New Grainger ecommerce executive

Grainger has hired Cecelia Myers, who has joined the company as vice president, group product manager.

Cecelia Myers

In this role, she will be responsible for leading Grainger’s strategy to custom build technology capabilities, the company says. The technologies are aimed at improving the customer and team member experience, Grainger says.

Prior to Grainger, Myers worked as vice president, digital, at CDW. She led its digital channel and oversaw product management, digital integrations, demand generation and product design. Prior to CDW, she held roles in product and user experience at Groupon, leading initiatives such as automating customer support, implementing artificial intelligence (AI ) programs and launching Groupon’s photo/video studio. She also co-founded CakeStyle, an online women’s styling business.

Myers will be based in the Chicago office and reports to Grainger chief product officer Brian Walker.

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“As a part of our effort to drive improved results and evolve our go-to-market approach, today we announced a restructuring that affects approximately 7% of our global workforce,” chief financial officer Daniel Lenz told analysts on a Nov. 8 earnings call. “While headcount and non-headcount reductions impact all teams across the company, sales and marketing spending will see the largest impact as a result of the go-to-market improvement.”

To pay for the layoffs, BigCommerce will take a charge of approximately $5.5 million for severance payments, employee benefits and other costs related to the restructuring plan.

BigCommerce reports Q3 results

For its fiscal third quarter ended Sept. 30, BigCommerce posted revenue of $78.0 million, up 8% compared to $72.4 million the third quarter of 2022. Net loss was $20.3 million compared with $30.3 million in the prior year.

“We have seen continued tighter ecommerce order and gross merchandise volume (GMV) growth in 2023 than the pre-pandemic trend line,” CEO Brent Bellm said to analysts. “This has led to fewer orders and GMV-based pricing upgrades compared to prior years, and it has impacted partner and services revenue growth more than originally anticipated going into the year. We have also seen the effect of a tight business spending environment.”

In the quarter, BigCommerce also rolled out a B2B invoice portal for large suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers. The product enables B2B merchants to incorporate invoice payments into a centralized online purchasing workflow through portal access.

“The B2B edition invoice portal provides an enterprise-grade, out-of-the-box invoice payment experience,” he said.

For the fourth quarter, BigCommerce expects total revenue between $79.8 million to $83.8 million. Non-GAAP operating income is expected to be between $1.1 million to $4.1 million.

For the full year, BigCommerce expects total revenue to fall between $305.0 million and $309.0 million. It expects non-GAAP operating loss between $6.9 million and $9.9 million.

Percentage changes may not align exactly with dollar figures due to rounding. Check back for more earnings reports. 

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Angela Hsu has stepped down as chief marketing officer at Overstock.com, which acquired the intellectual property assets of bankrupt retail chain Bed Bath & Beyond in June for about $21.5 million.

Angela Hsu

Overstock president Dave Nielsen has taken on Hsu’s responsibilities while a search for a new CMO gets underway. Hsu joined Overstock as CMO in March 2022. Hsu is leaving Bed Bath & Beyond and Overstock to pursue new opportunities.

“It’s been a pleasure being the CMO transforming Overstock.com into a 100% home furnishing retailer in 2022 and swiftly relaunching as the new online Bed Bath & Beyond in August 2023,” she says in a post on her LinkedIn page. “Now that this incredible period is a fait accompli, it’s time for me to refocus on one of my other passions: growing companies at the strategic level via board director roles.”

Overstock loses Hsu and her ecommerce background

Hsu has a long history as an ecommerce and retail marketing executive. Before joining Overstock, she worked for 19 years as senior vice president of marketing and ecommerce at lighting retailer Lamps Plus.

As chief marketing officer for Overstock, Hsu made $842,557 in total compensation in 2022.

Overstock.com ranks No. 50 in the Top 1000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American online retailers. Bed Bath & Beyond ranked No. 47 prior to its bankruptcy.

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It took a significant step in that direction yesterday in announcing several appointments to key positions including vice presidents in ecommerce and omnichannel development, customer and supplier relations, and national retail sales.

“These teams continue to evolve under the National Accounts umbrella, enabling Southern Glazer’s to remain the strategic thought partner to grow these categories and gain market share,” Southern Glazer’s said in statement.

