Including Unilever, Asda, OnBuy, and Oh Polly: 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 Currys, Roku, Amazon Fresh, Accenture, Order Editing, Würth, Receipt Hero, Proximity, Partridge Jewellers, and Red Ant.

Currys and Roku

Roku has launched the first stage of its partnership with Currys Connected Media, the retail media network offshoot of omnichannel tech retailer, Currys, to run Connected TV (CTV) video ads on its platform.

In a first of its kind partnership for Roku UK, Currys and its partner brands will be able to access Roku Media ad inventory, starting with videos ads and expanding to other creative ad formats. 

Launched late last year, Currys Connected Media enables the retailer’s partner brands to leverage its first-party data to understand, reach, and engage customers.

The aforementioned tie up enables Currys and its partner brands to reach customers across all Roku streaming devices in the UK, including streaming players and Roku TV models.

“Combining our expertise in TV streaming advertising with Currys’ leadership as an omnichannel tech retailer, we believe this partnership can combine the power of retail media and streaming video to help brands improve the effectiveness of their marketing investment,” says Richard Halton, Country Manager at Roku UK.  

Unilever

Accenture has expanded its partnership with Unilever to simplify its digital core and apply generative AI to drive efficiencies and improved business agility.

Hein Schumacher CEO, Unilever, says: “We have already introduced 500 AI applications across Unilever, helping us to reach new levels of efficiency. But as AI matures and becomes increasingly intelligent and intuitive, we see so much more potential.”

“Now, as part of our action plan to deliver faster growth, drive productivity, and dial up performance, we’re going deeper. With the help of Accenture’s world class tools and capabilities, we will be able to analyse where and how AI can have the highest transformational impact and deliver the greatest returns.”

Unilever will look to leverage Accenture’s GenWizard platform to accelerate its technology and digital product development. The Gen AI platform has more than 350 patents and ready to apply tools and frameworks.

Ogee

Organic skincare and makeup brand, Ogee, says that it is driving nearly 2.5x more e-commerce sales conversions and more than 3x greater average visit value (AVV) from shoppers who interact with AI powered personalised product recommendations on its site.

The average order value (AOV) is also 23.7% higher for anyone who clicks on the recommendations.

Ogee is using Nosto’s Commerce Experience Platform to enhance its online shopping experience with a variety of product recommendations and other onsite personalisation techniques.

Currently, around 10% of all Ogee’s e-commerce sales result from visitors that have interacted with Nosto powered campaigns. 

Holiday Extras

Digital payments specialist, Checkout.com, says it has helped Holiday Extras streamline and increase the performance of its payment processes through the use of virtual cards.

Holiday Extras is used by more than 11 million travellers every year to book airport parking, airport hotels, airport lounges, travel insurance, car hire, airport transfers and more.

By integrating Checkout.com’s issuing platform, it has automated its booking and payment systems, and claims to have significantly reduced manual processing and simplified error checking systems.

Holiday Extras previously relied on entirely manual payment processes with its hotel, hospitality, and airline business partners, which caused inefficiencies.

Manual batch bank wire transfers were previously required between Holiday Extras and their partners to confirm bookings and make payments, an area in which the two companies worked together to identify opportunities for technical improvements and significant efficiencies.

Successful implementation of this automated booking and payment system across the business is expected to reduce manual processing time by at least 12.5 hours per week, leading to substantial savings.

Furthermore, the ability to lock virtual cards to specific Merchant Category Codes (MCCs) has also added an extra layer of security, reducing decline rates and enhancing overall customer and partner satisfaction.

Würth

Würth, which has its roots in Künzelsau, Germany and operates nearly 200 stores across Finland, had gone live with ReceiptHero.

Business customers can now get a real-time digital receipt after payment and these can automatically flow into expense management systems.

With the Finnish State Treasury supportive of merchants being e-receipt compliant, Würth becomes an early adopter ahead of a 2025 deadline to provide customers with a digital receipt upon purchase.

Asda

Following Asda's acquisition of 116 petrol forecourt sites from the Co-op in 2022 in a £600 million deal, the grocery retailer faced the challenge of delivering a seamless and efficient user experience at these new locations.

Evolve provided the essential infrastructure for this project.

Alan Stephenson-Brown, CEO at Evolve, says: “The fuel forecourt sector is highly competitive, where connectivity is key to success.”

“Asda selected Evolve as its connectivity partner thanks to our two decades of extensive experience and expertise in the forecourt sector, and I’m incredibly proud of the service we delivered.”

“A key challenge facing the team was that each of the new sites requiring connectivity faced time constraints, meaning it was imperative for our engineering and development teams to tailor the connectivity solution to fit the deadline.”

“We are well versed in the dynamic nature of the market and the importance of keeping pace with its customers, and were able to deliver the Asda solution ahead of schedule.”

Event Network

Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions and partner Partron ESL are implementing new electronic shelf labels (ESL) in stores for Event Network, an operator of retail locations for experiential attractions in the US.

The solution has been implemented in four stores with plans for an accelerated roll-out in the next six months.

“We’re proud that by working with our system of partners we’re always able to deliver meaningful value to our customers. In this case, by working with Partron ESL, we consulted on the best solution to meet Event Network’s needs and implemented the solution in the four stores within a 30-day turnaround,” says Ted Clark, Director, Global Alliances at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions.

“Along with our hardware and innovative service solutions, Event Network is now uniquely equipped with modular end-to-end solutions to ensure that their shoppers have excellent in-store experiences at their favourite museum, zoo, tourist experience, and hospitality venue.”

East of England Co-op

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.

Helzberg Diamonds

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.

OnBuy

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.”

Partridge Jewellers

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

Oh Polly

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.”

Amazon Fresh

Amazon Fresh has opened four new stores, including its first in Northern California and locations in Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

These all offer Amazon’s Dash Carts and biometrics-based payment system Amazon One.

This brings Amazon Fresh’s store count to just shy of 50 locations in eight US states. 

The Northern California location is in Roseville.