Hello and welcome to July: In Review
In the month that has seen heat waves across the US and UK, more sales records broken on Amazon Prime Day and schools closing for the summer, we’re now reflecting back on all of the latest news stories and updates that have faced the retail industry.
1. Amazon Prime Day: Amazon Prime Day loses $90m due to outage but still breaks records
Every July, Amazon Prime Day seems to be the talk of the industry, with this year being no different.
However, Retail Gazette reported that Amazon experienced periodic outages just after the 36-hour sale started, while One Click Retail founder, Spencer Millerberg estimated that “for every minute the page was down, Amazon lost $1.2 million (£920,000)”, resulting in a total estimated loss of between $90 million and $99 million.
Despite these figures though, Amazon Prime Day 2018 still surpassed all other shopping days on the popular marketplace, including previous Prime Days as well as Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping events.
You can read the full story here.
2. Brightpearl News: Brightpearl appoints fashion chief as Chairman
In other news, we’ve recently announced the appointment of Maurice Helfgott, the former Marks & Spencer main board director, as our new Chairman.
With 30 years of retail operations and industry expertise, Helfgott brings valuable knowledge and opinions on how we can better serve the retail and wholesale industries.
Speaking on his appointment, Helfgott has said: “After years of intensive high-quality tech development, Brightpearl has produced an excellent and capable platform, growing rapidly under impressive leadership. The next step is introducing real-time machine learning data into the platform, so our customers are able to make more informed decisions — that’s hugely valuable in the current retail climate.”
And look out for a blog post next week, which will contain an exclusive Q&A with Maurice Helfgott himself. Subscribe to the blog now so you don’t miss it.
3. Guide: How to choose the right warehouse management system
Choosing the right warehouse management system (WMS) can be difficult.
The WMS vendor landscape is booming, resulting in a lot of choice, as well as systems that try to cater for all business types.
But we’ve got a lot of knowledge about warehouse management systems and the technology purchasing process here at Brightpearl, so we’ve created a new (and highly detailed) guide that aims to take you through the main steps of finding, purchasing and implementing a warehouse management system, specifically for retail and wholesale businesses.
Download the guide for free now.
4. Video: Rates of Returns: Managing the process and protecting profits while your business grows
There are a growing number of well-known retailers that are introducing services such as ‘Try Before You Buy’ (TBYB) and free returns.
But our research reveals that customers would return an average 3.95 more items each month in the US and 3.08 items in the UK with this sort of shopping model in place.
Which poses the question:
How can you stay ahead of the curve and offer these types of services without hurting your margins?
We’ve recently teamed up with one of our partners, EYStudios, a leading ecommerce brand development firm, to create an on demand webinar that will help you to understand why the introduction of these services could quickly lead to a tsunami of returns, and how, if approached correctly, it could be a massive opportunity for your business.
Sign up to watch the webinar now.
5. Partner Spotlight: What’s next in ecommerce? [eBook]
Our partner spotlight this month goes to Magento ecommerce agency, JH, for their work on creating a new and highly detailed ebook called ‘What’s next in ecommerce?’
With expert insights from dotmailer, ebizmarts, Magento, Detectify, Klarna, JH and us, this ebook aims to guide you through the trends, challenges and technologies that face the industry over the rest of this year and beyond.
Thanks for catching up on July’s news and updates – don’t forget to subscribe to the blog to get more insights like this delivered straight to your inbox!
