The latest from Halfords, Oxbotica, and ShipStation: RTIH’s biggest retail technology articles on LinkedIn
We’re big fans of LinkedIn and are busy building an amazing community of retail tech enthusiasts on the social media platform. These are the articles that are currently on their radars, including Salesfire, M&S, Zyler, HyperFinity, Xiatech, OneStock, and Wunderman Thompson Commerce.
Online retail specialist Salesfire appoints David Pinches as Chairman following £3.05m investment
SaaS company Salesfire has announced the appointment of David Pinches as Non Executive Chairman, following a £3.05 million investment in October.
Pinches brings with him experience as a senior executive at technology companies such as Sage, IRIS Software, FinancialForce and Causeway Technologies.
2022 RTIH Innovation Awards winners and highly commended entries announced
Now into their fourth year, the awards celebrate global tech innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world.
We received a record number of submissions this year across 14 categories (you can find a full rundown of the 2022 shortlists here).
Our winners and highly commended companies were announced during a sold out event that took place in central London last month and was attended by retailers, tech suppliers, members of our judging panel, and sponsors.
So, without further ado, here is the 2022 RTIH Innovation Awards hall of fame.
Congratulations to our latest entrants!
Halfords enlists Wunderman Thompson Commerce for digital boost and e-commerce growth
Halfords, a UK-based provider of motoring and cycling services and products, has appointed Wunderman Thompson Commerce as its strategic commerce partner.
In a press release, Wunderman Thompson Commerce says that it will help Halfords “reduce costs, increase sales, and harness the power in its Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform, as it looks to adapt to this latest approach while accelerating digital growth, alongside the e-commerce experts”.
Ten teams and approximately 100 experts will be based both nearshore and in the UK to ensure collaboration.
Made up of management, delivery and support, they will deliver several projects over the next three years to boost customers’ online experience.
A particular focus will be on Halfords’ Motoring Club loyalty scheme with its 1.2 million members, the retailer’s core proposition and project and programme enhancements, with the aim of delivering better connected journeys for customers, as well as maximising retention and revenue.
Halfords states that it is already benefitting from the introduction of new monitoring tools to track performance and online delivery as well as a new payment system provided by ACI Worldwide to offer customers the latest in-store, online and mobile purchase options.
Former Shopify, Twitch, and Box exec, Chris Deibler, joins DataGrail as VP of Security
Data privacy platform, DataGrail, has named Chris Deibler as its VP of Security.
The move reunites Deibler with DataGrail CTO, Cathy Polinsky, formerly of Shopify, Stitch Fix, and Salesforce.
Deibler previously served as Director of Security Engineering at Shopify, which included the areas of infrastructure security, application security, and consumer identity.
He also led the team that ran the e-commerce giant’s multi-million dollar bug bounty programme.
Prior to that, Deibler was the Director of Security at Twitch. He has also held security positions at companies like Box, Zynga, and PayPal over the course of his 20+ year career.
Oxbotica raises $140 million Series C investment for autonomous vehicle technology
Oxbotica, a specialist in autonomous vehicle software, has raised $140 million in Series C investment.
The round includes financial and strategic partners from North America, EMEA and APAC, including new investors such as Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance Co. and ENEOS Innovation Partners.
Current shareholders who are re-investing include bp ventures, BGF, Halma, Hostplus, Kiko Ventures (IP Group), Ocado Group, Tencent, Venture Science and ZF, amongst other global companies.
Oxbotica has raised approximately $225 million to date.
The latest funding will drive its geographical expansion in North America, EMEA and APAC, and accelerate the deployment of its autonomy operating system in domains where there is both urgent need and potential to scale, such as agriculture, airports, energy, goods delivery, mining and shared passenger transportation.
2022 RTIH Innovation Awards winner HyperFinity raises investment from Snowflake Ventures
HyperFinity, a UK-based decision intelligence startup, has raised an undisclosed seed investment from Snowflake Ventures, the venture capital arm of data cloud company Snowflake.
HyperFinity, powered by Snowflake, enables retailers and CPGs to better understand customer behaviour and needs, with clients including Costa, Asda, Card Factory, and Hotel Chocolat.
The investment comes after HyperFinity reached the finale of the 2022 Snowflake Startup Challenge, recognising it as one of the top three tech startups globally that is building software on Snowflake’s data platform.
The latest from Walmart, Shopify, Chipotle: Last week’s biggest retail technology plays at a glance
RTIH rounds up the stand out retail systems deals, launches, deployments and pilots from the past seven days. Featuring H&M, Roblox, Walmart, Shopify, Scurri and HIVED.
ShipStation partners with The Delivery Group for last mile online deliveries
ShipStation, a cloud-based e-commerce shipping solution, has partnered with The Delivery Group (TDG), a tech enabled online delivery specialist.
The tie up will see TDG added to ShipStation’s carrier services in the UK.
TDG enables an end-to-end delivery service across the UK and 220 countries worldwide.
By joining ShipStation’s carrier services platform, it says it can provide more merchants with quick and easy access to its UTrak and ETrak offerings that provide a range of tracked and untracked delivery services.
Xiatech and OneStock form strategic partnership focused on business transformation of retailers
Xiatech, the company behind the hyper-integration platform, Xfuze, and OneStock, an order management specialist, have formed a partnership to help retailers rapidly improve stock availability, drive customer satisfaction, increase sales, and deliver operational efficiencies.
The pair have a track record of working together.
Recently, Xiatech leveraged its composable Xfuze platform and, specifically, its Digital Integration Hub, to integrate OneStock’s order management system at a major fashion retailer in the United Kingdom.
They state that said retailer has increased sales, lowered inventory costs and improved warehouse operations by leveraging a single view of inventory, advanced analytics and process automation to accelerate omnichannel order fulfilment.
Marks and Spencer taps Zyler virtual try-on technology for in-store Jaeger trial
M&S and Zyler have partnered to deliver an in-store virtual try-on experience.
The former brought the latter’s technology to its Oxford Circus and Harrogate branches, where it was trialled with clothing brand Jaeger.
Shoppers added a head and shoulders photo and basic measurements to see themselves digitally in the Jaeger collection.
Sales assistants guided customers through the process and gave style advice.
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