Parentheses indicate the merchant’s ranking in the Top 1000.

Amazon.com Inc. (No. 1)

Amazon beat expectations with earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, 2023. Its net sales in the quarter grew 14% year over year to $170.0 billion.

Full-year sales grew 12% to $574.8 billion in 2023, up from $514.0 billion in 2022. Read more about Amazon’s earnings here.

Costco Wholesale Corp. (No. 6)

Costco said net sales grew 6.1% to $56.72 billion in its first fiscal quarter of 2024 ended Nov. 26, 2023. Ecommerce comparable sales grew 6.3% in the same period. E-gift cards, snacks and pet items were all strong in the ecommerce channel, the retailer said.

Read more on Costco’s earnings here.

Crocs Inc. (No. 104)

Crocs reported that revenue grew 1.6% to $960 million in its fiscal fourth quarter ended Dec. 31. Direct-to-consumer sales, including ecommerce, grew 6.8%, while wholesale declined 4.6%. Revenue grew 11.5% to $3.96 billion for the full year. 

CEO Andrew Rees says he expects personalization to be a major trend Crocs can capitalize on going forward. He pointed to Jibbitz sales, which grew 17% in 2023 to $250 million in sales.

Hanesbrands Inc. (No. 277)

Hanes reported net sales declined 12% to $1.3 billion in its fiscal fourth quarter ended Dec. 30. Activewear sales declined 24% in the quarter. For the full year, sales declined 9.6% to $5.6 billion.

“Our fourth-quarter performance did not meet our expectations as the sales environment proved to be more challenging than expected,” CEO Steve Bratspies said in a statement. 

Hasbro Inc. (No. 555)

Hasbro said revenue declined 23% to $1.2 billion in its fiscal fourth quarter ended Dec. 31. Revenue declined 15% for the year to $5.0 billion. In both periods, digital gaming grew but was offset by declines in consumer products and entertainment segments. Hasbro attributed some of the entertainment segment decline to lower film and TV revenue from strikes in the entertainment industry in 2023.

“The consumer remains value conscious and we anticipate entertainment will be less of a tailwind in the year ahead, behind a reduced box office slate,” CEO Chris Cocks said.

Shopify Inc.

Shopify revenue and gross merchandise volume (GMV) both increased in the ecommerce platform provider’s Q4, which ended Dec. 31, 2023. Its revenue and GMV both increased for the full fiscal year, too.

45 retailers in the Top 1000 use Shopify as an ecommerce platform. Read more about Shopify’s earnings.

Target Corp. (No. 5)

Third-quarter sales declined 4.9% for the mass merchant, to $25 billion from $26.12 billion in its fiscal third quarter ended Oct. 28. Meanwhile, Target online sales decreased 6% year over year.

Moreover, Target’s online sales declined 6.7% year over year for the first nine months of its fiscal year. Read more about Target’s earnings here.

Walmart Inc. (No. 2)

Walmart reported that U.S. online sales grew 24% for its fiscal 2024 third quarter ended Oct. 27. Global ecommerce sales grew 15% over the same period, while international ecommerce declined 3%.

U.S. comparable sales grew 4.9%, and total revenue grew 5.2% to $160.8 billion. Read more about Walmart’s earnings here.

Yeti Holdings Inc. (No. 135)

Yeti reported sales increased 16% to $519.8 million in its fiscal fourth quarter ended Dec. 30. DTC sales grew 11%, and wholesale increased 26%.

Full-year sales grew 4% to $1.66 billion. Sales through Amazon were strong, the retailer said, although it did not participate in Amazon’s October Prime sales event.

“The channel continues to prove effective in reaching both new and existing customers on the platform,” CEO Matt Reintjes said. Amazon makes up about 25% of DTC sales, Yeti said. However, higher fees and freight costs negatively impacted margins, the retailer said.

So what does it mean?

• Amazon has the power to make or break retailers that rely on online sales, as evidenced by Yeti. The retailer is feeling the pinch of higher fees, and it relies on the 25% of DTC sales that go through Amazon.
• The toy industry remains challenged. Hasbro fared worse than competitor Mattel, which forecasted further industry declines in 2024.

