Tag: retail

‘E-commerce as entertainment’: An investor behind Goop predicts the wild future of retail

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Investor Frederic Court’s bets on e-commerce—his London-based Felix Capital has backed Farfetch, Goop, jewelry site Mejuri, among others—are poised to pay off on Cyber Monday and throughout the holiday shopping season as consumers eschew traditional stores during the pandemic. Now Court is turning his attention to the next wave of online retail, which he describes as “e-commerce as entertainment.” He notes that in China and other parts of Asia, hundreds of millions of consumers already buy via streaming e-commerce, a service that’s reminiscent of a digital-only QVC. He shared his predictions with Fast Company . The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Fast Company : What are the big trends you’re seeing in e-commerce, and are you seeing simply an acceleration of trends that you had already seen forecast? What’s new? Frederic Court : This year we’ve seen acceleration on both sides of the marketplace—and acceleration of demand. On the supply side, from fashion brands to beauty brands to local restaurants, there’s a realization that if your customer cannot come to you anymore, you’ve got to go to them. If we had spoken last year, five years ago, or 10 years ago, we would have said the same thing: Every Christmas is going to be bigger [than the last Christmas]. This year is going to be significantly bigger. We don’t know what’s going to be the impact in terms of people being concerned about an [economic] crisis or unemployment. But at the micro-level of our portfolio companies, we saw, across the board, an extraordinary November. FC : In e-commerce, there are sites like Amazon that are very transactional, brands like Goop that provide information and sell products, and retailers that are trying to recreate the in-store experience. Do you see e-commerce becoming more experiential? Read More …

Black Friday is the perfect time to unsubscribe from pesky marketing emails

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For some of us, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a good time to buy a new TV or a Bluetooth speaker. But for marketers, it’s the best time of the year to spam your inbox. Because none of them want to be left out of the consumer feeding frenzy, marketers devote untold hours to designing and strategizing their Black Friday emails. And as e-commerce plays a bigger role in our shopping habits, the volume of emails they send keeps increasing . The ongoing coronavirus pandemic means there will be an even bigger mess in your inbox, as marketers trip over themselves to make sure they’re part of the online shopping rush. But while this might seem like an annoyance, it can also be a gift in disguise. Read More …

For the best deals on almost anything, check these 3 sites first

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We’re now officially neck deep in holiday deal ads, even though it feels like the holiday shopping season lasts half the year. (Fun fact: I received my first Black Friday email on October 13 this year—it was from Best Buy, for those of you keeping score.) The problem with every store in the history of retail offering holiday deals is that they each expect you to visit their sites to sift through all the would-be bargains. There’s got to be a better way! There is a better way. A much better way. I haven’t paid full price for something since I happily overpaid for a Nintendo Wii bundle in 2006. I also have almost no time to shop. So how do I score the best cheapskate-friendly deals? Here are the three sites I visit every time I’m in the market to buy something. DealNews: for a little bit of everything You’re not sure what you want; you just want deals. For you, there’s DealNews Read More …

Big Tech was already dominant. Has coronavirus made it unstoppable?

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People often ask me what stocks I own. My investing advice is simple: I only invest in unregulated monopolies. They aren’t supposed to exist, but our antitrust laws were written in the era of steam engines, and enforcement has been nonexistent. Big tech is the twenty-first century version of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, and there is no trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt on the horizon to rein them in. How have they done it? The algorithm is this: innovate, obfuscate, and exploit. Especially in a pandemic. Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity by Scott Galloway Put simply, COVID-19 has been an effective weapon of mass distraction from big tech’s bad behavior. No news story survives 12 hours while a pandemic coupled with a national display of incompetence renders everything else what it is, less important. But whether we are paying attention or not, unchecked growth and market dominance lead to a slew of problems. Inevitably, companies without serious competition become less innovative and capture more profits and share from exploiting their position, and less from creating real value. And to protect that position, they perform infanticide on other innovators. No wonder that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook have added hundreds of billions in market value since March Read More …

Exclusive: Inside Uber’s billion-dollar bet to deliver food, people, and everything else

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Earlier this week, Uber acquired Postmates, the number four player in the food delivery space, for $2.65 billion. It was a clear statement that Uber is no longer just a rides company, but a home delivery company. Now, Uber is rolling out a new design in its main app that gives its Uber Eats business equal real estate with rides on the app’s home screen. This shift in Uber’s business began last year, but was dramatically accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. As people began sheltering in place, the company’s rides business fell by 80% in April, and Uber Eats, the restaurant food delivery business, suddenly became its most popular product. Now, Uber Eats’s success has established it as a model from which Uber can design other services that rely on its advanced logistics platform. “We’ve really doubled down on our Eats business, extending not just in food, but from food into adjacent categories like delivery, like grocery, and essentials,” says Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in an exclusive interview. “There we’re seeing a pretty extraordinary acceleration, which is good for the business, but it’s also a really important lifeline for the restaurants and other local stores in every city, that frankly our customers are interested in keeping alive in an unbelievably difficult situation [with] COVID.” Uber’s new focus on Eats may help it survive the pandemic, in which the company has already shed a quarter of its 26,000-odd person global workforce in two rounds of layoffs. But it’s unclear whether Eats and other new Uber services can speed the company’s path toward profitability. Uber has lost a lot of money since its ill-fated IPO last year: It reported a $8.5 billion loss for full-year 2019. It reported a net loss of $2.9 billion in the first quarter of 2020, its biggest loss in three quarters. Before the pandemic hit, Uber said it expected to hit profitability in the last quarter of 2020, but was forced to withdraw that guidance in April, saying the coronavirus had made its 2020 financial performance “impossible to predict.” [Photos: courtesy of Uber] Even amid growing losses, Uber has placed a big bet on Postmates as central to the future of its business. With the addition of Postmates, Uber Eats will control 37% of the food delivery service market but will still trail the market leader, Doordash, which owns 45%, according to Edison Trends. But Uber didn’t buy Postmates just to beef up its food delivery market share, as some have suggested. Postmates’s technology and people will very likely be used to deliver home products such as groceries, pharmacy products, home goods, hardware, and packages (the Postmates brand will live on, at least for now). Khosrowshahi suggested as much in the Postmates deal announcement  Monday: “Uber and Postmates have long shared a belief that platforms like ours can power much more than just food delivery,” he stated. Dara Khosrowshahi [Photo: courtesy of Uber] This flexibility is key to understanding how the coronavirus has expedited Uber’s transformation from a ridesharing company to a logistics platform that can deliver people, food, and things. Read More …