November spawned a retail technology monster: the month’s big deals and deployments at a glance
RTIH rounds up the stand out retail systems deals, deployments and pilots from November, including Lacoste, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, DoorDash, Wing, Giant Tiger, Aldi Nord, and Jumbo.
Lacoste
Emperia has announced the launch of Lacoste’s first ever virtual store ahead of the holiday season.
Upon entering the experience, customers are taken through a crocodile’s mouth, where they find themselves in a showroom featuring five seasonal products, all shoppable viewed in 360°.
As users continue their journey into the second room, Emperia has developed a gamification feature that enables them to interact with more products in the Christmas range.
A third and final token gated room is nestled at the end of the store, exclusive to VIP customers in UNDW3 (Lacoste’s Web3 community) that are in possession of a Lacoste NFT.
Throughout December, ‘loot’ boxes will be dropped within this room for UNDW3 customers to collect, and five users will be selected at random daily, to win a prize.
Created in partnership, using Arianee’s token gated technology to bring this room to life, customers will be encouraged to keep coming back for new surprises.
Sainsbury’s
Checkout.com has been appointed by Sainsbury’s to simplify and modernise payment infrastructure across the grocery giant’s business.
New till-free technology is the first stage in a long-term partnership, aimed at creating more digital payment solutions for Sainsbury’s and improving its customer offering.
The new Checkout.com enabled SmartShop functionality, will allow customers to pay for their shopping via an app on their smartphones.
Underpinning the new functionality will be Checkout.com’s payments platform, enabling transactions through digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.
This is live across Sainsbury’s SmartShop stores and will be rolled out to Argos and Habitat stores in the coming months.
Tesco
DoorDash and Wing
DoorDash and Wing are working together to make drone delivery available via the former’s app in Australia, providing access to food and essentials from local restaurants and retailers in 15 minutes or less.
The service will be tested via a pilot programme in Logan, located within the South East Queensland region.
This is the first time that Wing is integrating its drone delivery service within another marketplace.
Giant Tiger
Canadian discount store chain, Giant Tiger, has launched a new website and an end to end tech stack replacement.
In a LinkedIn post, Simon Rodrigue, SVP & Chief Digital Officer at Giant Tiger, said: “Excited to be working with Shopify on the Shopify Plus platform building out an experience to help Canadians save with a smile.”
He added: “Thanks to all of the teams at Giant Tiger, our lead development partners at Diff and our technology partners at Algolia, Contentful, Segment, ShipHero, Akeneo, Sitation, 6 River Systems, Alumworks, Noibu, Yotpo, Klaviyo, Gorgias, Plobal Apps - it takes a powerful team, dedicated to a cause to make it happen.”
In a Twitter post, Aaron Rubin, Founder and CEO at ShipHero, described the project as “the biggest Shopify ecosystem news you haven’t heard”.
FatFace
FatFace is partnering with True Fit to deliver size and fit guidance to digital shoppers.
This was implemented on to the company’s site by Astound Commerce, FatFace’s strategic integration partner, as part of its digital transformation journey.
The partnership will leverage True Fit’s Fashion Genome, which brings together data from 80 million active members and 17,000+ brands, to unlock insights and serve fit personalisation to shoppers.
Collect&Go
Collect&Go, Colruyt Group’s online shopping service, is trialling an autonomous vehicle built by Clevon that combines remote teleoperation with autopilot functionality.
The Clevon 1 will cover a four kilometre route, from distribution centre to Collect&Go's pick-up point in Londerzeel. This is the longest route ever covered in Belgium by an unmanned vehicle.
Muffato
Sensei reports that Muffato has adopted its AI platform for what is pitched as Brazil's first autonomous supermarket.
The Muffato Go store, which is situated in Curitiba, Paraná, comes without queues, self-scanning or any form of physical checkout, and is the first deployment of Portugal-based Sensei's technology outside of Europe.
