The retail technology week in numbers
77% of people in the UK shop online at least once per month, 10 percentage points higher than the European average, according to research by ING Bank.
10…Target has announced the 10 startups that feature in its third Target + Techstars accelerator.
90%...Amazon Prime Day wasn’t the only online shopping extravaganza in town this week.
Target says that its one-day sale, which kicked off Tuesday morning, drove the highest single day of traffic and sales of 2018 on target.com. Nearly 90% of orders will be fulfilled directly from its stores.
One million…UK mobile payments and loyalty marketing platform, Yoyo, has crossed the one million user mark.
16.9%...UK online retailers had reasons to be cheerful during June, as the hot weather and start of the World Cup spurred a 16.9% year-on-year (YoY) growth of retail sales, according to the latest IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index.
$11.2 million…US startup, Standard Cognition, has raised an additional $5.5 million from CRV, bringing its total funding to date to $11.2 million. It has also hired two new execs, from Macy's and Walmart.
100…PXtech is to provide pizza restaurant and takeaway PIZZASQR with EPoS and CCTV systems.
The company is launching the first of a new chain of grab and go pizza restaurants at intu Merry Hill. It has plans to open 100 stores in the next five years.
Five…Walmart has chosen Microsoft as its strategic cloud provider as it looks to accelerate its digital transformation strategy.
The retailer is already using Microsoft services for critical applications and workloads, and has now inked a five-year agreement which will see it embark on a range of cloud innovation projects that leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence and data platform solutions for external customer-facing services and internal business applications. This will include the migration of a significant portion of walmart.com and samsclub.com to Azure, and a phased roll-out of Microsoft 365.
$1.7 million…Omnichannel retail marketing platform provider, Perch Interactive, has a new CEO Trevor Sumner, who previously founded and was President at LocalVox. It has also raised $1.7 million in seed funding from such angel investors as TVC and Corigin Ventures to expand its technology and shopper applications for retailers and brands.
Eight…A panel of eight experts has been appointed by High Streets Minister Jake Berry to diagnose issues that currently affect the health of our High Streets and advise on the best practical measures to help them thrive. But it could be a case of too little, too late, according to parcel delivery comparison site ParcelHero.
49.1%...Amazon is on track to claim $258.22 billion in US retail sales in 2018, according to eMarketer research. That weighs in at 49.1% of all online US retail spend and 5% of all retail sales.
Two…Morrisons is trialling reverse vending machines for the return of single-use plastic bottles. Two of these will be in the retailer’s stores in Skipton, North Yorkshire, and Lindsayfield, East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire, for six months.