Black Friday extravaganza belongs to entrepreneurs: bringing you the retail technology week in numbers

Do you like numbers? Do you like retail systems news? Then this is the article for you. Including Shopify, Weis Markets, Landsec, Puma, Tools for Humanity, Duvo, Domino's Pizza, Pets at Home, Asda, Protein Works, and the RTIH AI in Retail Awards.

1...RTIH, organiser of the industry leading RTIH Innovation Awards, proudly brings you the first edition of our AI in Retail Awards, sponsored by 3D Cloud and EdTech Innovation Hub.

There is now just one day left to get your submissions in for this. Deadline for submissions is EOP today (Friday, 5th December). It’s free to enter and you can do so across multiple categories.

Check out categories and entry forms here.

As we witness a digital transformation revolution across all channels, AI tools are reshaping the omnichannel game, from personalising customer experiences to optimising inventory, uncovering insights into consumer behaviour, and enhancing the human element of retailers' businesses.

With 2025 set to be the year when AI and especially gen AI shake off the ‘heavily hyped’ tag and become embedded in retail business processes, our newly launched awards celebrate global technology innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world and the resulting benefits for retailers, shoppers and employees.

Our 2025 winners will be those companies who not only recognise the potential of AI, but also make it usable in everyday work - resulting in more efficiency and innovation in all areas.

Winners will be announced at an evening event at The Barbican in Central London on Thursday, 29th January. This will kick off with a drinks reception in the stunning Conservatory, followed by a three course meal, and awards ceremony in the Garden Room.

$4 million at a $40 million...Searchable, a London-based startup, has raised $4 million at a $40 million valuation, led by early stage venture capital firm Freestyle.

The company says it is on a mission to help brands understand how they’re seen, ranked, and recommended by AI.

“AI is changing marketing faster than Google did,” says founder Chris Donnelly. “We’re no longer optimising for humans. We’re optimising for the platforms that talk to humans.”

Searchable acts as a command centre for LLMs. It tracks how brands appear across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity - revealing whether a product is being surfaced, ignored, or misread - and then helps fix it. The platform rewrites content, improves metadata, and makes it more ‘readable’ to large language models.

Powered by agentic AI, it connects analytics from GA4 and Search Console into an interface where marketers can ask: Which AI models recommend us? or Where am I losing visibility?

73%...New research from Sam Altman’s company, Tools for Humanity, shows that most Christmas shoppers are anxious and 73% specifically so about bots grabbing high demand items. 

2,000 Brits were surveyed for this. 56% have reduced or stopped buying expensive items online, and one in five have abandoned a purchase at least twice because something felt suspicious. 

British consumers feel increasingly unsafe online - worried about AI driven scams, fake ads, fraudulent reviews and bots snapping up sought-after items before real shoppers even get a chance. 48% say they’d even pay up to 10% more to buy from platforms that verify both buyers and sellers.

Across recent major shopping moments - including Black Friday - consumers report lived experiences with online deception: 27% believe they’ve encountered fake product reviews; 25% say they’ve seen scam ads promoted on social platforms; 19% discovered fake stores or listings - rising to 24% for those aged 18-24.

1...foodora, an online food delivery brand owned by Delivery Hero, has notched up a first in Czechia with Starship Technologies.

The pair have started testing robot delivery in the streets of District 8 of Prague, with McDonald’s onboard as a partner.

In a LinkedIn post, foodora said: “Backed by Starship’s global expertise and the support of local municipalities, we are proving how modern tech can shape the future and make daily life better for the communities.”

It added: “This pilot project is a major milestone for the country, allowing us to explore how autonomous tech handles real-world scenarios, specifically testing hot food delivery in collaboration with McDonald's Czech Republic.”

48% of US consumers have never heard of a digital twin before, according to First Insight research involving 1,303 people.

Once learning that this is a digital replica of customers built from past purchases, browsing behaviour and inferred preferences, 69% say they would trust a brand less if it relied on digital twins instead of real customer feedback.

Many retailers are using digital twins as a faster, more scalable way to deliver personalised experiences to their customers. But, using these virtual representations of customers to guide decisions and make predictions around everything from products and pricing to inventory and marketing - without ever involving the real customer - is not only largely inaccurate, but can cause brands to lose significant customer trust.

77% of consumers say they value authentic, direct communication from brands more than efficiency or automation in how they gather feedback. The study also underscores the commercial and reputational risks of replacing real customer input with simulated feedback. 69% describe themselves as “extremely” or “very” protective of their personal data.

Once shoppers learn that brands may model or monetise them without their consent, 58% say they would become detractors, either less likely to recommend a brand or actively warn others against purchasing from it.

Plus, while Gen Z shoppers may not drive the majority of revenue today, they’re the most likely to take action to voice their frustration: 56% say they would contact the brands directly, while 54% would share articles exposing the practice, and 53% would post about it on social media. 