Ecommerce earnings calendar

Here’s when other ecommerce earnings are scheduled to report this quarter:

• Amazon.com Inc.: Feb. 1
• Best Buy Co Inc.: Feb. 29.
• Costco Wholesale Corp.: Dec. 14
• The Home Depot Inc.: Feb. 20
• Lowe’s Cos Inc.: Feb. 27
• Target Corp.: March 5
• Walmart Inc.: Feb. 20

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Huisman was already well-established as a provider of heavy construction equipment for the energy industry. But to better help its customers maintain their equipment in top shape and avoid any costly downtime, the family-owned company, founded in 1929, realized it needed to go digital — and in a way that was helpful to customers who were often out of internet access range.

Maaike de Rover, program manager, digitalization, Huisman

Going digital — enabling customers to order parts and service and view technical manuals from computer devices in remote locations at sea — makes Huisman’s products and services far more accessible and the company far more efficient and proactive in serving customers.

“The ultimate goal is to grow our business and stay relevant for our clients,” says de Rover, program manager, digitalization.

Moving toward predictive maintenance

Moreover, Huisman’s digital applications are putting its Services division into the position to “move from preventive maintenance to predictive maintenance,” she says, with online dashboards designed to alert customers when their equipment may be due for maintenance and new parts.

Headquartered in Schiedam, Netherlands, with worldwide production and service facilities, Huisman worked with digital agency Fenego to deploy the Intershop Commerce technology platform. Intershop, which launched its first ecommerce platform in 1992, “combines the functionality of a B2B shop with the user-friendly aesthetics of a B2C platform,” according to Martijn Reissenweber, director of Huisman Services.

But the new digital technology layout is “more DXP than just an ecommerce platform, it goes far beyond ecommerce,” says de Rover, using the letters for digital experience platform.

In addition, Huisman manages customer and financial data and product information with an Isah ERP system, a Windchill data management application, and Google Analytics. And it uses an image designing tool for displaying 3D product drawings.

To make the digital platform more useful for customers when outside of internet access, de Rover says Huisman worked with Intershop and Fenego to deploy the commerce technology as a progressive web application. That configuration lets customers continue to engage through various mobile devices with downloaded web content, including product and order details, account activity, and service records, even when they have poor or no internet access in remote sea locations, such as windfarm construction sites.

Vessel-mounted Huisman cranes at a windfarm construction site.

Engaging customers via myHuisman

Huisman’s digital strategy is to make it easier for its customers aboard vessels to order parts and technical services through the manufacturer’s new digital portal, myHuisman. The portal also lets them access a broad scope of technical manuals, 3D product images, and other resources with detailed specifications, place orders for replacement parts, and receive technical help online.

Personalized content and service was crucial for Huisman to maintain a helpful digital interaction with customers at different types of companies, regardless of where they were operating and their level of internet access, de Rover says. She notes that a typical cost of equipment out of service for maintenance or repairs can run $200,000 or more per day.

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“Our industry is based on relations and personal contact with people who may work 30-40 years for the same company,” she says. “So, before we started building this platform, I formed a customer advisory board … and the clients helped us build the platform.”

Among myHuisman’s features are:

• Dedicated parts shops for customers with highly customized equipment. “It’s quite important for them to know what specific items are available for their equipment,” de Rover says. For example, she notes that a 2,600-metric-ton leg-encircling crane can have over 10,000 serviceable items and parts available for purchase, and a customer can click to see all the parts that are available, the price and the order lead times.
• Access to a technical digital library of what are typically huge volumes of product manuals and documents related to the purchase and operation of Huisman equipment.

In the past, ships outfitted with Huisman cranes or other products would carry a full ship container stocked with paper manuals and documents. Next came CD-ROMs, which offered helpful 3D imaging used for maintaining and repairing equipment, but intermittent internet access limited their usefulness.

The new library available through myHuisman lets customers download materials online and use them with full interactive features even without internet access.

• An online services ticketing system, which customers can use aboard vessels to arrange to receive technical assistance from Huisman technicians and engineers. Customers can also check other users’ questions and their status and review Huisman’s recorded replies.

In some cases, a Huisman engineer will travel by air and water to arrive at a client’s vessel to conduct onboard service, but to limit the expense of such travel, Huisman has developed alternate remote support services using such tools as photo-taking drones and the enterprise version of smart glasses to share images of onboard equipment with land-based engineers and technicians.

Keeping track online of made-to-order cranes

Later this year, Huisman also expects to launch a digital file management system for keeping customers up to date on the status of customized cranes and other equipment as they’re in production. De Rover notes that the production process can take two to three years, making it difficult to regularly maintain, share and organize project documents with customers on typically highly complex, made-to-order products.

