sustainable retailer, tying up with green energy company Big Green Switch, to offer customers that sign up to switch to clean power through IKEA’s website £35 of free electricity.
Further shaking up the retail paradigm, Twitter is tentatively experimenting with adding shoppable ads to brand twitter feeds as it looks to get in on the social commerce market. Unlike rivals it won’t be handling any of the sales or payments, just allowing shoppable adds on some feeds, but it shows just how much shopping and social are now entwined in consumer minds.
So too is voice commerce, which is poised to take off in the next three years – but only if the big platform owners (Google, Apple and Amazon, if you didn’t know) open up to more third-party retailers and come up with a more convincing checkout process – something not lost on today’s guest commentator Luca Visco Gilardi, VP Account Management, Digital Wallets at Paysafe.
Both voice and social commerce are among the tropes adopted by millennial shoppers, who have been among the most radically shifted in their shopping habits by lockdown. While it is they who will drive social and voice commerce, they are also creating a boom in cross-border D2C ecommerce.
We also learn that more than half of shoppers now also want digital interaction in stores and are actively looking to use shelf-edge tech to help inform them while mulling a purchase – not least of big ticket items.