199...Weis Markets is partnering with Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions and implementing ELERA Security Suite with the aim of enhancing loss prevention measures and improving the overall customer experience.

ELERA Security Suite is now operational across self-checkout lanes in all 199 Weis locations, with plans to extend the technology to dual use and cashier lanes. The offering includes ELERA Loss Prevention and Produce Recognition.

“Our goal is to upgrade our technology stack and invest in Security Suite to provide a frictionless experience for our customers. Our customers have embraced produce recognition, with over 94% selecting to use it at self-checkout,” says Greg Zeh, CIO and SVP at Weis Markets.

“We are one of the first retail chains with ELERA Security Suite across our stores, ensuring speed, privacy, and performance. It is already strengthening real-time loss prevention.”

14...Swedish FinTech firm, Klarna, has launched a new feature Tap to Pay across 14 European markets.

Utilising NFC technology, Tap to Pay turns the Klarna app into a contactless wallet, letting consumers set up a buy now pay later plan and pay with a tap, all in one place, without adding their card to another wallet or switching apps at checkout.

The move builds on the new debit first Klarna Card, now used by more than four million consumers. This is debit by default, with the option to activate credit when needed within the company’s app, and is accepted at over 150 million merchant locations worldwide through Visa Flexible Credential.

“Tap to Pay brings us closer to our vision of Klarna being everywhere for everything. Now you can set up a flexible payment plan and tap to pay in seconds, all inside our app. It makes the everyday shopping moments significantly smoother for our Klarna customers across Europe, giving them even more flexibility and choice at checkout,” says David Fock, Chief Product & Design Officer at Klarna.

The offering is now live for Klarna consumers across Germany, Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Portugal, Norway, Poland, Denmark and Sweden, and works on both iOS and Android devices. Support for Klarna Credit Card will be added soon.

3.84% and 31%...Domino’s Pizza and Havas have released results of what is pitched as the first European advertising campaign to use Samsung Ads’ GameBreaks ad unit, which replaces the conventional ad with a branded, remote control powered trivia quiz or game.

The Domino’s campaign presented viewers with a pizza related trivia question: “According to a 2024 national survey, what do Americans choose as their favourite pizza topping?”, along with four possible answers.

Viewers could select their answer using the TV’s remote control, with an onscreen message telling them if they were right or wrong. The quiz section was then followed by a ten second section promoting Domino’s Ultimate Gunpower Chicken pizza, part of the Ultimate Indian Feast.

The campaign delivered an engagement rate of 3.84%, and a 31% uplift in brand consideration. 

GameBreaks launched earlier this year, initially in the US and Canada, rolling out to the UK over the summer. Advertisers can customise trivia questions, themes, and design elements within GameBreaks ads to align with campaign goals. 

3.1 million...According to Pets at Home research, involving 2,000 Brits, 3.1 million UK households will spend more on gifts for their furry friends than any other family member. 

43% plan their festive celebrations around their pets, with 14% even skipping events with family and friends to stay home with them..

54% of pets will wake up to their very own Christmas present, and rabbits are officially the most spoilt species as 70% will receive a special gift this year. They will enjoy an array of festive treats including:

A specially cooked festive meal (41%); Corgis receive a truly royal treatment, with 31% getting a seat at the Christmas dinner table; Unwrapping other family members’ presents (20%); Opening a fun filled stocking (17%); Having a special Christmas outfit (13%).

30% of owners would happily kick their partner off the sofa if their pet wanted to sit there, while 29% say their furry friend always gets the “best seat in the house” at Christmas. A quarter even let their pet share their bed during the festive season - a figure that climbs to 44% among owners of the nation’s most pampered pooch, the Cavapoo.

Grooming is taking priority over personal pampering this Christmas, with one in four owners admitting they book a grooming appointment before thinking about their own festive haircut. Another quarter say they are more likely to buy a new festive outfit for their pet than for themselves. 

$15 million...Duvo, an automation platform that gives retail teams an AI workforce for their day-to-day operations, has raised $15 million in seed funding led by Index Ventures, backers of Figma, Revolut and Wiz.

Credo Ventures, Northzone and Puzzle Ventures also participated in the round, along with angels Roy Reznik (co-founder of Wiz), David Singleton (former CTO of Stripe) and Kieran Flanagan (former CMO Zapier).

Co-founded by retail industry veterans, including Tomas Čupr, founder of the European grocery unicorn Rohlik, Duvo can go live in weeks rather than years and works across the tools retailers already use. Business users describe what they want to achieve in natural language, and Duvo’s AI agents execute it end-to-end across systems such as SAP, portals, email, spreadsheets, and modern APIs, with no coding required.

