Dive Brief:
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Prescriptive analytics company Dynamic Action won Digital Commerce Startup of the Year honors this week at the National Retail Federation’s annual Shop.org conference in Los Angeles — a win that came a day after the technology firm announced Destination XL as a customer.
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The Silicon Valley company, led by co-founder and CEO John Squire, beat out DemandJump, a marketing technology company in Indianapolis whose co-founder and CEO is Christopher Day; and Salsify, a product content management company in Boston led by CEO Jason Purcell.
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For its win, Dynamic Action will receive $20,000, a free one-year NRF membership and a chance to pitch its products and services before e-commerce and technology executives from NRF’s Digital Council.
Dive Insight:
Not only was a prescriptive analytics company chosen as Startup of the Year, but one of the companies Dynamic Action beat — DemandJump — is also in the business of prescriptive analytics. The fact that two finalists were cut from a similar cloth says something about the importance of the discipline, which proposes to help retailers take appropriate actions once they have taken stock of a given set of analytics information.
And it's very important right now because after years of developing different ways to collect more data — via online and app registrations, behavioral and foot traffic tracking, among other things — retailers need to do more with it. But they also need a clearer lens through which to view it.
That's where Dynamic Action comes in, which views and prescribes action based off of data from a variety of sources. For DXL, for example, it plans to help the retailer eye customer shopping patterns and flag under-stocked and overstocked items, among other things.
Dynamic Action started to come into the sector's view last year, as reports surfaced of the costs of heavy promotion during the holiday rush and the complex challenges presented by overstocks. After earning the NRF honor, Dynamic Action is $20,000 richer, but prescriptive analytics could be due for much bigger and many more paydays as retailers take a closer look at the solution.
