Stefan Haney

Introducing the "7 Habits of Highly Effective Omnichannel Retailers". Inspired by the timeless wisdom of Stephen R. Covey, we've curated a comprehensive guide to help retailers elevate their omnichannel retail game in 2024. These habits serve as a roadmap to navigate today's complex #retail landscape. From proactive inventory management to optimizing delivery speed, these strategies hold the key to transforming your business operations. Dive into HotWax Commerce's blog post to uncover these highly effective habits and unlock the potential to the best #omnichannel retailer in the industry. https://hubs.la/Q02t2sDK0 #ShoppingandtheRetailIndustry #eCommerce #InventoryManagement

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Are you a multi-brand retailer looking for an Omnichannel Order Management System (OMS)? During a recent discussion, a multi-brand retailer raised a crucial question: does each brand necessitate a separate OMS license, or can multiple brands operate under a single license? With HotWax Commerce, retailers can manage multiple brands, each with its own eCommerce store, within the same OMS. However, for operational teams to effectively manage various brands within the same OMS, it's essential that brands are willing to grant access to each other's data. Scenarios where HotWax Commerce recommends each brand should have a separate OMS instance: 1. If a retailer operates multiple brands as independent legal entities, each with its own operational requirements and confidentiality protocols regarding data access, separate OMS instances are necessary. This ensures that each brand maintains autonomy and compliance with legal regulations. 2. If a retailer operates different brands in various countries, each brand may have unique regulatory requirements, tax obligations, and operational processes. In this scenario, having separate OMS instances for each brand allows for better localization and compliance with regional laws and standards. Empower your retail business with the right omnichannel strategy! Explore the solutions of HotWax Commerce, and let's optimize your multi-brand eCommerce journey together! #ShoppingandtheRetailIndustry #Retail #eCommerce #Omnichannel #OrderManagementSystem

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Are you a multi-brand retailer looking for an Omnichannel Order Management System (OMS)? During a recent discussion, a multi-brand retailer raised a crucial question: does each brand necessitate a separate OMS license, or can multiple brands operate under a single license? With HotWax Commerce, retailers can manage multiple brands, each with its own eCommerce store, within the same OMS. However, for operational teams to effectively manage various brands within the same OMS, it's essential that brands are willing to grant access to each other's data. Scenarios where HotWax Commerce recommends each brand should have a separate OMS instance: 1. If a retailer operates multiple brands as independent legal entities, each with its own operational requirements and confidentiality protocols regarding data access, separate OMS instances are necessary. This ensures that each brand maintains autonomy and compliance with legal regulations. 2. If a retailer operates different brands in various countries, each brand may have unique regulatory requirements, tax obligations, and operational processes. In this scenario, having separate OMS instances for each brand allows for better localization and compliance with regional laws and standards. Empower your retail business with the right omnichannel strategy! Explore the solutions of HotWax Commerce, and let's optimize your multi-brand eCommerce journey together! #ShoppingandtheRetailIndustry #Retail #eCommerce #Omnichannnel #OrderManagementSystem

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Are you a multi-brand retailer looking for an Omnichannel Order Management System (OMS)? During a recent discussion, a multi-brand retailer raised a crucial question: does each brand necessitate a separate OMS license, or can multiple brands operate under a single license? With HotWax Commerce, retailers can manage multiple brands, each with its own eCommerce store, within the same OMS. However, for operational teams to effectively manage various brands within the same OMS, it's essential that brands are willing to grant access to each other's data. Scenarios where HotWax Commerce recommends each brand should have a separate OMS instance: 1. If a retailer operates multiple brands as independent legal entities, each with its own operational requirements and confidentiality protocols regarding data access, separate OMS instances are necessary. This ensures that each brand maintains autonomy and compliance with legal regulations. 2. If a retailer operates different brands in various countries, each brand may have unique regulatory requirements, tax obligations, and operational processes. In this scenario, having separate OMS instances for each brand allows for better localization and compliance with regional laws and standards. Empower your retail business with the right omnichannel strategy! Explore the solutions of HotWax Commerce, and let's optimize your multi-brand eCommerce journey together! #ShoppingandtheRetailIndustry #Retail #eCommerce #Omnichannel #OrderManagementSystem