For Huisman’s largest and most ecommerce-mature customers, the manufacturer is also working on providing direct connections from companies’ enterprise resource planning or plant maintenance systems to the myHuisman web shop for fast and efficient ordering of products.

De Rover says there is a significant growth opportunity as Huisman onboards more customers to myHuisman for routine activities like scheduling service calls, freeing up its salespeople and account managers to spend more time on helping these companies match their needs to Huisman’s product offerings.

Sophie du Mortier, marketeer, Huisman

Going forward, Huisman is developing a technology application designed to let customers remotely monitor on myHuisman the construction progress of cranes they’ve ordered.

“Once they buy a crane, they can monitor their equipment’s complete production process,” says Sophie du Mortier, marketeer for Huisman. “Customers can collaborate with Huisman on design and test documentation. They will have full insights in planning. Transparency is key.”

Huisman is also developing a myHuisman online performance dashboard that enables condition-based monitoring, a method using information from equipment-embedded sensors to give customers information on required maintenance.

“They have a complete overview of the status of the equipment,” du Mortier says. “And we are working towards a servicing model in which we can use this data to provide operational advice.”

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

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It was “a phenomenal year for Shopify,” said president Harley Finkelstein in an earnings call with investors this week.

In North America, 45 of the Top 1000 online retailers use Shopify as their ecommerce platform. The Top 1000 is Digital Commerce 360’s database of the largest online retailers in the region by annual web sales. In 2022, those 45 online retailers combined for more than $8.29 billion in web sales.

Shopify revenue, profit and GMV grow in Q4 2023

In its fiscal Q4, Shopify revenue grew 24% year over year to $2.1 billion. Excluding Shopify’s logistics business, that growth rate shifts to 30%. It also marks the third consecutive quarter that growth (excluding logistics) has been greater than 25%, said Jeff Hoffmeister, chief financial officer. For the full year, Shopify revenue increased 26% over 2022 to $7.1 billion.

Of that $2.1 billion in Q4, $1.1 billion was gross profit. That’s 33% year-over-year growth in Q4 profit. Shopify gross profit in 2023 grew to $3.5 billion. That’s a 28% increase from $2.8 billion in 2022.

Meanwhile, Shopify GMV grew 23% in Q4 to reach $75.1 billion. That’s $14.2 billion more than Shopify’s GMV in Q4 2022. It’s also the largest quarterly GMV growth rate since the pandemic-driven rates in 2021, Hoffmeister said. For the full year, Shopify GMV grew 20% — or 38.7 billion — over 2022, to reach $235.9 billion in 2023.

In terms of channels, Shopify revenue from offline sources, which includes offline subscriptions and point-of-sale hardware, was $441 million. That’s more than five times what it was four years ago, Finkelstein said.

More than 70% of Shopify’s online checkouts in 2023 came from mobile devices, Finkelstein said. In Q4, the Shop App “nearly reached” $100 million in GMV in a single month, he said not specifying the exact figure.

Internationally, cross-border GMV was approximately 14% of total GMV in Q4. Europe, the Middle East and Africa represent 27% of Shopify’s total merchant base. More than $1.2 billion in Shopify revenue comes from sales in the region.

Shopify also noted growth in its B2B channel.

The biggest sales period: Black Friday through Cyber Monday

In the four days from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, Shopify merchants collectively generated $9.3 billion in sales, Finkelstein said. That’s 24% year-over-year growth. About 61 million consumers worldwide purchased from brands that use Shopify as their ecommerce platform, he said. More than 55,000 merchants had their highest-selling day ever on Shopify in that period, he added.

Part of that stemmed from scaling the platform to accommodate more traffic, Finkelstein said. Shopify handled, on average, 967,000 requests per second, he said. That’s the same as 58 million requests per minute. It’s also almost 80% higher than Shopify’s peak traffic two years ago, Finkelstein said.

Cyber Monday is still the largest online sales day in the U.S., with web sales reaching $12.4 billion in 2023, according to Adobe Analytics data. Cyber Monday 2023 online sales grew 9.6% over 2022’s $11.3 billion. Black Friday is the second largest at $9.8 billion in online sales. That represents 7.5% growth over 2022’s $9.12 billion.

Shop Pay and Shopify merchants

Finkelstein said that compared to 2022, Shopify has 35% more merchants from outside North America using its ecommerce platform. It has added brands including Dollar Shave Club, Authentic Brands Group, Buy Buy Baby, On Running and more, he said.

“In April, an external study by a big three consulting company confirmed that Shopify’s overall conversion rate surpassed the competition by up to 36% and on average is 15% higher than others,” Finkelstein said.

