Catching up with Confer With: these are our biggest retail technology articles on LinkedIn this week
We’re big fans of LinkedIn and are busy building an amazing community of retail tech enthusiasts on the social media platform. As we head towards the 20,000 followers mark, these are the articles that are currently on their radars, including Partridge Jewellers, Red Ant, East of England Co-op, RELEX Solutions, Iceland, Oh Polly, Order Editing, Helzberg Diamonds, and Proximity.
New Zealand retailer Partridge Jewellers partners with Red Ant on RetailOS deployment across its stores
Partridge Jewellers has partnered with Red Ant to deliver RetailOS to its stores.
This will include:
Customer book and profile, including data capture and lookup with past purchase, status, preferences and personalised recommendations
Access to full product catalogue, allowing users to view products, review prices and product description and add products to a customer profile or basket, which can be emailed to them
Configurable analytics with spend by customer, products and categories
Integrated personalised consultations, messaging and communications
Two-way integration with CRM system for a single customer view
Secure payment options and delivery tracking
East of England Co-op deploys RELEX Solutions technology for pricing and promotion optimisation
East of England Co-op, a regional independent retail co-operative with branches across Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, is expanding its use of technology from RELEX Solutions.
Since June 2013, the latter has supported East of England Co-op with solutions to optimise its store layouts, and since June 2019, with tools to enhance its forecasting and replenishment strategy.
It will now expand its use of RELEX to further refine its pricing and promotional planning.
And it will upgrade its space and assortment capabilities to the RELEX cloud-based solution. This will introduce automated API data feeds that serve the RELEX ecosystem across forecasting and replenishment, space and assortment, and pricing and promotions.
“We chose RELEX because of the success we’ve already experienced with their unified solutions,” says Andy Rigby, Chief Operating Officer at East of England Co-op.
“The automation and optimisation capabilities will streamline our processes, allowing us to make more informed decisions and ultimately improve the overall shopping experience for our customers.”
Fashion firm Oh Polly tackles customer order changes challenge with deployment of Order Editing technology
Oh Polly has gone live with Order Editing, which lets customers make changes to their orders without emailing support.
The latter says that its self-service portal eliminates 30% of support tickets and drives more sales by turning edits into a shopping experience. Customers see recommended products based on past orders that they can add and pay for in one click.
In a LInkedIn post, Hamish McKay, Co-founder at Order Editing, said: “I am eight months full-time on our startup, and this is by far our biggest launch to date... £113 million brand Oh Polly.”
He added: “I met Alix McShane (Head of Customer Service at Oh Polly and Bo+Tee) in November 2023 with a version of Order Editing that was not ready for a brand of this size. But we persisted because order changes are a massive problem for them.”
“I’m talking about manually editing 400 orders a week! A full-time employee, just fixing mistakes made at checkout. Not only this, but a top reason for returns was not being able to edit or cancel an order in time.”
He concluded: “I blasted Paramore all morning and danced around the house thinking about the impact we're going to have together...Hundreds of thousands of customers will use our app over the next year, saving thousands of hours of manual labour, and tens of thousands of returns.”
OnBuy partners with Contentsquare to gain greater visibility into how customers use its online marketplace
UK-based online marketplace OnBuy is deploying Contentsquare technology across its site.
In a LinkedIn post, the company said: “We're always working to improve our platform.”
“We're excited to announce that we've just taken on Contentsquare to gain greater visibility of how our customers use our site to help supercharge our optimisation roadmap, and make OnBuy an even better place to shop and sell.”
It added: “This comes straight off the back of a massive release of new features, designed to help our sellers boost their visibility and their sales on our platform. We're taking OnBuy to the next level.”
Confer With boss Serge Milbank talks industry recognition, key client wins and his favourite time of the year
Since then, the company has emerged victorious at the 2023 RTIH Innovation Awards and been recognised by Gartner as one of three cool vendors in digital commerce. RTIH now sits down with him again to run through a hugely eventful past ten months.
N Brown Group hails important milestone in its digital transformation as new JD Williams website goes live
N Brown Group reports the launch of a new trading website for JD Williams.
In a LInkedIn post, it said: “This is an important milestone in our digital transformation as it completes our transformational priority to roll-out new websites for all three of our strategic brands ahead of peak 2024.”
“Simply Be and Jacamo’s new customer facing websites have shown positive results since launch. Performing 20% faster than the historic website’s legacy technology, the sites have received external endorsement of their performance, with a doubling of their Google Lighthouse score, a measure based on a combination of performance, accessibility, SEO),and best practice criteria.”
Steve Johnson, Interim Executive Chair and CEO at N Brown, says: “We’re delighted to have completed our priority of launching new trading websites for all of our strategic brands ahead of peak 2024.”
“The transformation of our business continues to gain pace as we proceed with investing in our strategy, positioning N Brown for sustainable growth whilst always improving the customer experience.”
Helzberg Diamonds taps Proximity Retail Super-App as retailer looks to accelerate its digital transformation
Proximity has announced a partnership with US-based Helzberg Diamonds.
Proximity's clienteling platform was launched across all Helzberg store locations this summer, and is designed to enable Sales Associates to deliver a hyper-personalised and seamless service to their customers at every touchpoint.
By connecting customer data and using technology to power personalisation and provide endless aisle capabilities, Proximity's Retail Super-App aims to transform how brands engage with and sell to their customers.
The company says that the platform supports an omnichannel brand experience that inspires customers, drives repeat purchases, and increases in-store efficiency.
Iceland’s Richard Walker trades shoplifting related social media blows with former Sun Editor Kelvin MacKenzie
Iceland boss, Richard Walker, has called for laws to allow his company’s stores to share images of violent shoplifters on local WhatsApp groups.
He has slammed 'stupid' data protection laws that mean shops cannot share images of individuals shoplifting, taken by their CCTV cameras.
“We are fighting with one hand tied behind our backs,” Walker told former MP Gloria de Piero on her Lessons In Leadership podcast.
'It's actually illegal for us to share images of known offenders on local high street WhatsApp groups because of data protection laws. I'd like that to change.”
“When these images are on your CCTV, it's absolutely proven. You watch someone pick something up, put them under their coat or whatever they do, and walk out or become aggressive to those store staff if they're stopped.”
“I’ve told my colleagues to do it anyway, and I take the rap if there's a problem,” he added.
Enter Kelvin MacKenzie, an English media executive and former Editor of The Sun newspaper, who posted the following on X: “Correctly Richard Walker, the boss of the supermarket chain Iceland, points out in The Times that due to “stupid” data privacy laws, CCTV images of shoplifters caught in the act at his store can’t be circulated among staff on WhatsApp.”
“Mr Walker doesn’t need the photos as he may well know many of the thieves personally, since they will be all be Labour voters , the party he adopted when the Tories wouldn’t have him as a candidate. As a two-faced s++t Walker should put both of his images out on WhatsApp.”
Walker, a former Conservative Party donor who earlier this year switched his support to Labour, shot back: “Whoever Kelvin is, I think he needs a big hug.”
Now that’s how you deal with right wing loudmouths. Bravo, Richard!
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