November: retail technology deals and deployments at a glance
RTIH rounds up the stand out retail systems deals, deployments and pilots from November, including Ikea, Carrefour, Tesco, Alibaba Group, Walmart and Casino Group.
Ikea is launching its new Mobile Checkout solution in Australia.
This aims to give customers a faster and more convenient checkout experience in-store, with Ikea claiming that the roll-out is a first for home furnishing retailers down under.
Going live ahead of the Christmas shopping period, customers shopping at Ikea Logan and North Lakes in Queensland will be the first to experience the feature, which can be activated via the retailer’s app, or by scanning a QR code in-store.
Carrefour opened a Flash 10/10 concept store in Paris on 24th November.
The convenience store – developed in collaboration with US startup AiFi – is pitched as the first of its kind in France, and is located at 11 avenue Parmentier, in the capital’s eleventh arrondissement.
Flash 10/10 ("10 seconds to shop and 10 seconds to pay”) features a shopping journey that does not involve having to scan any products and quick payment.
Customers don't need to take items out of their bags. They can enter and exit the store without having to pass through a gateway. There is no need to download an app or register beforehand. And they can view their total spend in real-time.
Walmart has kicked off Cyber Week with a shoppable livestream event featuring Jason Derulo.
This beta tested Twitter’s shoppable livestream function, allowing customers to shop products straight from the platform.
“This will be the first time a brand in the US has leveraged this capability on Twitter and I’m excited to bring customers incredible deals on a platform they already love during the most joyful shopping season of the year,” says William White, Chief Marketing Officer, Walmart U.S.
“Twitter is a platform where we consistently see high return across top-and middle-of-funnel content, so it’s a natural next step for us to explore this new functionality.”
adidas has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider for SAP workloads.
This will see it migrate its SAP environment to AWS and implement a SAP S/4HANA platform.
adidas says that the move will enable it to “digitise core business processes across its value chain to provide better consumer experiences, become a more data driven business, and support new business models such as direct-to-consumer”.
The first Starbucks Pickup with Amazon Go location opened this month in New York City, powered by the latter’s Just Walk Out checkout free technology.
Located at 59th Street between Park & Lexington Avenues, this offers the full Starbucks menu and an assortment of food and beverages in the Amazon Go market.
RTIH first reported on this tie up in October. Starbucks and Amazon plan to open at least two more locations over the next year.
O2 has opened an ‘AR Store of the Future’ on Snapchat as part of its Black Friday activity.
In what is pitched as a UK telco first, from Black Friday until 8th December, Snapchatters will be able to visit the store and shop products by clicking on them to explore in more detail.
They can also buy through a Shop Now button present throughout the lens experience.
Alibaba Cloud says that it fully migrated all of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group’s systems and operations onto the cloud ahead of the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival.
This it claims, reduced computing resources by 50% for every 10,000 transactions compared to last year.
There was also a boost of 20% in technology deployment efficiency and 30% in CPU resource utilisation.
Sainsbury’s has opened a cashierless store in London, using Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology.
Tesco is leveraging a platform from RangeMe to “help its buyers scale product sourcing efforts with streamlined submissions and simplified discovery tools”.
It says that British suppliers will now have “a direct and unified journey to present their products to Tesco buyers”.
Casino Group and Gorillas have announced a quick commerce partnership focused on the French market.
The former has been boosting its online presence by tapping Ocado Group’s fulfilment platform, while its Monoprix supermarket arm works with Amazon.
This new partnership, which will see Casino buying a "symbolic" stake in Gorillas, will give Gorillas access to Casino’s national brands products, and also to Monoprix’s private label products.
These will be available through Gorillas’ app and delivered within 10 minutes to customers in Paris, Lille, Bordeaux, Lyon and Nice.
ICA Gruppen has gone live with an automated warehouse in Brunna, outside Stockholm, powered by Ocado Group technology.
Majid Al Futtaim, which specialises in shopping mall, communities, retail, and leisure across the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, is teaming with Russian tech giant Yandex to explore autonomous technology solutions that enhance Carrefour UAE’s last mile delivery capabilities.
This makes Carrefour the first omnichannel retailer to use self-driving robots for online order delivery in the region.
A pilot, involving customers in select neighbourhoods across the UAE, is set to launch in early 2022.
Waitrose is set to become the first supermarket in the UK to trial a new generation of electric vehicles.
Groceries from its St Katherine’s Dock, London store will be delivered to customers entirely by electric vans equipped with wireless charging technology.
The move is part of an ambition to end the use of fossil fuels across Waitrose’s entire transport fleet by 2030.
By 2030, Waitrose will have electrified all cars, vans and light trucks, and for sectors where that is not currently possible, such as long distance heavy trucks, biomethane will be used.