“At Rohlik we saw teams spending hours every day copy-pasting between SAP, supplier portals, email and spreadsheets just to close the books or launch promotions,” says Čupr. “Across the industry, millions of hours of bottom-up, exception-heavy work remain untouched because traditional IT automation takes years and cannot handle the messy reality of retail systems.”

“Duvo is democratising automation: giving every retail team an AI workforce they can deploy in weeks, not years, to finally eliminate the operational bottlenecks holding them back. With this funding, we’re accelerating our product roadmap and bringing assistants to more enterprises worldwide – helping retailers eliminate errors, reclaim time and gain a decisive advantage over competitors still relying on manual processes.”

24,000...Puma has opened the doors to its largest ever European flagship store, situated on Oxford Street in London.

Focusing on immersive story telling, the store, located close to Selfridges and Bond Street Tube Station, spans 24,000 square feet and features Puma’s running technology NITRO, its football boots FUTURE, ULTRA and KING, as well as its current range of lifestyle products. 

“The opening of our Oxford Street flagship is an exciting moment for us,” says Arthur Hoeld, CEO at Puma. “It’s our first flagship store in Europe, which gives us the chance to connect with more people than ever before - right in the heart of one of the world’s most iconic shopping destinations.”

“It is a powerful platform to engage directly with consumers, showcase our latest performance innovations, and strengthen our brand presence in one of the world’s most influential retail destinations. This space not only highlights our product excellence, but also celebrates our heritage and long-standing connection with elite athletes.”

68%...Despite 61% of UK shoppers already using AI to shop, research from CI&T (involving 2,000 people) has found that 68% can’t actually name a single retailer offering an AI experience that stands out.

Shoppers say they want AI to make their experience faster, smarter and more personalised, but most feel it’s yet to make a meaningful impact, with data privacy and trust still holding them back.

Other key insights include:

• 64% of UKI consumers feel retailers should use AI to improve the shopping experience for customers (compared to 58% in the US)

• ChatGPT, followed by Gemini were the top used AI tools for shopping

• 70% of consumers have bought directly or indirectly through social media, with Facebook and TikTok leading the way

Melissa Minkow, Global Director of Retail Strategy & Insights at CI&T, says: "Consumers are seeking solution oriented shopping experiences, but discovery is still a crucial part of the journey. Retailers must build smarter, faster and more relevant paths to purchase without sacrificing trust."

£95 million...Real estate company, Landsec, expects shoppers to have spent more than £95 million across its national portfolio of shopping centres during Black Friday week (the period between Monday 24th - Sunday 30th November), including Bluewater, Gunwharf Quays, Liverpool ONE and Braintree Village, as Christmas spending gains momentum.

Last year, total spend across Landsec’s destinations during Black Friday week (the period between Monday 25th and Sunday 1st December) reached just over £91 million.

It expects that health and beauty will be the standout category for the second consecutive year, with sales expected to hit £11 million. The sector has been a strong performer throughout 2025, driven by consumers seeking affordable luxuries, purchasing small but often at an average of £23 per transaction. 

Apparel is also projected to perform strongly as shoppers look for stylish gifts and update their festive wardrobes.

1.18 million...UK-based food and drink brand Protein Works reports that it sold over 1.18 million shakes (+54% YOY) on Black Friday (28th November), resulting in a +35% sales increase year-on-year and setting a new single day revenue record for the company.

Protein Works, which currently sells its products exclusively online, attributed its performance to the opening of a new £10 million+ manufacturing, logistics and head office facility in Speke.

Laura Keir, CEO, says: "Black Friday is one of the most demanding moments in ecommerce and retail, and this year our team delivered a record breaking performance. Our new fulfilment facility has proven its capability to operate e-commerce at true scale, enabling us to ship more units in a single day than at any other point in our history, while maintaining a seamless, friction free experience for our customers."

"This investment was designed to power the next chapter of Protein Works’ growth, and this day and weekend mark its first major milestone. I’m immensely proud of the team and excited by what this platform unlocks for the future.”

€3.3 million...Anyformat, a generative AI platform specialised in extracting and structuring complex data from documents, has raised a €3.3 million seed round led by Kibo Ventures, with follow on participation from 4Founders, Abac Nest Ventures, and Decelera Ventures.

The company ihas developed projects for the Singapore Government, L'Oréal Group, and IAG Group.

Since raising €520,000 in June 2025, Anyformat has expanded its capabilities beyond traditional document extraction. It now claims to be the only provider that can combine information extracted from a document with a company's proprietary data in real-time.

This enables automated analysis of unstructured documents while cross-referencing data with internal records such as customer databases, policies, product catalogues, or historical information.

"The document intelligence market is entering a new phase driven by generative AI and agentic systems. Anyformat has developed a unique technology that enables companies to automate critical processes while preserving data sovereignty, an essential requirement in Europe. The founders' vision and talent, combined with the vast potential of AI in a large and growing market, were key factors in our decision to invest," says Javier Torremocha, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Kibo Ventures.

