Amazon has temporarily suspended fulfillment of non-essential items through FBA through April 5, due to high coronavirus-related demand. Meanwhile, retail and DTC brands are closing their doors, while UPS assures customers their deliveries are safe, and major e-grocery delivery app downloads are setting records daily.
Carol Tomé, who has been CFO of Home Depot for 18 years and helped manage its strong growth, will be the new CEO of UPS. She succeeds David Abney, who will stay on as executive chairman until retiring from the board in September and acting as a transitional consultant through the end of 2020.
Following the playbook of developing innovative tech then selling it, Amazon is offering retailers its cashierless checkout capability from Amazon Go stores. Amazon said Just Walk Out is already under contract to several retailers it wouldn’t name. OTG, with hundreds of CIBO stores at 10 major U.S. airports, will soon be using it.
With a legislator raising the alarm that consumers’ “lives are at risk” due to dangerous counterfeit ecommerce products, a bipartisan group proposed the SHOP SAFE Act to crack down on ecommerce fakes. The GAO found that 20 of 47 items purchased from third-party sellers on popular consumer websites were counterfeit.
Escalating concerns over the spread of the coronavirus are affecting every industry and sector, and retail and ecommerce are certainly no exception. This includes not only challenged supply chains in Asia and other affected countries but also things like runs on certain products in supermarkets and price clubs as consumers panic.
Shogun, a drag-and-drop ecommerce website builder, has raised $10M in Series A funding from Initialized Capital, VMG Partners and Y Combinator to expand its platform and launch a new product helping sellers compete with Amazon and do headless commerce. Major brand clients include Leesa, MVMT and K-Swiss.
Walmart has launched a fulfillment service for sellers on its marketplace, similar to Fulfillment By Amazon, leveraging its vast logistics network to provide storing, picking, packing and shipping returns processing and customer service for a fee and entice more sellers onto the platform.
Amazon’s hunger for a bigger bite of the $839B grocery market was evident in the opening of the first checkout-less Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle. The 10,400-square-foot space, roughly 5x the size of an Amazon Go store, stocks 5,000 items. Tech startups AiFi and Grabango are reportedly working on systems for competitors.
Target’s strong focus on ecommerce, including a 2019 holiday push on fast delivery options and BOPIS, has propelled it into the top 10 for U.S. ecommerce sales, according to a new report from eMarketer. Target checks in at No. 8 with projected 2020 U.S. ecommerce sales of $8.34 billion, increasing its share from 1.1% to 1.2%.
Evolv Ventures, the investment arm of CPG giant Kraft Heinz, has joined a $110 million funding round in automation and robotics firm Fabric with an undisclosed investment, keeping an eye on ways to tap into Fabric’s expertise and capabilities in ecommerce and applying it to the B2B world.