WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Meta Platforms Inc. is rolling out a shopping product in India. This will be the first time users will be able to browse and purchase products without leaving the app, Bloomberg says.

WhatsApp unveiled the new tool alongside JioMart, part of Reliance Industries Ltd.’s Jio Platforms. This is an Indian tech company that Meta invested almost $6 billion into in early 2020. The new feature lets users in India shop for products from JioMart and pay for them directly within the app. People could previously browse products via WhatsApp, but had to leave the service to finish the transaction.

A full WhatsApp shopping experience has been a longtime goal for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The social networking giant paid $22 billion to acquire WhatsApp in 2014. The service is still a small part of Meta’s overall business.

The app now makes money by charging some businesses to message customers and by selling click-to-message ads, which are ads that appear in users’ Facebook or Instagram feeds and then kick them into a private chat with a business once they’re clicked. Those ads already bring in billions of dollars per year across all Meta’s apps.

Zuckerberg is targeting a much larger business opportunity for WhatsApp related to commerce and payments, especially in emerging markets where the app is popular like India and Brazil. The CEO has spoken about business messaging on almost every Meta earnings call in the past few years, pitching the idea as a complementary business line to the company’s existing advertising business.

Part of the struggle for Meta has been related to payments regulation. The company tested payments in India for years before getting formal government approval in 2020 to expand the test into a full-blown feature.

JioMart is competing with Walmart Inc.-controlled Flipkart and Amazon.com Inc. for a bigger piece of India’s growing online retail market. Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani runs the online grocery push. A partnership with WhatsApp could just give it a much-needed boost.

A Meta spokesperson said the company hopes to expand in India to team up with more businesses. It also aims to bring this shopping tool to other countries.

Barclays, a British universal bank, released data in June revealing people aged 21 to 30 are most likely to be scammed online. Despite that finding, the same research found that the majority (76%) in that younger group said they are confident they would not be a victim.

The majority of scams (77%) happen on tech platforms such as social media, purchase/auction sites, or dating apps. This makes younger people more susceptible to becoming a victim, warns the Barclay research.

A common misconception is that most ad scam victims are elderly people. In reality, cybercriminals do not discriminate. Social engineering is a manipulation technique used on younger online audiences that exploits human emotion.

It is not just consumers who are targets of online fraud. Website merchants also are in cyberthieves’ crosshairs, warns Jake Loveless, CEO of web acceleration company Edgemesh.

Consumers become victims of purchase scams when people buy goods that never arrive or are not as advertised. These scams are the most common type, accounting for more than half (60%) of all scams in the last three months, according to Barclays’ data.

The likelihood of falling for this type of scheme decreases significantly with age, with 21- to 30-year-old consumers being 15 times more likely to be a victim. Smartphones rank as the most common type of item fraudsters advertise.

A quarter (25%) of respondents said they could only go one day without replacing their smartphone if they lost it. Nearly one-third (31%) admitted to being willing to shop with a brand they did not know if the seller offered a good deal.

Older people are more likely to fall for higher-value scams. But the most common scams trick victims into buying something they never receive. Scammers usually offer items significantly lower than their value to lure in buyers. Before rushing into a potentially fraudulent purchase, would-be buyers should question why any legitimate seller would do this. Then check the seller’s website and be wary of anyone asking for a bank transfer rather than a debit or credit card transaction. Legitimate sellers do not usually do this.

Scammers use social engineering and its psychological manipulation to get viewers to unverified pages, fraudulent schemes, and malicious scams. Emotionally-charged ads are an effective low-tech way of luring users to listings of fraudulent or non-existent products, financial schemes, phishing scams, propaganda, and other low-quality landing pages. Cybercriminals attempt to appear legitimate and build trust with online audiences.

There are five tips on how to identify and avoid fraudulent deals:

1. Acknowledge that differences exist between ads and editorial content. Ads with salacious text or imagery are red flags.
2. Do not click on ads with mix-matched fonts/characters within the same sentence. To bypass text-recognition mechanisms, scammers replace English characters with special symbols.
3. Beware of cloned sites with mistakes in the domain name that mimic the branding of reputable sites. They are probably malicious.
4. Look for fake comments that attempt to build trust in the deal/product/offering.
5. Do ample research on the advertiser/brand before sharing credit card details. Only buy products/services through verified companies/sellers.

Clickbait as well uses cognitive tricks to get clicks. Typically, it involves emotional manipulation appeals to impulsive emotions such as fear, excitement, curiosity, anger, guilt, and sadness. Learn to spot clickbait in all its forms and communicate directly with website owners when they face a bad ad.