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Are you a multi-brand retailer looking for an Omnichannel Order Management System (OMS)? During a recent discussion, a multi-brand retailer raised a crucial question: does each brand necessitate a separate OMS license, or can multiple brands operate under a single license? With HotWax Commerce, retailers can manage multiple brands, each with its own eCommerce store, within the same OMS. However, for operational teams to effectively manage various brands within the same OMS, it's essential that brands are willing to grant access to each other's data. Scenarios where HotWax Commerce recommends each brand should have a separate OMS instance: 1. If a retailer operates multiple brands as independent legal entities, each with its own operational requirements and confidentiality protocols regarding data access, separate OMS instances are necessary. This ensures that each brand maintains autonomy and compliance with legal regulations. 2. If a retailer operates different brands in various countries, each brand may have unique regulatory requirements, tax obligations, and operational processes. In this scenario, having separate OMS instances for each brand allows for better localization and compliance with regional laws and standards. Empower your retail business with the right omnichannel strategy! Explore the solutions of HotWax Commerce, and let's optimize your multi-brand eCommerce journey together! #ShoppingandtheRetailIndustry #Retail #eCommerce #Omnichannel #OrderManagementSystem

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Inventory management has always been a challenging task for retailers. However, Instacart has innovated in a way that removes the need to maintain store inventory separately for online orders. By allowing Instacart shoppers to come in store and fulfill orders themselves, retailers can save time and resources. But what about in South Korea? Are there any innovators disrupting this space? Shoot me a message if so. I am ready to buy in. #inventorymanagement #retail #innovation #SouthKorea #instacart #emart #retailinnovation #storeinnovation #inventory #inv #ai #ax #digitaltransformation #dt #dx #artificialintelligence #delivery #onlinedelivery #ecommerce #openai #gpt4 #genai #startups #entrepreneurship #innovation #EmartTech

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Exciting Insights from The New York Times Interview with Robert Sanders In a recent interview, Dr. Stamatopoulos highlighted a fascinating trend: when Electronic Shelf Labels (E.S.L.s) are implemented in stores, they not only reduce the average price per unit sold but also increase the overall quantity of items sold. This dynamic pricing strategy, especially as expiration dates approach, creates a win-win situation for both companies and consumers. ……..! At Wasteless AI , we are harnessing the power of smart dynamic pricing to tackle food waste and enhance profitability. By using advanced algorithms, we enable retailers to optimize pricing in real-time, ensuring that products nearing their expiration dates are sold quickly while maximizing revenue and reducing foodwaste and markdown costs This approach not only benefits the bottom line but also contributes to a more sustainable future by reducing waste. Together, we can transform the retail landscape and create efficient, eco-friendly shopping experiences! Oded Omer Tomas Pasqualini Yossi Regev

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#Blackfriday shopping is in full swing, with 2 in 5 customers planning to use #AI to help with their holiday shopping according to Adobe’s online shopping forecast. https://lnkd.in/g3VnTzVn The Pacvue team have been testing out Amazon’s #Rufus this morning and anecdotally found that when it’s being used for upper-funnel searches like “gifts for dad who cooks,” it produces a collection of ASINs based on SEO and some picks that feel more thought out. Compared to search results for the same query, you see roughly half of the same products on page one. 💡 So what does this mean? It appears Rufus is using a similar algorithm as how Amazon’s Choice is determined. There isn’t a lot that brands can do to control for Rufus currently, (savvy brands will have loaded gifting terms into their keyword strategy weeks ago) but it’ll be interesting to see how much greater the difference in organic glance views and ad clicks is this year vs. last year. Between AI, deal aggregators, and Amazon’s home page suggestions for past purchase behavior we may see less opportunity for brands to win new customers this year with search, but more opportunity for DSP to drive more traffic driver and last-touch conversions. Have you used Rufus or ChatGPT for holiday shopping? Comment below with your insights/findings! #BlackFriday #Amazon #Cyberweek

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Had a great chance to speak on the topic of Embracing Tech with Erin Del Conte, Adi Dhandhania, CFA and Mike Templeton 📲🏪 today for CStore Decisions. Wonderful to hear about what small retailers, larger retailers and the overall retail space thinks about digital integration, mobile apps, loyalty programs, omnichannel and unified commerce to augment their in-store and out-of-store experience. The topics that were discussed in depth were: 1) How the industry is shifting. 2) What’s driving the adoption of digital integration. 3) How a big national chain like 7-Eleven and a small regional chain like Neon Marketplace are each finding success with digitalization 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gNP2Di3z #7eleven #cstores #conveniencestores #digital #webinar #innovation

