Ecommerce giant Amazon has announced that it will invest more than 1 billion euros up until 2027 to decarbonize its transportation network in Europe. The company will add electric delivery vans and electric heavy goods vehicles to its network. It wants to become net-zero carbon by 2040.

Online marketplace Amazon has been working towards more sustainable operations in Europe for a while now. It launched its first ‘micromobility’ hub in London this summer consisting of e-cargo bikes and on-foot delivery staff.

According to the company, it currently has over 3,000 electric delivery vans across Europe. It expects to grow that fleet to over 10,000 by 2025 with the new investment plans.

Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO says that the company’s transportation network is one of the most challenging areas of their business. Decarbonizing and achieving net-carbon will require a substantial and sustained investment.  Deploying thousands of electric vans, long-haul trucks, and bikes will help the company shift further away from traditional fossil fuels. Plus it will further encourage transportation and automotive industries in Europe and worldwide to continue scaling and innovation in order to reach global climate goals.

Amazon currently has micromobility hubs in 20 cities in Europe and it wants to double that by the end of 2025. The company has also announced that it will invest in thousands of chargers in its European facilities.

It wants to power its operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025. This includes operations like data centers, logistics centers and physical stores. A year ago, the company’s operations were powered with 85 percent renewable energy. Overall, it now has over 100 renewable energy projects across Europe.

Website design software WordPress is considering offering core features as plugins instead. With a plugin-first approach, the software could be updated regularly. The consideration comes right before the launch of the newest version of WordPress in November, ecommercenews.eu reports.

Founding developer Matt Mullenweg argues offering new features as plugins in a blog post. It was released during a conference for WordPress-developers in the United States earlier this month. Plugins are add-ons for the standard website-builder, which is also very popular for online stores.

The plea comes in response to a new version of WordPress, 6.1, which is to be released next month. This would include a feature for images called WebP, but this has been dropped recently. Instead, the feature will be released in the form of a plugin.

Releasing features as plugins instead, Mullenweg writes, means WordPress can be updated more regularly. It also offers more trustworthy plugins, the founder says. Instead of a third party, a team connected to WordPress can create these so-called canonical plugins.

We are reaching a point where core needs to be more editorial and say “no” to features coming in as ad hoc as they sometimes do, Mullenweg writes. A plugin-first approach could offer ‘the luxury of faster development and release cycles (instead of three times per year)’.

Not everyone is pleased with this idea. WordPress developer Jon Brown is concerned about its usability. At the moment, WordPress has around 60.000 plugins already. Instead, users can check- and uncheck features, he comments.

Developers for WordPress first coined canonical plugins in 2009. Ever since, the discussion comes up regularly. The dropped WebP-plugin in the newest WordPress is the latest reason for discussion. If WordPress is really making the shift, is not yet clear.

Last year, one out of four packages were returned in Germany. This comes to an estimate of 530 million parcels, with 1.3 billion items. Returning goods is part of consumer protection. On the other hand, the amount of returns brings high costs for sellers, as well as a large carbon footprint.

According to economists from the University of Bamberg, Germany is the European Returns Champion. They interviewed 411 managers of European retailers with an online turnover of around 60 million euros. Additionally, they evaluated data from associations for ecommerce, mail order, express logistics and parcel services.

Reasons

In 2021, German consumers collectively ordered goods worth 99 billion euros online. Of the 1.3 billion items that were returned, 91 percent are clothing or shoes. Only one in ten German online stores charge fees for returns. This is a significantly lower amount than in the rest of Europe, where every second store charges a fee. This is one of the reasons that so many orders are returned.

The large period in which items can be returned is another reason, say the researchers. Besides, most German consumers pay by invoice which makes it easier to return products as well.

The average transport and processing costs per return shipment are 6.95 euros. However, German online sellers are good at recycling their returns. The proportion of disposal in Germany is lower than in the rest of Europe, which makes the costs per return lower than with the competition. This results in a competitive advantage for ecommerce in Germany.

According to the research, just one percent of the returned items are disposed. Over 93 percent is immediately resold as new. The remaining items are offered as second-hand goods, donated or sold to industrial users.

The researchers estimate that 795,000 tons of CO2 are due to returns in Germany in 2021. In comparison, around 6.6 million cars would emit the same on the journey from Munich to Hamburg. While logistics providers are often trying to minimize their carbon footprint, the German ecommerce industry makes little effort to narrow down the ecological footprint. Less than five percent stated that their company measured the carbon footprint of returns, according to the survey.