Financial scams often connect to trending news like cryptocurrency and government support programs. The goal is to trick internet surfers to send money or share personal information.

About 56% of website owners found clickbait on their sites last year. Only 9% of website visitors reported inappropriate ads directly to publishers through customer service or social media.

Website owners should keep in mind the legal and brand obligations to ensure that the ads they host and the landing pages to which they lead meet their standards for brand suitability.

Criminals are trying to either gain advertising revenue with bot-driven clicks, gain importance by driving a high rate of bot-based clicks, or intentionally targeting competitive ads to increase costs and ultimately wasting ad budget.

The starting point for brands to protect against fraud is always to measure the level of the problem. Often this can be done by looking at the ratio of engaged users versus non-engaged users. In an efficient online store, this should be about 80% plus. From there, adding inline protection and an IP reputation system to identify invalid traffic is the next step. Start ensuring every dollar of ad spend is put in front of customers rather than bots and bad actors.

More than two decades ago, Internet technology pioneer Cisco Systems Inc.’s business was booming as companies implemented its routers and other products to grow in the new, digital-focused world of commerce.

Cisco’s fiscal year 2022 ended on July 31 with a relative failure. The provider of Internet equipment, products and software for cloud technologies reported a Q4 sagging in revenue of $13.1 billion. The company also reported modest full-year revenue growth of 3% compared to the same period last year to $51.6 billion.

Cisco records the gains from a surge in orders for internet technology products fueling its customers’ digital transformation, chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins said. Product orders for the entire year and the number of outstanding orders are at an all-time high and reflect the high demand that the company continues to see for its innovations.

The increasing demand is running across several product lines that support companies’ transitions to more digitally focused operations.

There are currently more technology transitions occurring concurrently than he’s seen in 20 years,Robbins said. ‘”Long-term megatrends” like cloud technology deployments and internet-of-things sensors used in digital supply chains and automated ecommerce operations “will likely provide tailwinds to our growth.” According to the company’s CEO,  they see significant opportunity ahead as their customers build out massively scalable cloud networks. Cisco’s web-scale business supports customers’ deployment of large data centers and other digital transformation projects.

Cisco did not report its e-commerce revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter or year. But the company notes on its website that most customers place orders with Cisco technology implementation partners who use the Cisco Commerce web portal to customize products, receive offers, check prices and place orders. In the past, Cisco claimed to process about 60% of orders through the Cisco Commerce web portal. This will amount to about $31 billion of e-commerce orders in fiscal year 2022.

Robbins said Cisco had “record net income” for the year ended July 30 of $11.81 billion. That’s up 11.5% from the prior fiscal year. He attributed that increase to the company’s operating discipline despite external challenges, including supply chain and inflation.

Chinese technology companies including JD.com are facifrom China’s Covid lockdowns and subsequent economic impact as well as the country’s tighter regulatory environment for technology businesses, CNBC reports.

In the second quarter, JD.com surpassed all expectations, but showed the slowest year-on-year revenue growth on record, becoming the latest victim of the economic downturn in China caused by Covid.

The company got a boost thanks to the increased profitability of its core retail and logistics division, which was facilitated by the annual “618” shopping festival, which takes place in China in June.

During the April to June quarter, China saw a resurgence of Covid-19 that led to lockdowns of major cities across the country, including the financial powerhouse of Shanghai, as authorities tried to contain the worst outbreak of the virus since the initial spread in 2020.

This month, e-commerce rival Alibaba reported flat June quarter revenue for the first time while gaming and social media giant Tencent reported its first revenue decline on record.

Tencent and Alibaba have been cutting spending and reducing headcount as revenue slows in order to grow earnings in the coming quarters, with similar focus shown from JD.com too.

JD.com reduced marketing and general and administrative expenses for the quarter versus the same time last year. The Beijing-headquartered firm also narrowed losses in its new business segment and saw its logistics unit swing to an operating profit in the quarter versus the second quarter of 2021.

As Sandy Xu, chief financial officer of JD.com, said in a press release, the company’s emphasis on financial discipline and operational efficiency has allowed them to return to shareholders in the form of share repurchases as well as a special cash dividend issued during the quarter. They will continue to focus on generating strong shareholder returns while maintaining commitment to investing for the long term.

JD.com’s retail segment makes up the most of its revenue. The division brought in 241.5 billion yuan in revenue in the second quarter, a near 4% year-on-year rise. Operating profit for the retail business rose 36% year-on-year to 8.17 billion yuan.

That was helped by the 618 shopping festival in China. It takes place for roughly two weeks in June and China’s e-commerce giants offer huge discounts across a number of goods. JD.com reported in June that total transaction volume across its platform during the promotional period totaled 379.3 billion yuan. This does not translate directly into revenue but it does bring users to JD’s shopping app.