And when consumers use Shop Pay, conversion can grow by half, he said. More than 150 million users have signed up for Shop Pay, as of Q4 2023. For the quarter, it facilitated $18 billion in GMV. That’s up 58% year over year for the quarter and up 50% for the full year.

Shop Pay has facilitated a cumulative $127 billion since launching in 2017, according to Finkelstein.

Shopify 2023 highlights

“We cannot talk about 2023 without mentioning AI,” Finkelstein stated. “We launched our suite of AI-powered tools known as Shopify Magic, an AI shopping assistant on our Shop App and further embedded AI tools within Shopify to increase productivity and streamline administrative tasks that have saved our merchants and our team thousands of hours of work, enabling us to ship faster and make great decisions quicker.”

The ecommerce platform brought nearly a dozen AI-enabled tools to its Shopify Magic product suite in 2023.

Shopify also partnered with Amazon.com Inc. to release the “Buy with Prime” app for Shopify merchants. The deal gives merchants the choice to offer Buy with Prime directly within their Shopify Checkout. This provides Shopify merchants access to Amazon’s logistics network.

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Dhaval Radia, CEO, Rupyz

“Our commitment is to unlock the full potential of India’s B2B ecommerce and supply chain,” says Dhaval Radia, co-founder and CEO.

Rupyz recently received $1.2 million in seed funding from venture capital firm Merak Ventures, which says it focuses on “sector-agnostic, early-stage” investments, and other angel investors.

In announcing the funding, Merak noted that “numerous Indian small and medium businesses face significant obstacles in maximizing their growth potential due to inadequate digital commerce capabilities. This gap is particularly concerning in an era where B2B commerce is not just an advantage but a necessity.”

Merak added, “Rupyz brings its integrated SaaS solution to enable these businesses to have an omnichannel interface to automate and scale their existing offline and online distribution.

Rupyz focuses mostly on companies in the food, personal care, lifestyle and fast-moving-consumer-goods (FMCG) industries. It says it caters to a network of 85 brands and more than 6,500 distributors and 250,000 retailers.

The company also says it expects to onboard over 3,000 businesses to its platform over the next 12 to 15 months. It adds that a broad shift to a new generation of leaders of family-owned businesses in India is fostering a shift to digital commerce.

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

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Today, the company said it took a significant step toward that goal by acquiring Radiance Commerce, an “enterprise-grade conversational commerce” platform powered by generative AI.

“Bloomreach is fully invested in an AI-driven future  ecommerce, and Radiance Commerce is critical in helping us bring that future to life,” Raj De Datta, Bloomreach co-founder and CEO, said in announcing the acquisition. He added that Radiance will help to further develop the Bloomreach Clarity “AI-powered conversational shopping” product and make it available to businesses worldwide.

Vikas Jha, Radiance’s founder, said the two companies are “perfectly aligned” as AI-powered commerce application developers to further the advancement of conversational shopping technology. Jha is listed on his LinkedIn page as vice president of engineering, conversational commerce, at Bloomreach, and the former CEO of Radiance.

The companies did not say what Bloomreach is paying to acquire Radiance.

Bloomreach’s other products include:

• Engagement, a marketing automation platform.
• Discovery, an ecommerce search application.
• Content, a content management system deployed with headless technology to make it independent of but integrated with the commerce engine.

Bloomreach has a client base of more than 1,400 global brands, including Williams-Sonoma, Bosch, Puma and Marks & Spencer.

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

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Kathleen Lewarchick

Some digital technologies arrive with fanfare while others enter quietly and become ubiquitous over time. Voice technology is one example of the latter. It gained momentum when developers and users began expanding their views of sound as part of multi-sensory engagement.

Voice activation was popularized by Google. They provided a “speech-to-text option” as part of their search functionality. And voice activation went from a quiet bleeding-edge technology (think OnStar) to a crescendo of widescale adoption as people began to use (and like) Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and others.

Making headway in B2B and B2C markets

It was only a matter of time before voice activation would become a powerful tool in commerce. Voice commerce, or v-commerce, is making headway in both B2C and B2B markets. Its technology twin, artificial intelligence (AI), complements and accelerates this trend.

There are obvious benefits, especially for those who are visually impaired or have diminished motor skills. There are also inherent risks, such as authentication and security. However, more and more voice commerce examples are appearing in the B2B market because of ease and simplicity.

