Retailers prep for the holidays with new e-commerce services

Dive Brief:

E-commerce post-click platform provider Radial has expanded its omnichannel e-commerce platform with the addition of Radial Edge, a suite of services related to order fulfillment and inventory management that e-commerce sites otherwise would need to purchase as point solutions from multiple parties, according to a company press release.
The new offerings, which include both revenue-generating services and efficiency-focused services, come about a year and a half after Radial was formed from the merger of private equity-owned eBay Enterprise and e-commerce fulfillment firm Innotrac.
Shoe retailer DSW is already using the new Radial Edge services, Stefan Weitz, executive vice president of technology services for Radial confirmed to Retail Dive in an e-mail.

Dive Insight:

Retailers are lining up fulfillment services as we near the holiday shopping season, when a missed delivery matters most. DSW has signed up to use Radial Edge for cross-border demand generation and logistics, seller-fulfilled Prime shipping without needing to rely on Amazon fulfillment, dropship services and pre-integrated hooks into third-party domestic and international marketplaces. The efficiency-focused solutions include machine learning-based inventory optimization, active delivery management, in-transit notifications, visual IVR for customer self-service, mobile messaging solutions, digitized handwriting and inventory remarketing promotion across sites like Amazon, eBay and Jet.com.

"The holiday season is the only temperature check that really matters in retail," Weitz said. "The next four months will make or break some brands." Weitz, a Microsoft veteran deeply involved in the development of the Bing search engine, declined to say anything further about the DSW relationship. However, he did say that launching this full menu of add-on services in September, right at the beginning of the holiday rush, was critical for helping retailers offer more supporting features and functions to busy shoppers.

Yet, while e-commerce retailers may crave services like cross-border demand generation, logistics and an intelligent inventory optimization to help them deal with the holiday rush, they have up until now been faced with the prospect of trying get these capabilities as point solutions from an array of specialist providers.

"I was walking the NRF show floor last year and just thought 'holy smokes — there is no way a mid-market retailer or brand is going to be able to figure out which of the 400-plus booths are magic versus snake oil for their business,” Weitz said.

This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the 2017 holiday shopping season. You can browse our holiday page and sign up for our holiday newsletter for more stories.