JD differs from Alibaba in that it owns more of its own inventory. It has also focused heavily on logistics and warehousing capabilities that allows it to get products to users on the same day or next day.

JD’s logistics division saw a 20% year-on-year revenue rise in the second quarter to 31.2 billion yuan.

United States ecommerce will continue its upward trajectory, reaching $1.6 trillion (almost 30% of all U.S. retail sales) by 2027, according to a projection from Forrester Research Inc.

The research firm says online sales will top $1 trillion this year and grow at a 10% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2027. In 2021, total (online and offline) retail sales (online and offline, excluding automotive and gasoline) reached a record high of $4.3 trillion and will grow to $5.5 trillion, Forrester says.

According to Sucharita Kodali, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester and one of the report’s authors, they expect ecommerce to take share from physical retail in the years ahead.

As the coronavirus lockdowns eased, shoppers returned to stores in 2021. That shifted sales growth from online to physical retail. In 2020, online retail sales grew 29% compared with 2019. That was more than double the 13% year-over-year ecommerce growth rate in 2019. From now on, Forrester expects ecommerce growth to revert to the levels seen in 2019 and before.

With the pandemic becoming less severe, ecommerce will continue benefitting from the factors that drove its growth before COVID-19. Those growth drivers are lower prices, larger product selection, fast delivery and convenience.

Forrester added that the top three merchandise categories in ecommerce are clothing and footwear, consumer electronics, and food and drink. In 2021, together, those categories represented 38% of U.S. online retail sales and 41% of total U.S. retail sales. By 2027, Forrester projects those categories will account for 42% of U.S. online retail sales. And the same categories will also be 40% of total U.S. retail sales.

Clothing and footwear online retail sales are expected to almost double in the next five years, from $153 billion in 2021 to $278 billion in 2027. Consumer electronics online retail sales will see similar growth, increasing from $123 billion in 2021 to $216 billion in 2027. And food and drink online retail sales will almost triple from $69 billion in 2021 to $183 billion in 2027.

Forrester says buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) and curbside pickup services will help ecommerce keep growing in the coming years. That’s at least partly because retailers invested in order-pickup capabilities, the report says.

Retailers have been increasing their numbers of pickup locations. Walmart now has pickup services available in 4,600 locations, and 3,500 of its stores offer same-day delivery. The Home Depot offers BOPIS, lockers, and/or curbside pickup in over 2,300 retail stores. Target’s click-and-collect sales grew 45% in 2021 — and that’s on the top of 235% growth for that service in 2020. Lowe’s increased its omnichannel capabilities by offering BOPIS lockers in all of its U.S. stores.

Americans will buy $100 billion in goods online for pickup at stores. Sales like that will more than double to $208 billion by 2027. By that year, they will represent 13% of all U.S. online retail sales, the firm projects.

While online and offline retail sales will keep growing, Forrester warns that the marketplace presents retailers with significant short-term challenges. For example, the report says consumers have shifted their dollars to non-durable goods in 2022.

Also, high inflation means consumers are spending more on gas and groceries. So, retailers face declining profitability as they offload excess inventory by offering discounts,” the Forrester team wrote. Beyond that, retailers face the possibility of a U.S. recession. Other potential problems include “unknowns,” such as when supply chains might normalize, and geopolitical risks, such as the possibility of China invading Taiwan.

Forrester says its forecasts rely on “demand-side data balanced with company supply-side metrics” and the work of the firm’s subject-matter experts. Forrester says it “develops comprehensive historical and base-year market size estimates based on a variety of sources, including public financial documents, executive interviews, Forrester’s proprietary primary research and surveys, and analysis of global companies’ distribution and growth.”

How many B2B marketplaces are there in the USA and Europe?

There are 400 B2B marketplaces in the U.S. and more on the way. That compares with between 260 and 300 B2B marketplaces in Europe, based on counts by Dealroom.com and Point Nine Capital, a Berlin-based venture capital firm.

As the global COVID-19 pandemic marches into its third year and continues to produce major supply chain hiccups for many manufacturers, distributors and others, more organizations will continue latching on to marketplaces to buy and sell goods and services, according to data and analysis in the 2022 B2B Marketplace 400 research report from Digital Commerce 360.

Today, B2B marketplaces driven by the dominating presence of Amazon Business and the proliferation of scores of marketplaces springing up to serve numerous vertical markets from health care and automotive to chemicals and agriculture are part of the mainstream of ecommerce.

