Yael Kochman
October 31, 2024
It’s that time of year when retailers and e-commerce brands dive headfirst into the holiday season frenzy!
In a competitive season packed with sales opportunities, every brand and retailer out there is competing to grab customers’ attention. As the holiday shopping season gears up, led by Black Friday and Cyber Monday, online retailers face the challenge of breaking through the endless wave of deals and discounts.
The other overwhelm that retailers and brands may have is trying and testing a variety of tools, plugins and software tools that promise to boost their sales and convert their audiences into high intent purchasers. This is where we come in, having scoured through a list of the top startups and innovations to bring you the ones that will truly make a difference to your ecommerce for the holiday seasons 2024.
As each brand and retailer is distinct owing to its product offering, operations, audience demographic, and more, if you need help finding the best technologies for your brand, we are happy to help guide you. Let’s chat!
The 2024 holiday season is forecasted to reach record levels in online spending, with e-commerce sales expected to grow by over 8% compared to 2023, reaching approximately $241 billion in the U.S. alone.
As the holiday shopping season approaches, e-commerce is expected to reach unprecedented levels during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the extended “Cyber Week.” According to NRF, there will be a record-breaking $979.5-989 billion U.S. holiday sales forecast for 2024, kicked off by Black Friday and Cyber Monday, making up 8% of total holiday sales, growing a significant 5% since last year.
And now with the onset of AI-driven personalization and promotions playing a key role, something we previously discussed in one of our most popular tracks during Re:Tech disrupt as it highly impacts all aspects of retail and retail tech in the holiday season. As shoppers are showing a strong preference for online deals, with over 64% planning to shop online this holiday season. Flexible payment options like “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) are more popular than ever, projected to peak on Cyber Monday with nearly $993 million in BNPL spending. Mobile shopping also continues to rise, set to account for over half of all online holiday purchases, marking a significant shift in consumer preferences.
To help retailers and brands maximize their holiday sales, here are some innovative retail tech startups that streamline each phase of the e-commerce journey. Should you need our assistance in tailoring which ones best match you business model, we’d be happy to help.
The biggest trend in retail tech in the holiday season is related to making each shopper feel like the online world is their own, which is why personalization is so key. Every shopper now wants to feel that their shopping is tailor-made for them, which only comes with solid data analytics and personalization solutions.
Twik: Twik uses AI to personalize e-commerce websites on an individual basis, adapting content, products, and recommendations in real time to each shopper. This real-time personalization, adapting website content to each shopper’s behavior, is useful for indecisive shoppers during the holiday season. It leads to a seamless shopping experience that can increase conversion rates, particularly critical as holiday shoppers often browse multiple sites before deciding. Personalization is a powerful retail tech driver during the holiday season, with customers more likely to buy when products feel tailored to them.
Anagog: Anagog’s AI technology tracks and predicts real-world behavior, using it to inform customer preferences and personalize online experiences. By using such AI to analyze shopper behavior, Anagog delivers contextual insights, allowing brands to create dynamic experiences based on location and real-time behavior. For holiday shopping, this is especially useful for delivering timely, personalized deals that cater to shoppers’ immediate needs. This helps retailers push the right deals at the right time, converting intent into sales during peak shopping periods, making it a dependable retail tech platform for the holiday season.
Kahoona: Kahoona manages customer data securely while personalizing the shopping experience, a key tool as privacy laws become more stringent. Using Gen AI, Kahoona enables hyper-personalization in a cookieless world, allowing brands and online retailers to turn the 96% of website visitors who remain unidentified into high intent buyers. When the customer is interacting with the site, Kahoona’s AI predicts a user’s purchase probability, pricing level, demographics and other metrics previously obscured. As such, it unlocks AI predictive approach to hyper-personalization for marketing, on-site personalization, retail media, CDP and analytics. This focus on privacy-conscious personalization can make or break a holiday shopping experience, especially with privacy-aware shoppers. Personalized shopping experiences can significantly increase conversions and are particularly impactful during high-traffic Black Friday and Cyber Monday seasons.
Kimonix: Kimonix helps ecommerce brands optimize sales and inventory by showing the right product, in the right place, at the right price. A game changer in personalization, the AI merchandising manager automatically optimizes and personalizes all merchandising aspects of an online store. It promises to boots profits by up to 30% with advanced merchandising that fulfills business goals, fuels conversion, and keeps customers coming back, which is key for promotional pricing changes during the holiday season.
One prime way to use retail tech in the holiday season is to drive higher engagement. Driving engagement is critical to retaining audiences on your site, as they likely swim through a plethora of online stores and shops, many of which look may tend to look similar if still embracing a more static, traditional ecommerce type look and feel.
buywith: Specializing in video commerce, buywith brings the online shopping experience to life with different applications of video commerce: shoppable videos, live shopping and one-to-one shopping. Much of the boost in conversion comes from the myriad of uses of shoppable videos on various marketing platforms, as well as live shopping, allowing customers shop alongside influencers or friends, increasing engagement and conversion. With live demos and real-time interaction, buywith taps into the trend of video commerce, perfect for driving purchases during the holiday season. The best use cases are for when a brand has longer form videos that need to be spliced into shoppable video snippets to be used in social media, product pages, paid social, and any form of marketing, to drive home a product demo or sales message more efficiently.