One example is hands-free ordering. A facilities manager might be replacing dirty equipment during scheduled maintenance when he or she recognizes a missing piece. One option is to pause work, clean hands and record the part for an order later. The alternative is voice commerce on the job, where the manager pauses for a voice-activated ordering assist, and then quickly gets back to the maintenance job.

Here’s an example of a voice-commerce shopping experience where the buyer:

● Audibly requests items to be placed in a cart, as pictured here:

● Places the order directly through the integrated order management system.

● And receives system confirmation through voice (and visual) outputs, as shown here:

While there’s no guarantee that the part is in inventory, voice commerce enables the order to be placed hands-free at the direct moment of need.  Not only does this save time, but it may eliminate order errors if the order process is fully automated.

Essential to B2B business growth

Voice commerce, or v-commerce, is no longer on the horizon. Competitively advantaged companies are using it today to help customers save time and effort. And more users enjoy hands-free technology. It is likely that B2B use cases will only grow given the tight labor market and calls for improved productivity. Getting started on the journey of voice commerce is essential to maintaining your B2B business growth.

Kathleen Leigh Lewarchick is the VP of Marketing for Xngage LLC, a B2B digital commerce services company with more than 60 clients across the industrial trades. She is the former PURELL® Hand Sanitizer Brand Director, has co-created automated replenishment products with Amazon Business, and created telehealth solutions for a company that she later helped sell to CVS Health. 

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Called The Shops, the ecommerce platform will provide Ford and Lincoln dealers and resellers with tools and features that enable them to link to pre-approved service vendors. Vendors can then help with tasks such as customer lead generation, warranty authorization and credit pre-approval, among others.

Specific vendors on FordDirect’s ecommerce platform include:

• Better Car People, a comprehensive business development platform.
• ComplyAuto, a dealership compliance software platform for privacy, security, safety/human resources, and finance and insurance.
• OfferLogix, a credit pre-qualification service.
• Velocity Automotive, reconditioning management software.
• Volie, automotive call center software.
• WarrCloud, a warranty processing technology platform.
• Work Truck Solutions, commercial truck and van digital marketing and inventory merchandising tools.

The Shops addresses dealership needs

Dealerships face an increasing demand for day-to-day resources, including meeting customer expectations, complying with regulations, managing employees, updating technology, and planning sales events, FordDirect says.

“As every facet of the auto industry transforms through technology, dealers tell us they are more challenged than ever to stay current while meeting their business goals,” says FordDirect CEO Dean Stoneley. “The Shops is now open to help Ford dealers and Lincoln retailers find the best vendors in the market for all of their needs.”

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Its brands are available on five connected websites, and PRADCO is also a distributor for other brands, too. Trent Welbern, graphic design manager at PRADCO, works in the fishing division, where PRADCO sells items from its 20 fishing brands online through LureNet.com.

Welbern said PRADCO is “constantly adding brands on the fishing side,” and that requires efficient technology. He and his team use software from headless commerce provider Fastr — formerly known as Zmags — to help manage website updates for their many brands.

What is headless commerce?

Headless commerce is a type of ecommerce website structure that effectually separates the front end of a website (the user experience) with the back end of a website (the content management system where administrators typically make changes). In doing so, it allows brands to work on the front ends of their websites without going through web developers and IT teams, which often requires filing a service ticket.

In the case of PRADCO’s LureNet, it also allows designers like Welbern to create ecommerce pages without relying on web developers.

Headless commerce meets generative AI

Fastr offers headless commerce technology, which it refers to as Fastr Frontend. The option “allows non-developers to control every aspect of their ecommerce site without dependence on developers,” the company says.

Welbern has been using Fastr technology for three years. He said it has helped with efficiency as far as “not having to bog down IT” when PRADCO acquires brands. “It gives us a tool to work on the website,” he explained.

“All of our top-performing pages on LureNet, Fastr has had a part in that,” Welbern said.

In addition, Fastr has added generative AI to its technology suite, building on OpenAI’s GPT-4. Fastr Frontend, now implementing generative AI to its headless commerce technology, allows Welbern and his team to make more changes to LureNet’s website than before.

Welbern can type in what he wants in an ecommerce page, and Fastr AI will use that prompt to generate an entirely new web page. That could include specific images LureNet has selected, fonts that suit its branding guidelines and more.

“All of our top-performing pages on LureNet, Fastr has had a part in that — whether it be our custom lures section, our new brand, Bank & Creek, which is one of our subscription services, and some of our custom soft plastics. All those have been created using Fastr,” Welbern said. “They’re our top-performing pages.”

