Bringing you last week’s biggest retail technology plays at a glance

RTIH rounds up the stand out retail systems deals, deployments and pilots from the past seven days. Featuring Amazon Style, Circle K, Hugo Boss, Boots, Sam’s Club, Sainsbury’s, SHEIN, Flipkart, and Walmart.

3D Cloud by Marxent, a 3D experience platform used by enterprise furniture and home improvement retailers and manufacturers, has announced the addition of a new US patent to its IP portfolio.

This is an extension of the company's Design from Photo patent which enables users to drag and drop 3D products to a custom floorplan by tapping on 2D inspirational images.

Paired with other technologies such as LiDAR powered room scanning for floor plan creation, 3D Cloud by Marxent says that auto-layout will introduce an entirely new, mobile friendly kitchen buying journey to consumers.

Amazon is continuing its excursion into physical fashion retail.

The company has opened a second Amazon Style store, with the aim of combining the personalisation of e-commerce with the immediacy of bricks and mortar shopping.

This is located at Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio.

Amazon debuted the concept earlier this year at The Americana at Brand, in Glendale, California.

Circle K has selected The ai Corporation’s payments platform, aiEazyFuel, to power its B2B mobile payments app, Circle K PRO.

This enables business customers to pay for their fuel and other products via the app.

Using ai’s technology, Circle K can authorise, and process transactions initiated from the driver's mobile device.

The platform will offer Circle K a range of issuing, acceptance, processing, and billing functions.

After a pilot, Circle K PRO is now available to business customers in the company’s core markets in the Scandinavian and the Baltic regions.

Hugo Boss has enlisted Adobe to power its strategy around 3D and immersive design.

“To support our vision of becoming the leading premium tech driven fashion platform worldwide, we were one of the early companies to explore the potential of 3D and immersive design in fashion,” says Sebastian Berg, Vice President, Business Operations Excellence at Hugo Boss.

“Now we have over 400 employees working with these innovative tools to produce more inspiring and sustainable products, and to lead our industry in digital.”

“With Adobe Substance 3D as part of our Adobe Creative Cloud stack, we have a powerful tool that provides hyper realistic renderings of our products. It gives us greater speed in responding to global consumer trends, while helping us experiment with new digital services to drive 3D innovation in fashion.”

PVH Europe, parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, has selected Contentstack as part of what is called “a digital transformation initiative to provide seamless, omnichannel experiences via a MACH-based solution”.

According to a press release:“Contentstack will enable the e-commerce content specialists, site merchandisers, SEO/SEM experts and technical stakeholders within PVH Europe, to reduce the time to market for new digital experiences, helping to increase revenue whilst ensuring consistent omnichannel interactions.”

Boots has partnered with RangeMe to expand the number of new and diverse suppliers it works with on a goods for resale basis both in-store and online.

With over 200,000 suppliers already registered on the platform, the retailer hopes that the RangeMe tie up will be a portal to working with the very best new and emerging brands.

As basketball season gets underway, Zippin has announced six new stores powered by its tech in NBA arenas this autumn.

Toyota Center, home to the Houston Rockets, recently launched two checkout-free stores ahead of the season opener on 21st October, and Gainbridge Fieldhouse closes out the final phase of uts “Fieldhouse of the Future” renovations with two more frictionless shopping locations, giving Pacer fans four shops to choose from.

Capital One Arena added two Zippin Lanes in October as well, making Zippin the platform behind one out of four professional basketball arenas nationwide.

Jisp, a shopping and rewards app In the UK independent sector, has announced the launch of Jisp Media Insights.

This equips brands, wholesalers, and market operators in the indie space with the ability to understand shoppers and retailers with insights, actions, and recommendations.

Tapping first-party data, Jisp Media Insights will support all three to understand shopper sentiments, attitudes, what they purchase, where they purchase, when they purchase and how they can grow sales, shoppers, distribution, and loyalty on going.

BigCommerce has announced the launch of British cycling lifestyle brand Kostüme on its platform.