Southern Glazer omnichannel development

Robyne Eldridge, vice president, omnichannel development, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits

Robyne Eldridge is the new vice president for omnichannel development. In addition, she will continue to lead digital B2C operations, development of ecommerce business priorities, and supplier integration.

Included among her duties is leading “B2C deliverables for digital-first eCommerce Business Priorities development,” the company says, adding: “The B2C Omnichannel team creates targeted goals to grow ecommerce sales and share for our suppliers. Digital allows us to support suppliers’ brick-and-mortar program priorities and also amplify support with digital-only opportunities.”

“Robyne oversees a team of B2C omnichannel ecommerce sales directors that work closely with our national accounts teams to find ways to grow sales and share for our suppliers at our most ecommerce enabled national accounts,” a spokeswoman says. “Robyne also oversees a new digital Center of Excellence to provide digital insights in this fast-evolving space and also support the integration of omnichannel capabilities throughout the 100+ person national accounts organization.”

Eldridge joined Southern Glazer’s in December 2019 and most recently served as vice president, B2C ecommerce for national and regional accounts.

Eldridge will report to Chris Williams, executive vice president of national accounts.

Reporting to Eldridge will be:

• Sam Raia, senior director, omnichannel development;
• DarShanna Smith, senior director, Amazon sales;
• Sarah Twitchell, director, liquor channel;
• Brennan Duke, director, mass market, club and drug channels;
• Jennifer Bailein, director, grocery sales.

Customer and trade development

Ryan Saas has been promoted to vice president of customer and trade development for national retail sales and on-premise sales. In his new role, he will drive supplier relations and manage Southern Glazer’s NRS business with support from customer development category experts. Saas will report to Williams.

National retail sales

JR Allen has been promoted to vice president, NRS Commercial Operations. He will work on demand forecasting, inventory and execution.

Nicolle Nottingham has been appointed senior director of GoBrands. She will work on strengthening and fostering national strategy with national retail sales suppliers.

Allen and Nottingham will report to Scott Moore, senior vice president of national accounts off-premise.

Center of Excellence

Adam Byrne has been appointed vice president, customer planning and development for Southern Glazer’s Center of Excellence. His duties will include focusing on the COE’s Elevate program, which recommends branded merchandise to customers. He will report to Williams.

In July, Southern Glazer’s hired ecommerce veteran Alan Wizemann as its chief digital officer. In prior roles, he worked in digital operations for Munchkin Inc., Target.com and Lululemon Athletic.

Southern Glazer’s racked up $3 billion in digital sales last year on its B2B ecommerce platform SGProof.com.

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.

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Blue Apron is an online retailer that helped to create the meal planning and ingredients ecommerce market. It has been acquired in a stock deal valued at about $103 million.

Wonder Group acquires Blue Apron

Blue Apron is being sold to Wonder Group, an online food-to-home delivery company, founded by serial ecommerce entrepreneur Marc Lore.

Lore pioneered combining digital community with ecommerce with the launch of Diapers.com in 2005. Amazon.com later bought the ecommerce business for $545 million in 2011. From 2011 until 2016, Lore next launched Jet.com, a general merchandise and shoppers club. Walmart acquired Jet.com for $3.3 billion in 2016 and named Lore as president of Walmart.com.

He worked at Walmart until 2021 and then went on to start Wonder Group. Lore’s Wonder Group is now acquiring Blue Apron to build out its business-to-consumer ecommerce model for home food delivery and meal preparation.

“Wonder is creating the mealtime super app, serving a broad range of occasions that feature cuisines from some of the world’s best chefs and restaurants while leveraging our culinary engineering and vertically integrated model,” Lore says. “At-home meals play a key role in this vision and have been on our strategic roadmap since the beginning.”

Why does Marc Lore want Blue Apron?

With the acquisition of Blue Apron, Wonder Group is purchasing a company that processed more than 8 million orders for more than 350,000 customers in 2022. It will give Wonder Group a bigger base to expand and diversify its online food delivery operation.

“When the opportunity presented itself to unite with Blue Apron, pioneers in the meal kit industry, we knew it would accelerate our strategic position (and) create immediate opportunities for synergy,” Lore says.