Shoppers download Muffato’s app, which generates a QR code that enables them to enter the store, pick up their items and leave.
A network of sensors provides the input Sensei's AI needs to keep track of the items each customer selects and returns throughout the 250 square metre location.
M&S
Marks and Spencer says that it has reduced workplace incidents by 80% just 10 weeks after introducing AI driven health and safety technology from Protex AI to its distribution centre in Castle Donington.
Protex AI uses CCTV systems to provide health and safety teams with technology that autonomously captures unsafe events and flags them to health and safety officers.
By increasing visibility of these incidents on-site, it helped the M&S HSE team to catch patterns in unsafe behaviour and take proactive action, providing focused training to staff to correct issues.
Kingfisher and Google Cloud
Kingfisher and Google Cloud have announced a five-year strategic partnership.
The former, whose brand portfolio includes B&Q, Castorama, Screwfix, Brico Dépôt and Koçtaş, will tap Google Cloud’s infrastructure, platform services, and artificial intelligence solutions, Kingfisher.
It says that benefits will include greater website uptime, better forecasting, more seamless customer centric experiences, improved personalisation, and engineering support from Google Cloud.
Kingfisher is one of the largest SAP enterprise users in Europe and is migrating on-premise legacy workloads to Google Cloud.
Aldi Nord
Aldi Nord has announced a partnership with autonomous stores firm Trigo.
This builds on a tie up in Utrecht with Aldi Nederland where the pair are working on a checkout-free test store, Aldi Shop & Go.
"To successfully lead discount retail into the future, technology and business must go hand in hand," says Sinanudin Omerhodzic, Chief Technology Officer at Aldi Nord.
"Our close partnership with Trigo unites exactly that and brings together two true experts in their field. The cooperation in Utrecht has shown that we share the right values and that together we can develop quick solutions with an eye for essentials, always focusing on customer benefits."
Asda
Asda has selected Veeam Software’s Availability Suite to provide backup and restore for mission critical systems.
Following its divestiture from Walmart in early 2021, the supermarket chain has taken responsibility for protecting the large, virtualised infrastructure that underpins its business.
It says that Veeam has enabled it to do this without sending IT headcount soaring.
Jumbo
Jumbo, the second largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands which also has stores in Belgium, has announced an exclusive electronic shelf labels partnership with Hanshow.
The retailer currently owns more than 700 stores in the Netherlands and Belgium.
To date, Hanshow’s solutions have been rolled out in over 250 locations. Jumbo will soon have upgraded all 700, with over 11 million Hanshow electronic price tags installed.
Co-op
Starship Technologies has partnered with Leeds City Council and the Co-op to bring autonomous grocery delivery to the streets of Leeds.
The service will be available to 20,000 residents initially within the Adel and Tinshill area of Leeds.
Orders are made through the Starship app, which is available for download on iOS and Android, with groceries picked in local Co-op stores on Spen Lane, Tinshill and Otley Road, Adel, for rapid delivery.
The expansion in the north of England for the first time follows the introduction of autonomous deliveries in Milton Keynes, Bedford, Northampton, Cambourne, and most recently Cambridge.
Currys
UK tech retailer, Currys, says it has invested over £250,000 in a fleet of robotic exoskeleton suits to help colleagues from logistics partner, GXO, work safely and efficiently through the festive period.
The suits, which are being used at Currys’ facility in Newark, will help people carry out their physical day to day tasks, with the aim of putting less pressure on their joints and muscles while lifting heavy loads.
The Newark site helped deliver 8.7 million units of stock to all 309 of its stores this Black Friday period.
The robotic suits are worn like a small backpack and give colleagues at least 10 tonnes of relief over the course of a typical working shift — with up to 30kg of assistance to the lower back per lift.
Made with ultralight carbon fibre, the waterproof exoskeleton incorporates the AI-based Smart Safety Companion ergonomics early warning system to alert of signs of poor posture and incorrect lifting practices in real-time.
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