“The return of goods is part of consumer protection and well-established processes in online and mail order business”, said Martin Groß-Albenhausen, deputy general manager of the Federal Association of E-Commerce and Mail Order. “All the more important to research the reasons for returns, the scope, avoidability and utilization of returns.”

Lisa, a startup from Berlin, raised 2.7 million euros in funding. The company, which offers social shopping solutions, will use the money to accelerate growth and develop its software service. Social shopping is still in its infancy in Europe.

Lisa is a startup from Germany which offers headless ecommerce solutions for live and social shopping. With live shopping, users can shop during live streams from influencers, for example. Social shopping is hugely popular in Asian countries, but still in its infancy in Europe.

Lisa was part of the Brent Hoberman’s Founders Factory startup programme in 2019. The company offers headless software solutions for live and social shopping. The German startup will use the money to accelerate the growth of its business, Tech.eu writes.

Through Lisa’s headless platform, retailers and marketplaces can develop their own live shopping experiences. Merchants can also integrate product feeds and user information such as favorite items and baskets through APIs.

According to the startup, its customers have reached customer engagement of up to 90 percent, online conversion rates up to 35 percent. Organic social sharing has rates up to 14 percent. Its customers include well-known fashion and make-up retailers like Otto, l’Oréal and Charlotte Tilbury.

Lisa’s founder and CEO Sophie Frères said in her talk with Tech.eu that the booming social e-commerce market has reached a level of maturity where it’s increasingly unmanageable for retailers to use up to 20 different little feature plugins. Also, seamless cross-platform experiences are simply expected by users.

Live shopping accounts for 10 percent of ecommerce revenue in China, according to research by McKinsey. In Europe, it has not been widely adopted yet. In July, Shopify announced a social shopping partnership with YouTube. That same month, though, Tiktok pulled their Western live shopping tool due to disappointing results. It seems the European live shopping market is still wrapped in uncertainty.

Investment manager Pascal Bless from Lisa’s main investor TechVision Fund is confident that with Lisa, we are entering the next evolution of shopping, where shopping remains digital with all its benefits and where the very much-needed social elements are brought back.

Nearly all top retailers accept Mastercard, which could make pay-later services nearly ubiquitous in online shopping.

Mastercard Inc. is facing pushback from retailers over a new pay later product. It allows customers to pay off their purchases in installments, digitalcommerce360.com reports. The payments giant has begun telling merchants and their banks that it will charge retailers 3% of a purchase price each time a consumer opts to use the new program, according to people familiar with the matter. Mastercard will automatically enroll retailers in its new buy-now- pay-later (BNPL) service. However, retailers will have a chance to opt out.

The price tag came as a surprise to some of the country’s largest retailers. Many of them have already negotiated separate deals with credit-card issuers and BNPL providers that may limit them from offering competing services to their customers. Others, however, are embracing the new service, given that the 3% cost, while higher than any of Mastercard’s normal rates for accepting credit cards, is less than what most standalone buy now, pay later providers charge for their products.

Virtually all retailers accept Mastercard, while just 45.8% offer the option to pay later. Only two retailers out of 1000 offered Mastercard’s installment service through their ecommerce platforms when researched earlier this year. Affirm is the largest pay-later service, available at 14.5% of retailers.

As Chiro Aikat, executive vice president for products and engineering at Purchase, New York-based Mastercard, said, when they built the program last year, they aimed at enabling another seamless and transparent way to pay, with the same levels of trust and security that’s expected from Mastercard.

The conflict is the latest episode in the long-running drama between retailers and Mastercard and rival Visa Inc. Merchants have grown increasingly vocal about the cost of accepting electronic payments. Processing fees soared to $137.8 billion last year alone, according to industry publication The Nilson Report.

Mastercard started the installments program last year. It was part of the network’s response to a surge in consumers’ interest in splitting up purchase costs. The move came after financial-technology companies focused on the buy now, pay later space — firms such as Afterpay and Klarna — had already siphoned away as much as $10 billion in annual revenue from banks, according to McKinsey & Co.

By the time it was ready to announce the new service, Mastercard had already partnered with lenders. Some of those included store-card provider Synchrony Financial and Barclays Plc’s US card unit to develop the new product. The idea was that those lenders and others, along with fintech upstarts and firms that offer digital wallets, would be able to approve consumers for an installment loan before a purchase or offer the option during checkout.