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Across 20 years of working with clients to design and implement improved product development processes and systems, one truth has been consistent – building assortments require information and assets that take significant time and effort. Merchants, designers, and vendors need visual references and systems require accurate and complete data entry. Many times, we begin new product iterations or even start large portions of the assortment all over. In the past, we have implemented tools that improve the quality of information for those assets and built processes to ensure that we do so as efficiently and effectively as possible. Unfortunately, anything more than incremental impacts to P&Ls and calendars has been elusive. Simply stated – the tools that have been available to us are foundational elements of any fashion architecture, but their role has not been transformative. PLM and other digital product tools certainly bring new capabilities and may make existing ones incrementally easier, but ultimately the impact is on the edges, with 10% productivity improvements here and ‘improved collaboration’ there. Anything more requires significant process change that comes with compromise that most in the industry have found unacceptable. When we first started looking at how Generative AI could help our clients, we saw something that was truly was transformational. For the first time, we were seeing tools that could deliver what teams required at tiny fractions of today’s efforts. It seemed too good to be true – little change to today’s approaches at dramatically reduced costs and time. The challenge, however, was the tools that were available were unfocused and not geared towards meeting the specific needs of the fashion industry. We started Greige Software to address that, and with our first tool Greige Create, set an objective of eliminating, not reducing, work throughout the process. We did that not by starting with the technology, but with the process. Where are there interim deliverables that have little value beyond supporting decision making in milestone meetings? Where is administrative work acting as a bottleneck that ultimately sets the constraint on how much we can do? Where are cycle times inhibiting our ability to be responsive? Finally, after we identified where there is significant value for our clients, we began looking at how GenAI and complementary tools can facilitate it. Greige takes a multi-modal approach to GenAI, integrating Latent Diffusion Models and Large Language Models into singular workflows underpinned by a robust logic and integration layer to deliver something that we would have said was impossible just a couple of years ago – a product development process that requires significantly less time and resources while still providing the tools for decision making with little compromise. Greige Software – Enterprise AI for Fashion. Shorten the calendar. Widen the funnel. Reduce Operating Expense www.greigesoftware.com

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Good article in WSJ’s CIO Journal today about Gen AI’s potential in retail. Many retailers are talking about AI and many solution providers are weaving AI into their capabilities; but there is also a resurgence of ‘vaporware’ connected to AI as the hype escalates. In reality - and the article does a good job of this - there are multiple areas where Gen AI can absolutely add value to retail activities. The areas I’m most focused on are hyper-personalization of marketing, business process automation, and data insights. The real magic happens when you combine these things. Together, these synergistic Gen AI capabilities are poised to transform and disrupt traditional retail marketing. But technology alone is an enabler. It must be combined with changing business processes to be transformative. And that’s what’s beginning to happen in historically mass-driven FMCG retail. Retailers using capabilities provided by a company like Birdzi, Inc. are upending traditional retail marketing, finding it is now more efficient, more cost effective, and more impactful to go to market on a true customer-specific basis. No more mass promotions, no more segment-based targeting. Gen AI capabilities, combined with big data, automate the process of developing, communicating, and delivering, hyper-personalized promotions and content to each individual customer. Understand the fundamental change that is happening here. For the first time, technology is enabling retailers to truly be customer-focused in how they go to market, rather than product driven. This was not possible before artificial intelligence. Marketing personalization was limited to simply filtering a finite number of mass promotions (ex. ad items) or coupons to surface those most relevant to the shopper. This was all current technology was capable of. Birdzi’s tech blows away those limitations, able to generate n number of customized promotions for each individual shopper, drawn from the 30,000 or 40,000 or 80,000 SKUs the retailers has on its shelves. And do this at scale. But most importantly - and most powerfully - Birdzi’s technology is disruptive: It changes shoppers’ expectations. Personalized Disruption article here: https://lnkd.in/gCPT8-sK #retail #FMCG #CPG #technology #AI #transformation #disruption #grocery #supermarket Center for Advancing Retail & Technology (CART) Birdzi, Inc. Shekar Raman #CEO #CMO #COO #CIO #retailinnovation #retailtech #genai Greg Fasullo Todd P. Michaud Pasquelo Tate https://lnkd.in/gaifbFkU

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An interesting returns prevention strategy or a margin killer? I encountered this while making a return at an online only retailer. I'll not name them here. Essentially I was offered a 20% refund on the item to not return it. I'm hoping this retailer has some advanced customer analytics that analyze possible abuse of this behavior - or perhaps this is just one time offer they are testing on me. Regardless, it's a pretty bold move. Pay for shipping to get all my money back or get a 20% discount. To me this just says "I have a return problem, please help." What do you think? #returns #oms

