Commerce Accelerated Issue #3 - Albertson's Interview, Retailer News, Product Launches & more!

This week's newsletter will focus on our new interview series, latest Retailer news, new Pacvue partnerships & products!

🎙️Interview Of the Week

I'm so excited to introduce our interview initiative! My goal is to bring to the community the unique access I have to smart decision-makers, latest cutting-edge thinking & metrics at retailers, brands, and agencies. This week's inaugural interview is with Harvey Ma, VP of Albertsons Media Collective. In this interview, you can learn more about:

1. How to activate on the Albertson's platform
2. Latest features & products launched
3. Measurement (especially insight into omnichannel measurement)
4. Standardization

Take a few minutes to listen to our interview HERE.

Both Harvey Ma & I will be at #groceryshop2023 in Vegas - we'd love to continue the conversation there!

📝Retailer News - What's 🆕

WALMART 

Walmart Display 

Reach Estimate for Auction Display Campaigns  

Once line items are set up with targeting and dates, Walmart’s new Reach Estimate Tool generates an estimated daily impression opportunity scale. 

• The Reach Estimate is included in the side summary panel in line-item details and based on the estimated impressions indicates the health of the opportunity. Walmart recommends that line-item opportunities are moderate to high.

💡Impact: This gives executors insight into the scale of campaigns based on the targeting set and will allow executors to more accurately estimate opportunity and budget for varying tactics. (If daily impression opportunity is low, executors may want to adjust targeting to reach more consumers.) 

 Predictive Audiences for Onsite Self-Serve Display 

Custom audiences utilize omnichannel purchase data and machine learning to identify predicted future purchase behaviors. 

• Brand Affinity Segments: Walmart customers who are loyal to your brand, loyal to competitors, or not brand loyal at all. 
• Item Propensity Segments: High intent who may be likely to convert on your products or similar categories during the campaign lifecycle. 

💡Impact: These are highly targeted audiences that Walmart is unlocking, giving brands the ability to have a more granular strategy for customers who are more likely to engage. With more granular targeting, brands can have more tailored messaging to improve engagement and consideration.  

 Streamlined Activation Management  

Walmart has made changes to Account User & API controls allowing Brands to have more control over who has access to their data and where it is shared via Walmart’s UI. 

• The most notable of those updates is that rather than being married to one API for ad management, brands can give access to up to 10 APIs and control varying levels of read & write access. 

💡Impact: This gives brands ownership of their data and allows them to change and evolve their tech stack without losing their data. Historically, if you transitioned from Walmart Managed Service to self-service using an API the data did not travel with the transition and new campaigns had to be launched. This allows brands to drive continued growth and learnings with Walmart and analyze performance more consistently over time. Great step Walmart! 

Wes Ryan of MPG breaks down why this matters here.

 AMAZON 

Brand Tailored Promotions for Sellers 

A customizable promotional program that enables all sellers to send promotions to high-intent customers (Brand Tailored Audiences.)  

• Sellers & Brands can offer discounts ranging from 10% to 50% to the audiences listed below. Each eligible customer can redeem the promotion on a sign product. 
• Brand Followers: Customers that follow the brand on Amazon 
• Potential New Customers: They engaged with the brand but did not purchase 
• Repeat Customers: Customers who have purchased the brand’s products at least twice in the trailing 12 months 
• High Spend Customers: The top 5% of spenders on the brand in the trailing 12 months. 
• Recent Customers: The most recent 5% of customers that purchased from the brand 
• Cart Abandoners: Customers who added at least one product to their cart but did not purchase in the trailing 3 months 

💡Impact: Amazon is allowing Sellers to offer promotions to a select group of recent & repeat purchasers to encourage loyalty or encourage consumers who have engaged but not yet purchased to try the product with a discount. This is an additional level of control that Amazon is unlocking for Sellers; historically promotions could not be targeted to specific groups on Amazon, this allows Sellers to engage strategically with their consumers to increase & encourage conversions. 

 🤝Pacvue Partnerships 

 We announced a partnership with i2o Retail, a provider of brand enforcement solutions. The collaboration aims to provide scalable brand protection across over 200 eCommerce marketplaces. The partnership will enable brands to incorporate brand protection and additional supply chain insights into their Pacvue ecosystem. i2o Retail's Brand Protector™ will allow brands and sellers to track, monitor, and enforce reseller activities, removing unauthorized resellers across global marketplaces. The collaboration will also focus on improving buy box availability for vendors, leading to organic growth and enhanced campaign efficiency. 

💡Impact: The partnership between Pacvue and i2o Retail addresses the persistent problem of unauthorized sellers on eCommerce platforms, which can erode brand equity, harm customer experience, and negatively impact pricing and profitability. By joining forces, we aim to foster organic growth, drive revenue, and reclaim revenue from unauthorized sellers. The collaboration is designed to offer a comprehensive tech stack that includes brand protection, helping brands to win the buy box and optimize growth and performance. It signifies a step towards streamlined commerce solutions and increased efficiency and profitability for brands, sellers, and agencies in the eCommerce space. 

 ⚙️ Product Roadmap News 

 Amazon vendors struggle with the complex and dynamic marketplace environment. Shortages and chargebacks alone lead to lost revenue and reduced profitability. The current manual process for invoice reconciliation and dispute management is time-consuming and inefficient, leading to missed revenue recovery opportunities. 

 Pacvue’s Revenue Recovery Management service offers a comprehensive solution for Amazon vendors to address this profit leakage. Leveraging automation, AI, and industry expertise, the service seamlessly integrates into Pacvue Commerce, requiring no upfront costs. 

 By analyzing CoOp agreements and real-time sales data, Pacvue identifies discrepancies and potential revenue recovery opportunities. The service manages the entire A-Z recovery process for invoice shortages, price claims, CoOp discrepancies, chargebacks, and returns, maximizing results and success rates. With Pacvue’s Revenue Recovery Management, vendors can reclaim lost revenue, improve profitability, and streamline their financial performance on Amazon. 

 Case Study: One of our customers has been selling its products on Amazon and suffering significant losses due to inconsistencies in Amazon’s vendor billing, return penalties, and invoice-shortage fines. This simply couldn’t go on, so their finance and sales teams reached out to Pacvue to help address its revenue leakage on Amazon. Together, we conducted a CoOp agreement audit, analyzing chargebacks, price claims, and invoice shortages. And the results were staggering -- over $500k in potentially recoverable claims! After requesting additional documents and submitting disputes to Amazon, we successfully managed to recover $430k of revenue leakage for the brand – a 75% success rate in recovered revenue. 

Check it out for yourself - for a free audit, you can sign up here.

🎧 Podcast of The Week  

I really enjoyed Modern Retail's podcast episode with Nick Stone - His company is an experiential coffee company that is ten years old, with over 60 locations and has seen its business grow 350% since the pandemic. Part of the thesis is delivering an amazing customer experience. Maybe if we had one in Seattle, I might actually sit in a coffee shop and relish my cup of coffee and organize my to do list - but for now, I always go with #starbuckscoffee mobile app and coffee to go for this busy, working mom of 2! You can listen to the episode here.

About the author: Melissa Burdick, a seasoned omnichannel growth expert and retail industry thought leader, is the co-founder and president of Pacvue, a commerce acceleration company. Burdick helps brands and sellers start, run and scale their business across shopping destinations including Amazon, Walmart and Instacart, and more. Prior to Pacvue, Burdick spent 10 years at Amazon, where she led development of the Amazon Ads business and played a key role in launching the e-commerce giant’s CPG/Health & Beauty retail business.