The retail technology week in numbers
$60 million…SaaS enterprise customer service platform venture, Kustomer, has raised $60 million in Series E funding.
$37 million…US startup Flow has snagged $37 million in Series B funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), American Express Ventures and Latitude Ventures.
13%…DPD UK has recorded its biggest ever Cyber Weekend, with parcel volumes up 13% on last year.
26%…The growing trend among consumers to look for ongoing Black Friday deals during the following Saturday and Sunday resulted in this year’s Cyber Weekend being 26% larger than in 2018.
10% and 27%…M&Co reports a 10% reduction in returns and a 27% increase in AOV since implementing personalisation platform True Fit on its site.
1…Marks and Spencer has been reflecting on one year of its Founders Factory startup partnership.
79%…UK consumers are 79% more likely today to discover new products on social media than they were just two years ago, according to research by Curalate.
4.4%…November saw UK retail sales decrease by 4.4%, against an increase of 0.5% in November 2018, according to research by the BRC and KPMG. However, If adjusted for the later timing of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, sales are more likely to have increased by a more palatable 0.4% like-for-like.
78% of UK consumers are frustrated by untargeted and irrelevant marketing and communication from brands, according to research by Boxever.
57% of Brits would be happy to ditch all of their passwords and pins and replace them with biometric verification, according to research from Equifax.
£208 million…Hastee has secured £208 million of investment to fund the development of its solution that gives workers immediate access to their earned pay.
£500 million…Ocado has announced a £500 million bond issue to fund deals won by tech arm Ocado Solutions.
$1.9 trillion…mPOS transaction values will exceed $1.9 trillion by 2024, up from $850 billion in 2019, according to Juniper Research.
300,000…There were more than 300,000 new PoS software deployments in the year to June 2019, according to research by RBR.
76% of UK grocery shoppers have, in the last 12 months, switched, avoided or boycotted brands due to their environmental policies, according to research by Kantar.
6%…Against a back drop of Brexit uncertainty and a late general election, UK Black Friday footfall increased by 6% compared to the 2018 event, according to ShopperTrak.