Can generative AI build web pages?

Ryan Breen, chief technology officer at Fastr, said ecommerce merchants and brands can set up asset libraries as a foundation. This means inputting fonts, images and logos for the generative AI to use. From there, the user would go to the Experience Canvas that Fastr provides and write a prompt with directions on how the generative AI should build the page.

Breen said every brand has its own style of what an H1 field should look like on its website, acceptable colors to use, and sets of images that suit its style. For example, when he tests FastrAI, he likes to have the generative AI include emojis in the copy it produces.

“I typically say, ‘go nuts,’ and it knows what I mean,” Breen said. 

Upon entering a prompt, the user sees the generative AI populate the web page in real time. It will pause intermittently to check in with the user about its progress, asking if the page looks good and if the user wants the generative AI copilot to proceed.

Breen added that users can reuse a prompt and the copilot will still ” trigger a really thoughtful, interesting, ‘I can’t believe it’s not a human’ type of feeling. It was disorienting at first, but every time you’re interacting with it, it’s going to say I have a different idea.”

Breen said Fastr’s team taught the generative AI tool “everything about what an asset means.” That includes what an experience means, how to create designs on a canvas, and where to put text and images.

How does generative AI build web pages?

“Content creation velocity and output can soar,” Fastr said in a statement. That provides “greater opportunities for experimentation to determine what content works best at driving conversions.”

At the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in New York City this week, ecommerce platform provider Salesforce announced its own generative AI technology to build web pages. Salesforce debuted Page Designer, which is in its pilot stage. The tool allows online retailers to build web pages through text prompts. Retailers can customize the design or specify that it mirrors existing branded web pages.

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In a phone interview with Digital Commerce 360, Gerbig reflected on the lessons he learned taking Pink Lily from a bootstrapped ecommerce site with a team of two to a company with 300 employees and $120 million in annual revenue. With 15,000 products in its inventory, the company found new paths to its customers, thanks to its early focus on nascent social media trends.

The Pink Lily Boutique is No. 836 in the Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000, a ranking of North America’s leading retailers by online sales.

Coming out of 2023, Gerbig cited a “really solid holiday season, comparable to last year,” but he is also looking ahead. From merchandising to ecommerce platform changes and staffing, he shared what he believes Pink Lily got right early on, as well as where his attention will be in 2024.

What sold well in the 2023 holiday season?

Asked what has been selling the best on Pink Lilly of late, Gerbig credited its mainstays.

“Basics and athleisure, and loungewear continues to be a top seller for us,” he noted. These standards have long made up the staples in Pink Lily’s colorful online catalog. But it has invested in new technology along the way.

“We have an in-house design team that creates a lot of our graphic tees and graphic sweatshirts,” Gerbig explained. “We just invested in a large DTG — direct-to-garment — printing machine that can print, you know, 900 shirts an hour with various designs.”

That machine replaced an old screen-printing process for the online retailer. The time and labor to build each screen and change out designs became too intensive. So they brought in a larger machine to apply new designs on demand. Those graphics include simple callouts to coffee, emotions and locations on cozy t-shirts and sweatshirts. The Pink Lily site currently shows about 100 options, according to Gerbig. He credits remote work with driving demand.

“As more people just work from home and more people want to wear comfortable clothes, I mean, yoga pants, workout pants, hoodies, just your basic casual stuff continues to be a pretty solid performer,” he explained.

Gerbig on growing Pink Lily’s team to 300 staff

Remote work has played a role for Pink Lily’s growth internally, as well. The company is located in Bowling Green, Kentucky, which is where the Gerbigs studied together at Western Kentucky University before starting Pink Lily. Gerbig believes staying in the area was the right call, though he acknowledged that attracting top talent to relocate can be a challenge.

“It’s not exactly a giant digital talent hub, you know, like if I was in Dallas or L.A. or Atlanta — or even Nashville for that matter,” said Gerbig. “But the good thing is we have a lot of remote jobs.”

As much as 25% of Pink Lily’s staff is remote, according to Gerbig. That number would likely be higher, he said, if it weren’t for the onsite needs at the warehouse that come with managing inventory and shipping orders. Still, opening up to remote hires has allowed him to fill out departments for non-warehouse positions.

“Otherwise, I think we might have struggled a bit,” he admitted. “But the fact that we can make these guys remote — we have a lot of remote staff now — a lot of remote employees and everything seems to work out just fine.”