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To say this has been a big week in the world of shopping would be a massive understatement. It’s not just #CyberWeek— Perplexity just launched its groundbreaking shopping capabilities, enabling users to “Buy with Pro” and “Buy with Prime.” Meanwhile, Sundar Pichai recently revealed, as captured in The Verge article, that Google Search will “change profoundly in 2025,” as well as exchanging amusing barbs with Satya Nadella. Sundar’s response to Satya saying Google "should" have been the “default winner” in the AI race challenge was “I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft’s own models", pointing out that Microsoft is “using someone else’s models.” 🔥 😂 Of course, Jeff Bezos is getting in the mix too. As highlighted in a recent Medium article, "Bezos’s investment in Perplexity suggests a shift in shopping dynamics. The future might not be about traditional marketplaces, but instead about conversation-first interfaces that understand context and intent. Bezos is betting that the next generation of shoppers will prefer talking to AI about their needs rather than scrolling through endless product listings—and I tend to agree." The race to dominate product discovery is heating up, and we’re seeing a massive disruption in online shopping. AI-powered “Answer Engines” like Perplexity AI are challenging the longstanding dominance of Google and Bing’s “Search Engines.” Retailers must act now to ramp up their Generative Search Optimization (GEO) efforts and augment their existing SEO strategies. If you haven’t addressed the fundamentals of your product data yet, you’ll find it increasingly difficult to keep pace in this rapidly evolving landscape. The Lily AI team is here to help you navigate these challenges. Feel free to reach out! In the meantime, here are some valuable resources for inspiration and insight into what’s working for leading retailers like ASOS.com, SEPHORA, Tapestry, Bloomingdale's, and Lowe's Companies, Inc.: - How Retail AI is Moving the Needle for Leading Retailers (by our very own Purva Gupta) - 2024 Retail AI Index: Discover the Top 100 Trailblazers (https://lnkd.in/e24qgBzF) We’re just scratching the surface of what AI can do to transform shopping, and it’s exciting to see the shift unfold in real-time. We’re looking forward to navigating it together with our clients! https://lnkd.in/ekj_bk6s

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Thanks Parvez Musani for sharing this. A must read playbook for everyone in Retail. I like what I see on Slide 10 ;)

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Lacking critical data can lead VPs of Allocation in retail to make decisions that result in poor store allocations and increased supply chain costs. Robling provides the visibility you need to make better decisions, ensuring smarter, more cost-effective allocations. —- P.S. DM me for more info on how Robling can help optimize your allocation strategy.

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Is Shopify holding back your omnichannel growth? Shopify’s order management works well for smaller retailers, but as your business expands to dozens of stores, it can quickly become a bottleneck. Managing orders, inventory, and fulfillment across multiple locations requires advanced solutions that go beyond Shopify’s native capabilities. Our latest blog breaks down the limitations of Shopify’s order management and compares it with HotWax Commerce’s OMS. From smarter order routing to efficient store fulfillment and inventory control, discover how HotWax Commerce helps retailers handle the complexities of scaling operations. 👉 Read the full blog to see how you can elevate your retail strategy with HotWax Commerce. https://hubs.la/Q02RdLC30 #ShoppingandtheRetailIndustry #eCommerce #Retail #Omnichannel #OrderManagementSystem

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Walmart State of Adaptive Retail Report If you haven't seen it, Walmart released their first annual "State of Adaptive Retail" report (linked in the comments). A couple key takeaways for me were: 1.) We can now add "Adaptive Retail" to our buzzword list amongst multichannel retail, omnichannel retail, and unified commerce. 2.) "Shoppers want retailers to be ready for them" - There continues to be a shopping shift, especially in online channels, where the shopper is expecting the retailer to make a curated assortment available to them based on their shopping preferences, behaviors, and external factors vs. having to find the products they want themselves. Multi-Vendor Commerce + personalization + AI, anyone? 3.) "Distracted Shopping" - This is likely driving some of number 2, the number of people "casually shopping" while doing other thing, especially GenZ. If people are distracted by social media while shopping, it makes sense for your products to be there as well. 4.) Continued of Blending In-Store and Online Experiences - Shoppers want the convenience of online buying, when in the store and the convenience of the store when buying online. I'm seeing several apparel brands and retailers doing this well, but not as much traction in other categories. What was interesting to me was that 43% of all shoppers want to buy products in-store, but have them delivered to their home. This makes sense for big and bulky products, but I'm surprised the number is that high if the shopper is already at the store. If you'd like to continue this conversation, don't hesitate to reach out. #logicbroker #dropship #marketplaces #connectorchestrategrow #walmart

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The cost side of the ecommerce and retail P&L remains ripe for disruption and innovation. I wrote more about that and discuss some specific areas in my latest musings

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