Three years ago, Digital Commerce 360 was following about 75 to 100 B2B marketplaces. Today, the B2B Marketplace 400 research report has metrics and analysis on 400 commercial and vertical-industry marketplaces spread across 18 industries. They range from automotive parts, chemicals, energy, and construction supplies to labor and logistics.

B2B marketplaces can take shape according to multiple ecommerce ownership arrangements. But there are two categories of marketplace types: Industry (vertical) marketplaces that bring together buyers and sellers in a particular industry such as automotive parts, steel, health care, and multiple other segments. The second is commercial third-party (horizontal) marketplaces, such as Amazon Business and Alibaba.

Amazon Business remains the single most dominant B2B marketplace. In 2022, Bank of America Securities projects Amazon Business will post $41.5 billion in gross merchandise volume. That would be up 31.7% from a projected $31.5 billion in 2022. Based on these projections, Amazon Business singlehandedly would account for 31.9% of all B2B marketplaces sales, or one in every three transactions, based on a Digital Commerce 360 estimate. As soon as 2025, Amazon Business could post annual gross merchandise volume of about $83.1 billion, says BofA Securities.

Chinese fashion retailer Shein is looking to expand in Europe. At the same time, the company’s value has fallen around 30 percent. Shein has been under scrutiny about its labor conditions and environmental impact.

Shein was founded in 2008 by entrepreneur and search engine optimization marketing specialist Chris Xu in Nanjing, China. The company is known for its affordably priced apparel. In its early stages, SHEIN was considered more of a drop shipping business than a retailer. Online retail shop Shein was originally named ZZKKO. The website SheInside.com was registered in March 2011 and advertised itself as “a worldwide leading wedding dress company”, although it sold general womenswear too. The company acquired its items from Guangzhou’s wholesale clothing market, which is a central hub to many of China’s garment manufacturers and markets.

Currently the company is not involved in clothing design and manufacturing, and instead obtains its products from the wholesale clothing market in Guangzhou. SHEIN is the world’s largest fashion retailer, as of 2022. The company was valued at $100 billion after a funding round in April 2022. In 2020 Shein grew by a staggering 250 percent.

According to CNN, TikTok plays a large role in driving customers to the company website due to a TikTok trend of bulk buying clothes from Shein and presenting Shein clothes to their audience like a standard haul video. On May 17, 2021, the number of Shein’s app downloads surpassed those of Amazon.

The Chinese retailer ships across 220 countries worldwide, with most customers in India and the United States. Now, Shein focuses on Europe. Shein made their products available in Spain, France, Russia, Italy, and Germany in the early 2010s; as well as selling cosmetics, shoes, purses, and jewelry, in addition to women’s clothing. Shein recently opened European pop-up stores in Madrid and Barcelona for click-and-collect. The company also has set up temporary shops in London and Paris before. In 2012, the company began using social media marketing by collaborating with fashion bloggers for giveaways and advertising items on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Moreover, the company appointed Jacobo García Miña as European director of business development, Moda.es reported. Garcia is based in Dublin and formerly worked for H&M and Zara as well as Burberry and Salesforce. The director is meant to build relationships with European companies and improve Shein’s image in Europe.

Shein’s concerns with its image are not unjustified. The third most valuable startup in the world is facing a 30 percent valuation drop after its fast-paced growth in the past few years. In the run-up to an IPO, investors are now looking to sell their shares. More companies in the tech and ecommerce industry have seen lower valuations due to global economic uncertainty.

In addition, Shein has been involved in numerous controversies concerning copyright, labor conditions and environmental impact. Shein has also been criticized for a lack of transparency in these areas.

In August 2021, Shein claimed on its website that its factories were certified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and SA8000. This was disputed and was considered to be a breach of the United Kingdom’s 2015 Modern Slavery Act. According to Reuters, Shein was also in violation of a similar anti-slavery law in Australia. In an investigation by Swiss advocacy group Public Eye it was found staff across six sites in Guangzhou were found to be working 75-hour weeks, in breach of Chinese labor laws.

Most recently, TikTok videos on Shein went viral showing brand labels with the word ‘help’ on them. According to Shein, the videos contain ‘misleading and false information’, saying the retailer takes supply chain issues very seriously.

Drone deliveries are not far from becoming a scalable, globally acceptable solution for delivering parcels.

This technology provides a faster way for people to get what they need, without making roads more congested than they already are, and it has found new momentum since the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns.

A new study conducted by UVL Robotics, a Californian provider of AI-powered drone solutions, supports the idea that an autonomous 24/7 depot-to-parcel-station model could safely and efficiently fit in urban environments, including in areas of multi-story housing, where over two-thirds of the global population are expected to live by 2050.