Testing out physical retail

As Pink Lily’s staffing expanded from in-person to remote-heavy, the online retailer also piloted a physical retail presence for its sales. That flagship store was set — like the company — in Bowling Green, and it’s something that Gerbig is contemplating in the coming year.

“The majority of our sales are online,” he stated. “But I know a lot of companies do have a strong retail strategy and strong retail presence, and that’s the conversation that’s come up recently. So we’re paying attention to a few things, and we might look a little bit deeper into that — maybe later on in 2024.”

Like other retailers, Gerbig is watching what happens with macro trends in the economy and consumer habits. Signals on those fronts are likely to influence the company’s next steps.

“We’re paying a lot of attention to the economy and the markets and competition, just some of the ideas floating around about what to do with retail stores,” he explained. “Are customers going back to more retail, or are they shifting to more ecommerce?”

AI and ecommerce tech

As an ecommerce brand, Gerbig is also paying attention to Pink Lily’s tech stack. That extends to their ecommerce platform, as well as emerging uses for artificial intelligence.

“We’re paying attention, but we haven’t quite dived into the full AI, yet,” he said.

Currently, he likes solutions for automating some responses in customer service.

“Those have been helpful for us —  to not have to staff so many full-time customer service reps considering the same questions: ‘Hey, what’s my tracking number? When does this restock? What’s my order number?’ — things like that that can easily be answered by a machine or a robot,” he cited as examples. “Those have been helpful.”

Beyond those use cases, he is hopeful that better AI-powered options will emerge for fit recommendations.

“[The technology is] still kind of young, and it’s not perfect yet, so we haven’t started using it, but we are paying attention because one of the main drawbacks of being an online business is you can’t try to clothes on,” he said. “People have different body sizes, different shapes, things fit differently. So the ability to kind of do that digital try-on will be very, very helpful once the technology is proven.”

Pink Lily’s ecommerce platform

Pink Lily uses Shopify, which has been its ecommerce platform since 2020, according to Gerbig. After initially starting with Volusion, moving to BigCommerce, then eventually making the move to Shopify, he seemed confident that it’s the right fit for the time being.

“There’s a lot of add-ons, a lot of apps, a lot of different plugins that work,” he said, calling the overall user experience “great.” He also values Shop Pay, and the checkout session speed that Pink Lily is able to achieve as a result.

“I don’t know if it’s Shopify specifically, but just the app partners that they have,” he explained. Gerbig cited inventory control, customer service, restock alerts and website heat maps of customer activity as features he values.

“I think I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t have Shopify,” he stated. “It’s been good to us.”

Pink Lily’s social media strategy

One area where Pink Lily proved itself early on was on social media, where Tori spearheaded its presence. Over 10 years, platforms have changed and opportunities have shifted, but Gerbig noted how the company has learned and evolved along the way.

“We’ve learned that if you’re the first one to a trend and utilize that trend to its maximum potential, you can really grow it,” he said. In the early years, that meant using social media posts to organically grow traffic. Later, that shifted to paid strategies.

“So once social media organic posting kind of died out a little bit, we jumped on the paid ads bandwagon,” Gerbig recounted. “We really pushed paid ads, Google ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, pretty heavily back in I would say 2016-2017, before the whole world caught on and before it got extremely flooded.”

That was followed by prioritizing influencer marketing in 2017-2018, when Gerbig said Pink Lily “put 60%-70% of our marketing budget on influencers.” Now, the company has a holistic marketing approach, which he said encompasses “social, paid ads, email, influencer” and notably in 2024: TikTok.

“We do a lot of text alerts, so we have this holistic marketing approach where we have, you know, eight to 10 different channels and make sure that we kind of spread the budget across different areas,” he said. “But if we see that one is performing well or if there’s something new and up and coming, we’re quick to shift and throw a few more dollars of budget at the channel, and to see what happens.”

Potential on TikTok

TikTok alone represents one of Pink Lily’s priorities in the coming year. Against the backdrop of the company’s historical successes on social media, Gerbig specifically sees the ByteDance-owned platform as having “the biggest potential.”

“TikTok is huge, TikTok Live, TikTok Shop, and then just organic,” he noted. “We’ve posted on TikTok a lot more and put a few more eyeballs on that category as we try to tweak our campaign strategy. Because, you know, what you do on TikTok needs to be a little bit different than what you do on Facebook, also a little bit different than what you do on Instagram because [there are] different algorithms, different customers, different eyeballs and different chances to go viral on each platform.”