Within months, Mastercard announced retailers including Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., American Airlines Group Inc. and Bass Pro Shops had agreed to work with the network on launching the new service. In June, technology giant Apple Inc. announced it would use Mastercard for its new Pay Later product.

Apple Pay is available at 37.2% of top 1000 retailers. But adding its pay-later service would increase buy now, pay later penetration to nearly 60% of top 1000 retailers. 134 retailers accept the iPhone payment method but no pay later service. This move by Mastercard would increase penetration to nearly 100%, assuming none opt out of the service.

“By using the Mastercard network, Apple Pay Later just works with Apple Pay and requires no integration for merchants,” Apple says on its website.

Negative reaction

Other retailers have told the network in recent months that they’re opting out of offering the new service. Some of these retailers are in the fast-food industry, along with gas stations and convenience stores. In most cases, they worried customers would take out installment loans to pay for smaller purchases, the people said. They didn’t want consumers to become dissatisfied paying off a tank of gas or meal months after it was gone.

Mastercard said it would compile a list of those merchants that have opted against accepting the new service. But some retailers bristled at that idea, fearing it might drive customers away. Instead, Mastercard will inform card issuers which retailers have opted out of the service. In doing so, they won’t promote or authorize those transactions from those merchants, according to one of the people. Digital-wallet providers won’t make the option available when customers check out at those retailers, the person said.

Mastercard and Visa have long faced criticism from merchants because they set the fees retailers are charged each time a consumer swipes one of their cards at checkout. Banks collect the bulk of those so-called swipe fees before handing over a slice of them to the two payments giants.

Merchants recently won a battle over swipe fees, though. Two U.S. senators introduced legislation that would give merchants the ability to route credit-card transactions over alternative networks. The move came after Visa and Mastercard introduced a series of changes to swipe fees earlier this year. The changes sparked outcry among retailers who say they’re already dealing with the effects of inflation at a 40-year high.

According to Doug Kantor, general counsel for NACS, a trade group representing the convenience-store industry, it’s definitely a source of frustration as nobody should be automatically opted into any service in this context and as the service in question doesn’t make sense for lots of retailers. Bloomberg

B2B ecommerce is a digital growth driver for Unilever, one of the biggest and oldest consumer brand manufacturers and the maker of more than 400 products such as Dove soap and Lipton tea.

Total Unilever sales grew about 15% to 29.623 billion pounds (US$35.998 billion) for the first six months of the year from 25.791 billion pounds (US$31.341 billion) from January through June in 2021.

Ecommerce grew 25% in the first half and now represents 14% of total sales, Unilever says. Based on those metrics, experts project that digital Unilever sales totaled $5.039 billion from $4.03 billion in the first half of 2021.

While the company did not break out specific metrics, B2B ecommerce was the primary growth driver for digital Unilever sales, the company says.

Ecommerce grew 25% in the first half, with growth coming from omnichannel retailers and the company’s B2B platforms, according to Unilever CEO Alan Jope. Ecommerce growth has moderated in the U.S. as consumers return to physical stores and the company sees greater number of consumers researching online and then purchasing offline. And that emphasizes the growing importance of digital channels in the path to purchase.

In the first half of 2022, B2B ecommerce grew 69% and is helping to grow overall digital Unilever sales, Ecommerce news reports.

In just five years, ecommerce has grown from 2% of Unilever’s turnover to 14% in the first half. Unilever continues to invest in channel expertise and the right technology and in channel-specific innovation.

Unilever operates multiple B2B platforms such as Compre Ahora, a B2B marketplace in Spain.

Unilever produces 400 food, beverage, cleaning, hygiene, and personal care products sold in 190 countries and used by more than 2.5 billion people every day.

Ecommerce software Shopify and online video streaming platform YouTube are launching YouTube Shopping. The feature offers multiple options for live shopping, where users can purchase products directly on YouTube’s website.

Shopify gained a lot of new users during the pandemic and has been moving into the influencer market recently. Live shopping, where users shop during a video live stream, is mostly popular in Asia. In Europe it has not been widely adopted yet.

With YouTube Shopping, users can purchase products from Shopify merchants while watching a video or live stream on YouTube. The entire payment process will also take place through the video streaming platform.

The feature is available worldwide. To use it, merchants will need a minimum of 1000 subscribers.