UVL Robotics based its research on approximately a year of real-life operation of its own autonomous system in Muscat, the capital of the Sultanate of Oman, home to over a million people. Many tests were made for different verticals in logistics, from medicine to food delivery, and mail.

The company is the first player in the world to have obtained a full Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone operation licence from Oman’s civil aviation authority and local government.

Cheaper and faster

Last-mile delivery typically makes up nearly half of the total cost of shipping.

It’s an expensive market, projected to reach €50 billion by 2028, where drones could prove an efficient and cost-effective solution.

The UVL Robotics study shows that using drones to deliver parcels in urban environments soon will, at the very least, cost no more than having humans do the job.

On average, the receipt price of delivering a 3 kg grocery parcel will be $5 (€4.89) or less, in a scenario where six drones perform 192 quick trips per day within a 10 km radius.

This amount closely matches what it normally costs customers to have their parcels or food delivered by most major last-mile players, while at the same time being safer and up to three times faster.

Companies will be able to transfer deliveries from days to hours, and from hours to minutes, accessing remote and hard-to-reach areas like islands or mountains in just two years, experts say.

Technological advances in key areas like the Internet of Things (IoT), computer vision and battery cell density also allow a complete rethink of business-to-consumer logistics, automating the full cycle of deliveries.

Greener

With the boom of e-commerce, last-mile delivery is expected to grow 78 per cent by 2030, which could cause carbon emissions from delivery traffic to increase by over 30 per cent in the world’s 100 largest cities, according to a World Economic Forum report.

All-electric drone-based delivery solutions are greener than land-based alternatives in many ways.

Most of the deliveries being tested now are for packages small enough not to need transport by a van or truck, and UVL found that not having vehicles idling while loading/unloading parcels could lead to a 30 to 50 per cent reduction in associated CO2 emissions.

Cut price furniture retailer IKEA is investing €3 billion in its stores as it looks to capitalise on a boom in online shopping.

Ingka Group, the largest franchisee of the Swedish homeware chain, intends to invest €3 billion by the end of 2023, building new stores and remodelling existing ones to cope with “increasing demand for home deliveries”.

The money will be spent at locations around the world, Ingka Group retail manager Tolga Öncü told Reuters, although around a third will go towards testing new store formats and logistics set-ups in London.

Most of it will be in the existing stores, that will be about transforming, redesigning the purpose of the square metres.

The plans include a city-centre store on London’s Oxford Street, as well as a new distribution centre east of the British capital, Ingka Group said.

The warehouse sections of the retailer’s existing out-of-town stores could also become increasingly automated, Öncü said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, IKEA saw record demand for its furnishings as people spent more time at home.

At the same time, restrictions on movement sped up a growing tendency towards e-commerce among shoppers.

IKEA had already tried to adapt, with smaller, city-centre stores, a redesigned website and improved digital tools, but Öncü said the company needed to do more.

Shipping online purchases from the warehouse sections of nearby out-of-town stores will mean faster and cheaper deliveries, with lower emissions, than by shipping from a few logistics centres, he said.

Instead of building central warehouse capacities for online buys, it will be a smart idea to send it from IKEA stores.

One of IKEA’s traditional, “big-box” stores in Kuopio, Finland, has already been refitted to meet the new demands of online shoppers.

Following the rebuild, customers in Finland were able to receive their orders in half the time and at a reduced cost, Ingka Group said.

Walmart is buying up Memomi, an augmented reality (AR) optical tech company, to continue to offer virtual optical try-on capabilities and contact-free digital measurements.

Since 2019, Memomi has enabled digital measurements for all Walmart and Sam’s Optical customers, across more than 2,800 Walmart Vision Centers and 550 Sam’s Clubs, and also powers the Optical eCommerce experience on SamsClub.com.

Acquiring the AR company is the next step in Walmart’s journey of offering personalized, affordable access to optical care, the company said. This acquisition develops Walmart Health & Wellness’ strategy to deliver integrated, omnichannel healthcare, leveraging data and technology to improve engagement, health equity and outcomes.

Customers tend to be looking for digital access to care, in their homes, and purchasing eyeglasses is no exception. Memomi is a provider of technology to enhance virtual optical try-on experiences, helping customers virtually “try on” eyewear in real-time for a seamless, easy and fun omnichannel experience.

The acquisition is expected to close in the coming weeks, and Memomi employees will join the Walmart Global Tech organization.

The Memoni team are looking forward to joining Walmart and offering their innovations and user experiences to such a large scale both in-store and online, according to Salvador Nissi Vilcovsky, CEO, Memomi.