Other retailers have shown new interest in TikTok as well. Both Newegg and Peloton have recently expanded their presence there, and a Morning Consult report in 2023 showed that it played a growing role in driving holiday purchases.

What has worked so far

10 years after launching Pink Lily, Gerbig spoke confidently about the lessons learned and analytics-driven approaches that helped grow its sales and size from the business’ lean years to where they are now.

“We didn’t have money,” he said. “We had a very small amount of capital that we put into a printer and a small amount of inventory. So I had to focus on being cash-flow positive from day one and being profitable.”

After expanding and continuing to experiment with tech, merchandizing and social strategy, he expects to keep those core values in place in 2024.

“Our expectations are to keep doing what we’re doing,” Gerbig stated.

As for what ultimately made the difference in Pink Lily’s growth trajectory, Gerbig points to the early combination of skills that he and Tori brought to the table.

“I think we lucked out when we decided to divide and conquer the roles of running the business, so it just so happens that she is an expert in sales and marketing,” he explained. “And it just so happens that my fields were in finance and operations and business strategy.”

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The post Chris Gerbig, Pink Lily’s president and co-founder, shares 10 years of ecommerce learnings appeared first on Digital Commerce 360.

Geert Leeman

The CRM software market value is anticipated to increase from ~$64B in 2022 to ~$146B by 2029, and 91% of top businesses are investing in AI — with that percentage expected to increase.

CX and B2B trends

In the fast-evolving landscape of customer experience, the influence of AI stands as a central force, with data-driven innovations ushering in a new era of personalized and interactive experiences. Businesses are gearing up to navigate a dynamic terrain where industry-tailored solutions, connected enterprise insights, and AI-driven personalization converge to create the ultimate customer experience.

Let’s look ahead to 2024 and examine my predictions for how certain technology advancements will elevate customer experience and boost business revenue and profitability.

1. A focus on industry-tailored solutions will improve business outcomes

When it comes to CX — and B2B — trends, it’s not one-size-fits-all. What works for a manufacturing company may not be best for a retailer.

“Generic software often comes with a plethora of features, many of which might be irrelevant for a specific industry,” Kamran Khan, an IT and business development specialist, said. “Tailored solutions, on the other hand, are laser-focused on the exact requirements of an industry, ensuring that every feature and function is relevant and adds value.”

Industry-tailored CX solutions are designed with a deep understanding of a particular industry’s specific challenges and dynamics. This understanding ensures that the CX strategy addresses customers’ unique needs and pain points  within that industry, leading to more effective and relevant customer interactions. This approach improves customer satisfaction, loyalty, and a competitive edge in the marketplace.

2. Unified CX will overtake the siloed approach to customer satisfaction

Nearly two decades of research by multiple analysts shows that anywhere from 20%-70% of CRM projects fail. Why? These systems concentrated on connecting sales, service, and marketing rather than focusing on integration across the entire enterprise.

With an intelligent approach to customer experience, all teams across the enterprise — service, marketing, sales, logistics and operations — speak to each other. Organizations can connect insights like fulfillment business processes with insights from customer touchpoints, like service and commerce. This approach leads to a truly unified and exemplary experience for the customer.

3. AI will drive personalized customer relationships and efficient business processes

In my experience, brands are more likely to make a sale to an existing customer and are significantly less likely to sell to new customers. Therefore, it’s more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer.

With AI capabilities embedded within CX technology, businesses significantly increase their chances of improving customer retention. By analyzing the full breadth of enterprise data in addition to customer data, such as past purchases, service history, and industry preferences, businesses can provide a better experience for their customers overall. As a result, this drives revenue and increases a business’s bottom line.

Additionally, with business AI, the B2B space can take customer relationships to a new level. We’re finally seeing a pivot from input-heavy, output-poor systems to systems in which business professionals have insights at their fingertips that truly work for them. They’re able to do their jobs more effectively, and ultimately, make their customers happier and more loyal. In all, integrating AI-based technology into CX strategies drives personalized customer relationships, more efficient operations, and empowered decision making at all levels in the organization.

Wrapping up, in 2024, I predict that the B2B market will undergo a dynamic and engaging transformation of customer experience. Organizations that prioritize industry nuances, break down data barriers, and harness the power of AI will find themselves well-positioned to thrive in this dynamic and competitive landscape. The forthcoming year promises a new chapter in B2B interactions characterized by innovation, efficiency, and a scalable customer-centric focus.

Geert Leeman is the chief revenue officer of SAP CX, a software line of SAP SE.

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