Natural Baby Shower, an online retailer in the newborn/early childhood category, has deployed Descartes’ cloud-based e-commerce warehouse management solution (WMS).

US retailer, Ulta Beauty, has selected the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as its internal standard for automation transformation.

This is part of a three phased transformation project to free up IT teams by deploying technology with greater speed and efficiency.

Sam’s Club, a division of Walmart, has announced the completion of a US, chain wide roll-out of Inventory Scan towers that have been added to its existing fleet of robotic scrubbers in partnership with Brain Corp.

The deployment was initiated in late January 2022 and has resulted in Brain Corp claiming the title of world’s leading supplier of robotic inventory scanners.

Walmart has announced the launch of a new platform designed around creators.

Walmart Creator is pitched as  a one stop portal that makes it easy for the latter to monetise shoppable products from the retailer.

In a press release, Walmart says that those who sign up will have “access to tens of thousands of products and are given the opportunity to earn revenue all while earning commissions on sales they refer  with no cap”.

Users of the platform can share product links to any social platform or group of their choice, receive product recommendations based on interests and affinities, and collect performance data to help grow their community and following.    

Flipkart has launched a metaverse offering for consumers to more interactively discover and shop new products on its app.

The Walmart backed Indian e-commerce giant has partnered with eDAO, a Polygon incubated firm, to launch Flipverse.

This is in the pilot stage and will be available on Flipkart’s newly launched platform, FireDrops.

Brands including Puma, Noise, Nivea, Lavie, Tokyo Talkies, Campus, VIP, Ajmal Perfumes, Himalaya, and Butterfly India will be participating in the first edition.

Phase one of Flipverse is an Android only experience, and will be live for a week.

MediaVision has launched Metis, an integrated tech stack which the, company claims, is set to redefine SEO and revolutionise organic growth strategies.

The search platform, built in-house, gives businesses the ability to quickly anticipate and respond to consumer trends.

At its heart is the delivery of weekly search market insights. The offering also enables companies to perform deep dives into client and sector specific categories.

It will also deliver daily insight into client website operation.

Fashion retailer, New Look, was involved in helping test Metis.

Chinese fast fashion giant, SHEIN, has announced the launch of SHEIN Exchange, an online peer-to-peer resale destination.

The firm says that, over the past years, through community created Facebook groups and social platforms, its customers have communicated an interest in buying and selling previously owned SHEIN products without the high platform fees that they are usually required to pay.

Available via the SHEIN app, a pilot version of SHEIN Exchange is currently available in the US.

Climate Pledge Arena has announced expanded use of the Amazon One palm recognition and payment solution at three concession areas.

These join the four existing Just Walk Out technology and Amazon One enabled stores, which opened last year and allow customers to take what they want and leave without stopping to check-out.

Evri has developed bespoke software designed to improve parcel delivery accuracy and customer communication, ahead of this year’s peak Christmas period.

This is currently being trialled regionally in the UK.

Parcel Vision has been designed to detect and flag any safe place photos that are taken by the courier as proof of delivery but which fail to show the parcel and where it has been left.

This is for when the parcel may not be clearly visible, be too close to the lens or the camera lens covered.  

The software has been developed using a machine learning model that was trained using thousands of SafePlace photos and will detect these issues, alert the courier explaining the problem and ask them retake the photo.

Snap has partnered with Disguise to let users try Halloween costumes from the latter’s 2022 collection using Snapchat’s AR shopping tool.

Snapchatters can try-on, share with friends, and buy costumes of their favourite characters from the likes of Harry Potter, The Office, Chucky, Minecraft, Power Rangers, Transformers, Cobra Kai and Ghostbusters.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is working with Sainsbury’s as the UK grocery giant looks to accelerate its cloud first strategy.

TCS has been a strategic partner to Sainsbury’s for over a decade.

As a part of a new multi-year deal, it will consolidate and modernise the retailer’s IT infrastructure landscape into a hybrid cloud stack using TCS Enterprise Cloud.

It will also  provide end-to-end managed services for workplace services, network connectivity, and security.