Including Alphamega, Debenhams, EE, and Waitrose: 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. Including Pricer, Voyado, Trust Retail, Movable Ink, Aptos, Mangopay, Brave Bison, and StrongPoint.

Alphamega

Pricer’s partner StrongPoint has signed an agreement with Alphamega, the largest grocery retailer in Cyprus, to install electronic shelf labels in all its stores. The value of the contract is approximately 37 MSEK and roll-out is expected to begin in 2024 and be completed by 2026.

“We are excited that our solution will support Alphamega in its digitalisation journey,” says Mats Arnehall, Chief Commercial Officer at Pricer.

“The adoption of our cloud-based platform Pricer Plaza represents a significant leap forward and empowers this leading retailer with centralised control and management of pricing, product information, and promotions across all stores, ensuring real-time updates and eliminating the need for manual adjustments.”

Ellis Brigham

Voyado has partnered with outdoor sports retailer, Ellis Brigham, to help bring its online customer experience in line with the service customers experience in-store.

Known for stocking outdoor and ski apparel and equipment, the in-store Ellis Brigham team provide specialist advice to customers, something that is more of a challenge with online shopping.

Ellis Brigham is seeking to bridge this communication gap online, working with Voyado to unlock customer data, bring all systems together and communicate with customers more effectively.

Waitrose

Waitrose is working with Trust Retail, a Trust Payments company, to implement a new system which aims to improve store availability and free up Partner time for customer facing activities. 

The tie up will involve rolling out a more dynamic store inventory management system which will give stores a near real-time view of their stock position and improve data driven decisions.

Waitrose is investing heavily in new technology across its supply chain and recently laid claim to significant progress in availability, which now stands at record levels.

Under the Trust Retail system, Waitrose Partners will be able to receive stock quickly and efficiently, which will allow their time to be diverted to other customer facing tasks.

Debenhams

Debenhams, a 243-year-old European department store that was reimagined as a direct-to-consumer retailer in 2021 following a Boohoo Group acquisition, has selected fabric to power its fashion and beauty product catalogue across 11 brands.

Debenhams increased its catalogue to three million SKUs with fabric, which in turn has allowed the company to serve multiple stores and merchandise over 7,000 collections across thousands of categories, giving the retailer the flexibility to display products in ways that improve conversion.  

"We got Debenhams live in just under three weeks with an enterprise grade product catalogue designed to accommodate their extensive and complex range of products,” says Mike Micucci, CEO at fabric.

“Our platform was purpose built to deliver the on-demand scale and performance Debenhams required to easily deploy millions of daily product updates and leverage our unique collections capability to merchandise across eleven storefronts.”  

Astrid & Miyu

Movable Ink, an AI powered content personalisation platform, has announced a partnership with UK jewellery brand Astrid & Miyu.

The aim is to enhance various aspects of the brand's offerings, including the recently launched bespoke necklace service, Story Chain, which enables customers to create personalised welded charm necklaces.

With Movable Ink technology, Astrid & Miyu says it can deliver personalised email communications at scale.

"At Astrid & Miyu, we strive to revolutionise the jewellery experience by seamlessly blending our online and offline offerings," says Lucy Kemish, Head of CRM.

"Movable Ink's personalisation capabilities will introduce a new level of customisation for our shoppers, further elevating their journey."

Voyado

Swedish retail technology firm, Voyado, has launched new AI functionality to enhance the capabilities across its platform.

It says that the AI, named “Bonnie”, is already trained on billions of transactions, interactions, and industry data, giving it “a unique and deep understanding of the retail industry”.

The aim here is to further support the way that Voyado works with retailers and e-commerce businesses to enhance the online customer experience with recommendations and search features. Voyado also provides a multichannel platform for marketers to succeed with personalisation across channels.

Voyado's new AI combines predictive models, which use historical data to forecast future steps, and generative models, as well as producing new data like texts or images. 

This allows it to suggest activities and campaigns based on customer business goals, and generate relevant content.

Mangopay

Mangopay has announced the launch of its new fraud prevention solution for e-commerce, marketplace and FinTech platforms.

It says that this provides a fully integrated and payment processor agnostic AI driven cybersecurity solution to guard against an evolving range of threats, including account takeover by both bots and humans, reseller fraud, payment fraud, chargebacks, and return abuse.

The customisable product enables platforms to protect themselves from existing and emerging threats, including real-time fraud detection, darknet insights and device fingerprinting.

Platforms can connect to the solution through the Mangopay product ecosystem. They can also connect their existing payment processors through an API.  

The solution leverages a fraud detection engine based on original Nethone technology - the fraud detection and prevention specialist Mangopay acquired last year.

It benefits from years of first hand darknet insights to help guard platforms against techniques and patterns used by the most advanced fraudsters.

EE

EE is introducing a new cloud-based PoS solution from Aptos in its retail stores. The aim is to enhance customer engagement capabilities and reduce the IT infrastructure footprint in each store. 

Following a six week pilot across 15 locations, the software is being rolled out to EE’s more than 400 stores across the UK.

As part of the IT refresh across its retail estate, EE has upgraded to a newer version of Aptos’ PoS solution, delivered via SaaS, which will run on mobile devices that its employees can use throughout the store.

They will be able to complete all sales, service and operational processes from a single device, instead of multiple devices for different tasks.

EE has also removed fixed tills from each of its stores, allowing staff to have more personal conversations with shoppers, while also helping to reduce any potential congestion and queues. 

Yours Clothing

Brave Bison has been selected by Yours Clothing, a British plus-size fashion retailer, to handle its performance marketing following a three-month pitch. 

Brave Bison will be responsible for the UK market while setting the business up for success across core international territories (US/Ireland/Australia) as the retailer expands throughout 2024.

To achieve this, it will leverage its relationship with technology partners, such as Feedonomics and GWI, for the data and insight to determine the most profitable territories and how to navigate each respective market’s unique nuances.

In particular, considering Yours’ brand mission to champion women and their curves, there is a need to understand the attitudes towards body positivity and self-love across target growth regions.

The initiative will include the use of AI insights to give an accurate reflection (and renewal) of the current core audience, alongside building out and managing all paid search, shopping, feed management and paid social channels.