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dgearhart@firstanalysis.com
mmikos@firstanalysis.com
- Despite being smaller than the other two Shoptalks, Shoptalk Fall featured many high-quality e-commerce technology companies and knowledgeable industry participants. We identified four key themes for e-commerce tech and highlight some of the companies benefitting from them.
- First, we saw a growing recognition that the true value of AI in e-commerce lies not in AI itself, but in how it enhances offerings and plays within larger solution frameworks.
- Second, unified communication in e-commerce has become table stakes, and we think the new frontier in e-commerce communication lies in technologies that enable rich consumer experiences entirely within message formats like text and email.
- Third, the evolution toward fully converged in-store and e-commerce continues, driven mainly by brands’ and retailers’ acute and unmet need to precisely attribute consumer sales and engagement to sales and marketing spend.
- Lastly, while technology to address e-commerce product returns remains focused on optimizing returns processing and logistics, we think the larger, long-term opportunity lies in technologies that substantially reduce returns by addressing their root causes.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Smaller than the Las Vegas version but insightful
AI downplayed, now positioned more realistically following earlier hype
Unified communications platforms more common; next evolution of offerings in focus
Greater convergence of physical and digital (e-commerce) retail coming, key to attribution
Product return prevention technology underrepresented
Looking ahead to future shoptalk shows
E-commerce optimization index ends 1-year period with wide lead over market
E-commerce M&A: Notable transactions include SPS Commerce, Shopify acquisitions
E-commerce private placements: Notable transactions include Wildfire Systems, Cart.com
Smaller than the Las Vegas version but insightful
We recently attended Shoptalk Fall in Chicago, the smallest of the three Shoptalk shows, which also include Shoptalk Spring (March in Las Vegas) and Shoptalk Europe (June in Barcelona). Despite its diminutive size, it featured many high-quality companies and knowledgeable industry participants, affording many opportunities to discuss current market dynamics and new and ongoing trends. Indeed, we were able to meet with dozens of e-commerce software and services companies, both exhibitors and attendees. They ranged from platform companies to point solution providers and tools and supported a wide range of e-commerce needs, including customer communication, marketing automation, order and inventory management, shoppable media, retail media networks and data attribution. Based on our meetings and observations on the show floor, we identified four themes for e-commerce. We discuss these briefly below and plan to explore a few of them in more detail in future reports.