Commerce

Early Thanksgiving online sales numbers are up 7% YoY to $15.6B, on par with pre-pandemic trends

Thanksgiving weekend has long been seen as the traditional start to the most important sales period for retailers, and so far, the indication is that we’re in for a strong holiday season for e-commerce. Salesforce is tracking activity in real time and has just put out its first figures for the day. It says that […]

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Entrepreneur Marc Lore on ‘founder mode,’ bad hires, and why avoiding risk is deadly

Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold two companies for billions of dollars, collectively. Now he plans to take his food delivery and take-out business Wonder public in a couple of years at an ambitious $40 billion valuation. We talked with Lore in person in New York recently about Wonder and its ultimate aim of making

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Zepto raises another $350M amid retail upheaval in India

Zepto has secured $350 million in new funding, its third round of financing in six months, as the Indian quick-commerce startup strengthens its position against its competitors ahead of a planned IPO next year. Indian family offices, wealthy individuals, and asset manager Motilal Oswal invested in the round, which maintains Zepto’s $5 billion valuation. Motilal

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Perplexity introduces a shopping feature for Pro users in the U.S.

AI-powered search engine Perplexity is venturing into e-commerce. On Monday, the company debuted a new shopping feature for its paid customers in the U.S. which offers shopping recommendations within Perplexity’s search results as well as the ability to place an order without going to a retailer’s website. With the move, Perplexity is taking on Google

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Text marketing firm Blip secures backing from SoftBank, Microsoft

People prefer texts over phone calls — especially when it’s a company on the other side. According to one survey, two-thirds of consumers say they’d switch to a company that offered texting as a contact option. With the text-message marketing industry expected to grow to $12.6 billion by 2025, it’s not surprising that vendors like

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Amazon takes on Temu and Shein with discount ‘Amazon Haul’ store

Amazon has rolled out its answer to the discounted, low-cost storefronts of Temu and Shein. The Amazon Haul store, currently available on the mobile app or mobile web browser exclusively, offers similar mass-produced, discounted items, most of which ship from China. It’s a departure from Amazon’s long-established reputation as a powerhouse of rapid delivery times

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Patreon gets gift subscriptions in time for the holidays

Creator subscription platform Patreon is making it a bit easier for fans to support their favorite creators this holiday season. The creator membership platform announced on Wednesday that it will roll out gift subscriptions, as well as functionality for creators to offer discounts for membership sign-ups. The gift subscription feature had previously been in testing

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Fleek, a marketplace for wholesale second-hand clothes, sews up $20M

Second-hand clothing has exploded as a category over the past couple of decades. A London startup that’s built a first-of-its-kind platform to improve how this very fragmented industry operates is now announcing funding to double down on the opportunity.  Fleek, an online marketplace that connects second-hand clothing wholesalers with those who sell it at retail,

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Swiggy’s public debut will test India’s appetite for $1B+ IPOs

Swiggy’s upcoming IPO on Wednesday will finally give many analysts a public comparable for what has been long considered to be the Indian internet stock: Zomato. It will also test the nation’s appetite for IPOs that can scale past the $1 billion mark.  For its IPO, Swiggy has already secured $1.4 billion from institutional investors

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