Retailers can tag products in a live stream or show a list of products under videos. They can manage which products are featured through the ‘Shopping’ label in YouTube studio. Creators can also add a ‘Store’ tab on their YouTube channel.

All product information such as name, price and inventory is synced with your catalog on Shopify. If a product is out of stock, for example, it also disappears from YouTube.

Shopify has been focussing on the influencer market recently. In spring of this year, the software company acquired influencer marketing startup Dovetale and launched its own creator linking tool.

Shopify’s new YouTube integration will fundamentally change what opportunity looks like for independent brands in the creator economy.

YouTube currently houses over 2 billion monthly users. Competitor TikTok, which is surpassing YouTube in popularity and watchtime, launched their own live shopping tool in Europe late last year. This month, though, the company pulled their Western launch after disappointing results.

Ashvin Melwani, chief marketing officer at My Obvi, a US-based supplements DTC brand, has shared some details as to the measures the company has taken and is going to take to maintain competitiveness and raise profits in the light of the recent global events. He has to admit that the lead times have tripled this year, from four weeks to 12 weeks.

According to research firm Kearney, over the next five years, inefficient supply chains will cause more than half (52%) of all consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies to either shrink in size or grow below the market.

Switching manufactures is not easy. The company produces supplements, including protein powders, and just a slight change in flavor can lead to the loss of customers.

The company is looking for and testing ways to double overall revenue from their in-store retail efforts alongside with their DTC website sales with what is at hand and trending.

My Obvi sells its products in the Vitamin Shoppe, GNC as well as smaller “mom and pop” brick-and-mortar shops. The average order value (AOV) on My Obvi’s website is much higher than in store at about $75. GNC and Vitamin Shoppe sell My Obvi’s best-selling items in-store and online.

The brand wants customers to be able to add beyond its bestsellers to their carts, so the goal is always to drive customers to the DTC website, through frequent promotions and a rewards-points loyalty program. Melwani says conversion is higher, compared with third-party sellers or a marketplace like Amazon.

Apple’s iOS changes allowed people to opt out of tracking when browsing online. The company was doing pretty well before the iOS changes with the average cost for acquisition (CPAs) was around $30. After the iOS update, they hit a peak of $93 to acquire a customer, which wasn’t sustainable.

The team are testing more creative content than they’ve ever tested before, 30 to 40 pieces a week, with multiple offers and ads on landing pages to find that winning combination. Creative content includes everything from landing-page designs, offer pop-ups and other advertising content. To see what works and what doesn’t, My Obvi invested in Triple Whale ecommerce software that allows Shopify retailers to track ads and how they perform on different platforms. The cost varies depending on factors like traffic and revenue volume. My Obvi spends anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million per month on its overall advertising. Triple Whale costs the retailer just about $2,000 per month.

According to the CEO, you can’t trust what these social platforms like Facebook are telling you. It’s good to separately reassess. In practice, Melwani says My Obvi learned that while Facebook was telling him ads were giving a 5x return, Triple Whale refuted that data. Triple Whale also allows Melwani to see how it’s faring on different social platforms like TikTok.

As for TikTok, it has proven to be a worthwhile venture for My Obvi, there are good initiatives how to sell there unostentatiously integrating their products in entertainig videos, for example, and making people want to check their website for more information.

My Obvi also reaches out to content creators or micro-influencers and wants them to assess the products impartially to sound honest if they agree to promote them on their platforms for their audiences.

Amazon helps My Obvi get in front of customers as well. This year, My Obvi offered a Prime Day deal (another version of Black Friday) on its Super Collagen Protein Powder. Amazon Prime Days give a boost in rankings and reviews. The company’s people send out a promotion to the customers and let them know there is Prime Day two-day shipping and a certain percentage off.  More orders translate into more reviews, which, if positive, help give the brand a boost on Amazon. Meanwhile, on its DTC website My Obvi offers customers rewards points. This year, customers are able to show My Obvi their Amazon receipt and earn two- to three-times more rewards points on MyObvi.com.

The brand did not pay for much advertising outside of Prime Day other than email and SMS. My Obvi might capitalize on organic content on TikTok by posting after Amazon Prime days. This year, My Obvi supported its Amazon Prime Day Deals with marketing solely from TikTok. Last year, without any marketing toward Amazon, My Obvi nearly doubled its daily sales average during that period. On the first day the sales quadripled. Besides, My Obvi launched a surprise product exclusively on Amazon and shared it with the brand’s Facebook community. Emailing and texting My Obvi’s customer base and alerting its Facebook community resulted in six times the daily average sales on Amazon.

