FRIDAAAAAAY! 🤘

We made it! The weekend is here, and we have a lot of great news to get you caught up on. Here are the top retail and e-commerce stories from this week:

• AiFi is working on making shopping easier by using computer vision.
• Google extends enhanced product experiences to additional e-commerce sites and introduces new Search Console reports.
• Amazon has announced that their sellers will now be able to utilize free email marketing capabilities in order to reach out to repeat, recent, and high-spending customers.

Top Retail and E-commerce Stories

Shop Smarter: AiFi Your New Virtual Shopping Assistant

AiFi brings the store to you! AiFi (also known as "wi-fi") is a Silicon Valley startup that is the driving force behind 86 "computer-vision driven" autonomous stores in North America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. AiFi's camera-equipped model allows businesses to keep their physical layout while adopting autonomous checkout.

Artificial intelligence in AiFi's software can give retailers a more thorough knowledge of human behavior in brick-and-mortar establishments. Retailers may keep track of how long customers spend in specific aisles, which items they pick up and then return, and basket size patterns. The technology not only helps businesses with labor difficulties but also allows for 24/7 shopping. One company that has seen great success is the Polish convenience-store chain Zabka, whose sales increased by up to 40%.

#NewToolsAlert: Google Expands Enhanced Product Experiences

Google e-commerce update! Good news for everyone using Product structured data: Google has expanded eligibility for enhanced product experiences in Search. Additionally, the search engine powerhouse has also added new Search Console reports to help measure performance and identify any issues with your structured data. "These enhanced product experiences were previously only available to Merchant Center users," Google said in a recent statement.

Google stated that there are now two broad categories of search experiences for product and e-commerce sites, which are:

• Onsite merchant stores that enable users to purchase products directly from the site.
• Product snippets for a broader range of webpages with product information. This includes sites that sell products, provide product reviews, and/or aggregate data from other sources.

Google search results used to only display product snippets that were mostly generated by schema.org Product structured data. Now, merchants who don't have a Google Merchant Center account can still be eligible for merchant listing experiences by including product data on their web pages.

Additionally, Google created two new Search Console reports:

• Merchant listing report
• Product snippets report

The Amazon Corner

Email Marketing Made Easy: Amazon Launches Free Email Marketing Capabilities

Get your email marketing campaign off to a flying start! Amazon just announced three new types of audiences reachable through the Amazon Customer Engagement tool to help sellers expand their email marketing at no cost. Now, for the first time, brand followers are not the only ones who can be reached when sending free marketing emails. Sellers can also target their most loyal customers like repeat customers, recent customers, and high-spend customers.

Amazon's Customer Engagement features custom audiences that let you measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns and customer engagement with performance and reporting metrics like open rate, click-through rates, emails delivered, opt-out rates, sales, and conversion.

Amazon is currently running a beta test of Tailored Audiences in the United States, and the service will be made available to all American merchants by early 2023. The functionality will be accessible for free to sellers via Seller Central, Amazon's online marketplace for businesses. With additional HTML content and improved templates coming soon, Amazon aims to improve message design capabilities as well.

A LITTLE MORE

• Maverick is using deepfakes to connect with e-commerce consumers on a deeper level.
• A new suit in California claims that Amazon has been breaking antitrust laws and stifling competition, leading to higher prices.
• MySize is rolling out its new FirstLook Smart Mirror and MySizeID solutions to retail customers in the Americas during Fashion Week New York, as well as at DMEXCO Europe.

FUN FACT

The typical online shopper makes 19 online purchases over the course of a year.

QUICK TIP

Try this. Reassure your customers that their data is secure. In the age of data breaches and identity theft, customers are increasingly concerned about the security of their personal information. Make sure your website has a privacy policy that is easily accessible, and make sure to prominently display any relevant security badges (such as SSL).