The retail technology week in numbers

$40 million…Amazon Go rival Standard Cognition has raised $40 million in a Series A funding round led by Initialized Capital.

6%…Retail Assist has published its annual Black Friday survey, which is now in its fourth year.

Key findings include: A 1% dip in people planning to participate; A 6% rise in people planning to buy on the High Street – the first increase Retail Assist has seen since starting its survey in 2015; 79% of respondents said that they've never returned a Black Friday purchase, contrasting with the view that shoppers often regret what they buy.

$271 million…Grocery delivery venture Instacart has pulled in an extra $271 million in funding from investors including US hedge fund Tiger Global Management. This brings its latest round of fund raising to $871 million.

44%…Although 49% of people now do at least half their Christmas shopping online, 44% say the experience is worse during the festive period compared to the rest of the year. That’s according to a survey by YouGov of 2,024 British shoppers, commissioned by parcelLab.

10,000…Accenture has helped Carlsberg transition its IT infrastructure to the public cloud. This is part of its SAIL ‘22 strategy, which targets increased digital connectivity between the company and its customers, supply chain and employees.

Accenture and Avanade worked with Microsoft and SAP to help Carlsberg move its core infrastructure and business-critical applications to the Microsoft Azure public cloud in less than six months. The project covered more than 150 terabytes of data on 600 servers and 200 applications that serve more than 10,000 employees, including the whole SAP application suite.

5…BBC Children in Need has partnered with iZettle as it looks to notch up a record number of contactless donations during its appeal week.

Fundraisers, equipped with iZettle readers, will be carrying out contactless collections at some of London’s busiest stations. Pudsey Bear will also be making a number of appearances, allowing the public to high five him (with their debit or credit cards) to donate a fiver.

14%…Online shopping fraud attempts will surge by 14% during the 2018 Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, as hackers prowl on big ticket items such as TVs and smartphones, according to ACI Worldwide.

1…London-based PayTech venture Wirex has announced its first corporate partnership with the blockchain-powered ‘piggy-wallet’, Pigzbe.

60% of retailers in Europe saw an increase in fraud during the past year, according to a new report from Adyen.

$30.8 billion…The 10th anniversary of the biggest shopping day on the planet did not disappoint. Alibaba reported that Singles’ Day 2018 generated a record $30.8 billion (last year's final tally was $25.3 billion).

$23 billion…Transaction volume on JD.com reached a record RMB 159.8 billion (approximately $23 billion) from 1st to 11th November, during its Singles’ Day shopping festival.

5.6%...After years of hype but very little action, the uptake of mobile payments such as Apple, Google and Android Pay in the UK has quadrupled over the last 24 months, according to Cardlytics data based on 190 million transactions made by 6.4 million bank customers.

As a proportion of total payments, mobile transactions in the UK have jumped from 1.3% in Q3 2016 to 5.6% in Q3 2018. Compared to this time last year, they have increased by 60%. Still pretty niche then, but heading in the right direction.