Under the terms of the merger agreement, Wonder will acquire all outstanding shares of Blue Apron Class A common stock for $13.00 per share in cash. The companies expected to close the transaction by the end of December.

“The transaction delivers immediate and certain value for Blue Apron stockholders at a significant premium over recent trading prices,” says CEO Linda Findley.

Blue Apron generated revenue in 2022 of $458.5 million. That’s down 3% from $470.4 million in 2021. It had actively been looking for a buyer, according to various industry financial reports.

Blue Apron is No. 195 in the Top 1000. The database ranks the largest online retailers in North America by web sales.

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The global shipping and mailing company provides technology, logistics, and financial services for ecommerce shipping.

And among the new duties for interim CEO Jason Dies is evaluating if Pitney Bowes will choose to sell off its global ecommerce business unit. The unit provides retailers with a parcel delivery and returns network and other fulfillment services such as pick, pack and ship.

Dies, who most recently served as executive vice president, replaces CEO Marc Lautenbach, who has now left the company. Since joining Pitney Bowes in 2015, Dies was responsible for overseeing the company’s SendTech and presort services segments. He was also responsible for overseeing:

• Human resources
• Information technologies
• Marketing and communications

“After careful deliberation and consideration of various factors, the board determined it is the right time to initiate a search for our next permanent chief executive officer and install a qualified interim leader who can continue to advance key initiatives and pursue new opportunities for value creation,” says Pitney Bowes board chairman Mary J. Guilfoile.

While the search for a new permanent CEO is underway, Pitney Bowes will begin to “focus on accelerating corporate cost optimization and related restructuring efforts while also working with the leaders of SendTech, presort and global ecommerce to identify actionable opportunities to strengthen performance and market positioning.”

For the second quarter ended June 30, Pitney Bowes revenue declined 11% to $776.48 million. That’s down from $871.49 million in the second quarter of 2022. Net loss was $141.5 million versus net income of $4.3 million in the prior year.

Revenue for the Pitney Bowes global ecommerce unit was $313 million. That’s down 21% from $394 million in the second quarter of 2022.

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Mark Detelich

Logicbroker has a new president.

The company, which provides services for marketplace platform, supply chain management and drop shipping management, has named Mark Detelich as president.

Detelich will lead Logicbroker’s strategy, product management, engineering, and project management departments.

Previously, Detelich served in multiple chief product officer roles for Syndigo, a product information management (PIM) and mobile device management (MDM) provider, and Numerator, an omnichannel shopper and ecommerce media analytics services company. He was also a partner at Accenture, where he led global supply chain and ecommerce transformation initiatives for large enterprise clients.

Matt Ramsbottom

Detelich is the latest executive hire for Logicbroker, which has been building up its management team over the last few months. In July, the company hired Matt Ramsbottom as chief financial officer. Previously, he worked as senior vice president of finance for project44, a freight management software provider.

Justin Hartanov

Also in July, Logicbroker hired a new chief executive officer. Justin Hartanov was named as the new CEO. In previous roles, he served as chief commercial officer for Syndigo.

Logicbroker says it processes more than $3.5 billion in gross merchandise volume annually.

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For example, there are more than 1,500 job openings listed on Indeed.com for various positions on B2B marketplaces. They range from marketing and sales to ecommerce application developers and other information technology specialists. Annual salaries are diverse and can be lucrative. There are currently nearly 290 B2B marketplaces jobs listed on Indeed.com paying $130,000 and up on Indeed.com. Here are three key takeaways on B2B marketplace hiring from Digital Commerce 360.

Key takeaways: B2B marketplace hiring

1: B2B marketplace companies are big employers. Strong hiring is one indicator demonstrating the fast growth of B2B marketplaces.

2: B2B marketplaces will pay top dollar for the right talent.

3: B2B marketplaces large and small are adding to their head counts.

More Charts & Data Stories

Check back soon for more Charts & Data Stories, like our weekly B2B infographics. Here’s last week’s. We add new content regularly. 

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BigCommerce leadership update

BigCommerce has named Steven Chung, a technology industry veteran and experienced ecommerce sales executive, as its president. Chung will oversee the BigCommerce’s sales, marketing, and services organizations.

