Jerry Hallamek, CEO and owner of furniture retailer JerrySales.com, won the Win the Wheels contest at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition June 7 in Chicago. This is Hallamek’s first IRCE. He sells furniture on his own site and as an Amazon.com Inc. marketplace seller.
Online car dealer Carvana sponsored the Win The Wheels contest. Carvana is an e-commerce platform for buying and selling used cars available in 61 cities and can deliver a car to a shopper’s door as soon as the next day. Hallamek won $30,000 to purchase a car at Carvana.com.
Other highlights around the IRCE Exhibit Hall include:
- Advertising technology platform provider Kenshoo Ltd. announced Amazon.com marketplace sellers can now access Kenshoo E-Commerce’s services to manage their Amazon advertising through Seller Central, the interface marketplace sellers use to manage their Amazon sales. Previously, Kenshoo E-Commerce’s service to manage Amazon advertising was available only to vendors that sold wholesale to Amazon (first-party sales), not marketplace merchants selling to customers. Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2018 Top 500.
- Dotdigital Group PLC’s dotmailer marketing automation platform now supports SMS text message and Facebook Messenger marketing campaigns. Dotmailer’s ConsentInsight and Consent Maintenance services now address the GDPR challenge and let platform users store records of what messaging email subscribers have seen and consented to and manage permissions to be in compliance with the European Union’s rule.
- Retail search marketing company NetElixir has added Bing to its paid search recommendation platform LXRGuide, allowing marketers at small to medium-sized businesses to optimize search marketing campaigns that run on Bing. These new capabilities complement the platform’s existing features for Google Adwords. Retailers can now manage both Bing Ads campaigns and Google Adwords campaigns side by side.
- Web-based e-commerce platform BigCommerce launched BigCommerce for WordPress, which combines the WordPress platform with BigCommerce’s commerce engine for an improved online store. This is a part of BigCommerce’s larger initiative of Commerce-as-a-Service, which aims to bring content and commerce together in an easy way. It will allow retailers to offer shopping experiences through custom and commercial content management systems while centrally managing catalog, customer and order data through BigCommerce.
- Point2Point Global is a new cross-border e-commerce logistics and technology company created to improve the traditional international shipping model offered by legacy solutions. Point2Point Global offers a range of options balancing speed and cost, integrated carrier management, routing optimization and enhanced tracking. Services also include an upcoming international returns solution.
- Elite SEM has acquired Email Aptitude, an email marketing agency. Email Aptitude focuses on comprehensive email program management, advanced email strategy and CRM. The EA team is made up of industry veterans who have grown and managed email programs for brands including Halston Heritage, Bombas, Peter Millar and Brooks Running. Elite SEM now offers display advertising, affiliate marketing, SEO, paid social and search, shopping and feed, Amazon and marketplaces, conversion rate optimization, and CRM and email marketing—supported by Elite SEM’s integrated media strategy and analytics/marketing science teams.
- E-commerce platform and services vendor Skava has added voice commerce capabilities into its platform through Amazon’s Alexa APIs. With it, customers can reorder a product by saying what they want. Voice commerce capabilities are built into the 7.5 version of Skava Commerce.
- Moltin and Stance today announced that Stance is the first retailer to offer a self-checkout solution that allows customers to completely skip lines and kiosks and check out on their smartphone—no app download required. The solution was built with Moltin’s API-first commerce platform. When shopping in a Stance store, a customer navigates to a short URL from their phone where they can scan the barcodes on product tags and check out using Apple Pay, Google Pay or a credit card. It is designed to behave like an app, but since it is browser-based, it can provide the ease of an e-commerce checkout experience in a physical store.
- Salsify, a product experience management platform provider, announced the launch of its Command Center for Amazon. For first-party vendors on Amazon, driving discovery, search placement, traffic and conversions are a daily battle. These e-commerce teams need constant oversight over all the moving pieces that drive success or failure on Amazon, such as sales velocity, product content and imagery, inventory levels, prices, and search results. Salsify Command Center for Amazon is designed to solve this challenge by identifying the daily risks and opportunities across an entire product portfolio and defining the necessary actions sales managers can take in order to come out on top.