2.8%...Asda shared a Q3 2025 trading update on Friday, reporting total revenues (excluding fuel) of £5.1 billion and a 2.8% decline in like-for-like sales.  

The UK grocery giant completed Project Future - one of Europe’s largest retail tech separations - which involved moving off more than 2,500 legacy Walmart systems and switching every part of Asda’s operations onto its own IT platforms. 

The changeover was complex and severely disrupted depot and store operations and the online shopping experience for customers, it admitted in its update.

Allan Leighton, Executive Chairman, said: “We said it would take three to five years to turn Asda around. We made good progress in the first half of the year against our ‘Formula for Growth’ with the best availability in eight years, a notable price gap versus competitors and a return to like-for-like growth."

“At Q2 results, we said that the cutover from Project Future, although completed, would likely have a negative impact on our performance. This change severely disrupted our systems and materially impacted our progress, as we saw a step back to inconsistent availability, operational issues at depot and in-store and a poor customer experience online and through the app that impacted our grocery home shopping business in particular.” 

“Since then, we have made good progress stabilising our platforms and the worst of the disruption is now behind us. Availability is back to where it was in June, operational issues are reducing and performance in recent weeks is improving, but we do not expect to re-establish our Q2 2025 position until Q2 of 2026. Thank you to all our colleagues for their hard work and commitment and our customers for their patience." 

$6.2 billion...Shopify merchants achieved a record breaking $6.2 billion in total sales on Friday, up 25% from last year (22% on a constant currency basis).

Consumer spending surged at 12:01 PM EST, when sales peaked at $5.1 million per minute. The average cart price at checkout was $117.93.

The top product categories by order volume were cosmetics, clothing tops, activewear, fitness and nutrition.

Top trending products included:

→ ALO, Accolate Crew Neck Pullover
→ Cozy Earth, Bamboo Sheet Set
→ Merit Beauty, Flush Balm
→ Goose Creek Candle, Christmas Tree 3-Wick Candle
→ Caraway Home, Cookware Set
→ ILIA Beauty, Super Serum Skin Tint
→ Brooklinen, Super Plush Robe
→ Béis, The Weekender

In a LinkedIn post, Harley Finkelstein, Shopify President, said: “The biggest weekend in commerce is off to an incredible start. Black Friday belongs to entrepreneurs. We just make it possible for the world to find them.”

3.6%...Black Friday in-store traffic was down -3.6% across the USA, according to RetailNext, a specialist in retail intelligence and traffic analytics that works with the likes of Burberry, Bloomingdale’s, Disney Store, Macy’s, and Estée Lauder.

Its research is based on data collected at tens of thousands of US stores across hundreds of brands operating on the RetailNext smart store platform and in a variety of retail segments, from big box brands to standalone and specialty retail operations.

Metrics exclude automobiles, petroleum, and warehouse clubs, and include locations across the US that were open both this year and last year.

1...Joe & The Juice, a Danish chain of juice bars and coffee shops, has opened its first store in Mexico City, and its first in Latin America.

In a LinkedIn post, Thomas Noroxe, CEO at Joe & The Juice, said: “Expanding into an entirely new region is a milestone that goes far beyond one store. It reflects the consistency, culture, and ambition of our people, and the strength of a brand that can travel across continents without losing its identity.”

He added: “Our first Mexico location opens in Colonia Roma Norte, one of the most vibrant and creative neighbourhoods in the city. This entry into Mexico is built together with our local franchise partner, who will drive development and help bring the Joe experience to more Mexican cities in the coming years. Strong partnerships continue to be a key part of our global growth story.”

Norroxe concluded: “Over the past months, we’ve opened franchise store number 100 in Morocco - our first on the African continent - and now entered a brand new region with Mexico. The momentum is real - and so is the opportunity ahead of us. Thank you to everyone involved. On to the next chapter!”

£250,000...Yocuda has launched a new Paper Receipt Cost Calculator, with the aim of giving businesses a clear, personalised breakdown of what paper receipts are actually costing them each year and how much they could save by making the switch to digital.

According to the calculator, a large scale retailer with a network of 600 stores and approximately 200 transactions per store per day spends over £650,000 per year on till rolls. Just a 40% reduction in this, due to implementing digital receipts, could save over £250,000 every year.

As well as the simple cost of paper till rolls, which the calculations are based on, there are also additional hidden costs for retailers.

●      Thermal paper prices keep climbing, and high volume stores feel it fast

●      Printers jam and break, slowing checkouts and frustrating staff and customers

●      Energy, repairs and consumables add up - especially across multiple sites

●      Thermal paper can’t be recycled, meaning retailers literally pay for the waste