My Obvi plans to use social media to help it bolster holiday sales this year as customers may be a bit more careful with their spending this year.

What is more, My Obvi plans to “hype up” its Black Friday deal as well as offer giftable bundles and accompanying free gifts with purchase. It also plans to “hype up” its loyal customers already interested in My Obvi by reaching out to groups like its Facebook community, which has more than 50,000 members. The retailer wants to hype up new product lines or flavor expansions and to offer free samples to that community so they can post online and share the new products.

Private companies valued at over $1 billion and called unicorns flourished in 2021, doubling in number globally. The U.S. is home to most of those companies, but China has some of the most highly valued. In 2021, 519 new unicorns emerged, bringing the total number worldwide to over 1,000 at the beginning of 2022.

Unicorns were rare until eight years ago. Before that, startups would take their companies public to raise capital to grow after two or three rounds of venture capital funding.

Now more sources of funding are available. Private equity firms have historically invested in mature companies but lately are willing to fund early-stage startups. Today it is not uncommon for companies to have five or six private funding rounds, permitting them to reach billion-dollar valuations without going public.

According to CB Insights, there are more than 1,150 unicorns worldwide, as of June 2022. Forty-seven countries have at least one unicorn. The U.S., China, and India are leading with 612, 174, and 65, respectively. In Europe, the U.K., Germany, and France lead with 43, 29, and 24. The four cities with the most unicorns are in the U.S. and China.

The most valuable global unicorn at the beginning of 2022 was ByteDance, the Chinese tech company that owns TikTok and several other platforms in various industries. Its valuation then was $140 billion.

The top 10 unicorns have a combined valuation total of $698 billion at the end of last year.

At the end of 2021, there were 157 fintech unicorns, with 81 located in the U.S., according to Statista. China came in second with 11. CB Insights reports that fintech unicorns lead in valuations with a combined value of $926 billion.

In 2021, unicorn companies in the U.S. took in $142.3 billion in new funding, more than double the previous allotment. In the first quarter of 2022, 75 companies achieved unicorn status, according to PitchBook.

Unicorns in the U.S. raised $27 billion in 134 deals in Q1 2022. Of the top 10 new American unicorns in that quarter, 60% were fintech, and five of those six were associated with blockchain or cryptocurrency.

The public market determines the valuations of publicly traded companies. Conversely, the valuations of private firms are dictated mainly by investors interested in creating a high value, often without compelling data to back it up.

Private companies do not have to disclose detailed financial and operational information, that’s why their status is often opaque. Unicorns attract media attention, which can inflate or deflate valuations, depending on the publicity.

For example, the blood-testing company Theranos, valued at over $9 billion at its peak around 2013, plunged to $800 million a few days after published reports revealed the product did not work and revenue was relatively modest. The company shut down at the end of 2018, and founder Elizabeth Holmes’ net worth reportedly dropped from $4.5 billion to nothing. The company eventually sold its patents and intellectual property for only $65 million. Investors lost all their money.

So the tendency is that unicorns will likely continue making spectacular entrances, but valuations can be fleeting.

Nike Inc. said it’s leaving the Russian market entirely after suspending operations in March. It joins other United States-based companies that have pulled out since Russia invaded Ukraine, Bloomberg reports.

The world’s largest athletic-wear maker halted sales in Russia earlier this year, telling customers it couldn’t guarantee product shipments. The Beaverton, Oregon-based company had more than 100 stores in Russia. It’s a priority for the company to ensure they are fully supporting their employees while they responsibly scale down their operations over the coming months, the company said in a statement June 23.

Hundreds of multinational businesses across industries have curtailed or shut down their operations in Russia this year. U.S. companies including McDonald’s Corp., Starbucks Corp. and HP Inc. have all made full exits.

In May, Nike said it wouldn’t renew an agreement with its biggest Russian retail franchisee, which managed dozens of Nike stores. It also said it would not make any new business commitments.

Less than 1% of Nike’s total sales come from Russia and Ukraine, Chief Financial Officer Matt Friend said in March. Revenue from its Europe, the Middle East and Africa region accounted for $11.5 billion in 2021. That’s about 26% of total sales.