Steven Chung

Prior to joining the BigCommerce, Chung most recently worked at Delphix Corp., an enterprise software development and IT operations company. He led Delphix’s strategic growth as its president, worldwide field operations since December 2020.

From May 2016 to December 2020, he served as senior vice president, worldwide sales, customer success, and services at Pagerduty, Inc., a digital operations management platform for businesses.

Prior to those roles, he has held numerous leadership roles, including at Demandware, Inc., which Salesforce acquired in July 2016. He served as senior vice president, worldwide sales from January 2013 to April 2016, and at OneLogin, Symantec, MicroStrategy, and PwC Consulting.

He holds a B.A. in liberal arts from the University of Michigan and an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California.

As president, BigCommerce will pay Chung a base annual salary of $460,000. He will be eligible to participate in an annual bonus program, with a target bonus of 80% of his annual base salary, BigCommerce says in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“As the global sales leader at Demandware when they moved upmarket, Steven wrote the playbook for a modern SaaS company to take on the enterprise ecommerce incumbents,” says Demandware CEO Brent Bellm.

BigCommerce earnings

BigCommerce also released its second-quarter earnings.

For the quarter ended June 30, revenue totaled $75.4 million. That’s up 11% from $68.2 million in the year-earlier quarter.

Net loss was $19 million. That compares with $39.6 million in the second quarter of 2022.

Percentage changes may not align exactly with dollar figures due to rounding.

Check back for more earnings reports.

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Executive Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai is a longtime confidant of billionaire co-founder Jack Ma. He will take Zhang’s position as the chairman of the board. Eddie Wu is now chairman of Alibaba’s core Taobao and Tmall online commerce divisions. He will take over as chief executive of the $240 billion company. Taobao is No. 1 in the Digital Commerce 360 database of Global Online Marketplaces. Tmall is No. 2.

Zhang’s future

Zhang’s unexpected departure comes after Alibaba announced a six-way restructuring. The change is an attempt to juice growth and create a family of standalone leaders in businesses from cloud computing and logistics to international commerce. He unveiled his grand vision in detail just as Alibaba posted its third consecutive quarter of single-digit revenue growth. It reinforced concerns that a Chinese consumer spending rebound may be farther out than anticipated. Earlier this year, Alibaba returned to profit growth for the first time since 2020.

“The good thing is that the new CEO and chairman are all co-founders of the company and are the closest to Jack Ma. That means Ma remains the spiritual leader of Alibaba,” said Kenny Wen, head of investment strategy at KGI Asia Ltd. “I don’t think the management change signals a big strategy change.”

Zhang will remain head of the cloud business. He took the helm in 2015 after rising to prominence as one of the architects of Alibaba’s “new retail” initiative, intended to marry physical and online retail and extend the company’s dominance into areas from malls to supermarkets. He became chairman a few years later as growth surged and Alibaba at one point became China’s most valuable company.

Then in 2020, regulators cracked down on Ma and his Ant Group Co. after the billionaire angered regulators. Beijing began a clampdown on the privately owned tech sphere shortly after, accusing Alibaba of monopolistic behavior before levying a record fine for the alleged violations.

The company thereafter never regained its stratospheric growth. New entrants such as ByteDance Ltd. and PDD Holdings Inc. sapped its core business. It began to lose market share in the cloud, its other engine of growth, to state-backed rivals.

Wu’s history

Wu, an Alibaba co-founder, is credited with helping the development of the company’s digital advertising platform Alimama and its PayPal-like Alipay, now part of Ant. It’s unclear whether the new management will reconsider ways to hive off the most valuable parts of the Alibaba empire via separate listings.

In addition to growing competition, Alibaba is also suffering from macroeconomic uncertainties in China. A post-COVID rebound in the world’s second largest economy is faltering fast. It’s partly hurt by Washington’s efforts to restrict China’s access to critical technologies.

While Beijing has promised to support the private sector after its blistering crackdown essentially obliterated the internet sector’s once-heady pace of growth, those pledges haven’t yet translated into meaningful policy.

The Chinese ecommerce giant’s latest maneuver brings “old Alibaba management back to the stage again,” said Willer Chen, a senior research analyst at Forsyth Barr Asia. “Not sure whether it is a good thing for Alibaba given now the key should be new growth drivers and the restructuring plan.”

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