Loox: Loox helps build trust by integrating user-generated photo and video reviews into e-commerce sites that are hosted on Shopify storefronts. These add authenticity and reliability to online shoppers who are constantly targeted with ads, and thereby tend to drive conversion. By leveraging customer reviews, it enhances credibility, encouraging conversions, a critical feature when holiday shoppers are making quick purchase decisions.
How brands and retailers demonstrate their products helps drive conversion by peaking the interest of users, and giving them a more dynamic way to understand the product and its benefits. Plus, its always great to wow shoppers with smart retail tech in the holiday season!
Hexa: Hexa brings products to life through 3D and augmented reality (AR) visualization. By allowing shoppers to “try” products before they buy, Hexa boosts customer confidence—a huge asset in reducing returns and increasing conversion rates. Lower returns are a key pain point in ecommerce, and reducing these is a prime KPI ecommerce retailers and brands can work towards during an already busy holiday season.
D-ID: This platform offers AI-driven video creation, helping brands humanize their content through dynamic, realistic videos. Common amidst a growing number of beauty and fashion retailers, the realistic renditions are both cost saving for brands and retailers (versus creating actual production with real people), but also effective in communicating messaging to audiences. D-ID’s video capabilities make it easier for retailers to stand out in the competitive holiday market, especially on platforms where video content thrives.
WeR: weR is an AI+AR software that helps retailers optimize in-store sales conversions and logistical operations.The software allows shoppers to filter and search for products and find them on the shelf. This enhances the shopping experience through profound visual understanding, with a patent pending solution and provides a scalable solution for the AR store.
The pain point for many growing brands and retailers comes down to having a solid grasp on analytics, all the way from which products sell best, to how, to inventory management and avoiding stockouts. Retail tech can come to the rescue here during the holiday season with platforms like the following.
Nexite: Nexite uses data from physical interactions, like in-store behaviors, to inform online strategies. Nexite’s technology provides real-time inventory insights, helping retailers manage stock efficiently and avoid overstock or shortages. Real-time inventory management is essential for ensuring popular items remain available during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. By bridging physical and digital insights, it allows for data-informed holiday promotions and product stocking.
Belle AI: Designed to enhance digital catalog and content creation, Belle AI uses AI-driven technology to generate high-quality, consistent product images and descriptions. By streamlining content production, Belle AI enables brands to quickly and effectively enhance their digital presence, optimizing the product journey from inventory to customer engagement. By optimizing digital catalog production, Belle AI enables brands to accelerate their holiday marketing campaigns and showcase seasonal promotions, making products stand out in a crowded market and increasing engagement during peak shopping periods.
ShopperAI: ShopperAI enables retailers to understand in-store behaviors through computer vision, translating these insights into online customer experiences. The technology is designed to integrate seamlessly with in-store cameras and can collect insights and recommendations about in-store activities, like shelf positioning, product assortment, store layout and design and more, particularly in light of which products sell better and why so. As this ties closely to inventory and fullfilment, this technology can inform holiday sales strategies, offering data-backed insights into what products may attract the most holiday attention.
Adapt: Adapt’s uniqueness lies in its AI-powered solution and state-of-the-art recognition algorithms which allow Adapt to auto-match any product, ensuring comprehensive coverage across all retail sectors worldwide. It identifies and prioritizes the top trending products with a demand score, streamlining the selection process for optimal sales performance. As we had previously discussed when highlighting this stellar startup, the platform simplifies inventory management by cross-referencing current products, allowing users to quickly identify and order trending items from preferred suppliers. With a focus on effective promotion, pricing, and competitor monitoring, Adapt empowers businesses to grow, leveraging a user-friendly dashboard to measure sales performance and stay abreast of weekly consumer trends. Inevitably, this is key for a season full of a variety of discounts and promotional offers for the holidays.
Renbizz: Rebizz focuses on the circulatory economy with a rental and resale model. With a flexible people-product relationship that aligns with consumer expectations, it builds on customer loyalty by providing personalized rewards and offers based on behavior. It also turns returned inventory into alternative revenue streams. During the holiday season, when customer acquisition spikes due to Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers, Renbizz helps retain these new shoppers post-holidays with targeted loyalty programs.
AI has become a mainstay in many retail tech startups, and is primarily used to facilitate operations or areas that require more human guidance. In terms fo retail tech startups that aid in the holiday season, they similarly allow brands to offer more and do more, without necessarily investing more, making the season hopefully more efficient to manage. As AI was a huge component of all of their success, do check out our recap of how AI is transforming retail in our review of one of our most successful tracks during Re:Tech Disrupt here.
Bria: Bria specializes in generative AI for visual content, offering a solution that creates high-quality, on-brand visuals quickly and at scale. During the holiday season, Bria can help retailers to keep up with increased demand for personalized visual marketing content without overloading their creative teams. Its ability to generate diverse images that resonate with holiday themes can boost customer engagement in ads, social media, and email campaigns.
Tasq.ai: Tasq.ai specializes in AI-driven data annotation and model evaluation, providing scalable, diverse training data for machine learning. Touted as the first NanoTasking Data Platform providing data creation and curation by dynamic mass allocation of global, diverse human judgements, it provides human guidance at scale without diminishing quality. During the holiday season, retailers can leverage Tasq.ai to enhance their AI models with more accurate and comprehensive data, ensuring that personalized recommendations, customer insights, and automated responses are optimized for high traffic and varied consumer needs. With Tasq.ai’s support, retailers can improve their AI’s accuracy and reliability, leading to a smoother and more responsive customer experience during peak shopping times.
Marketeam: Marketeam.ai is a GenAI startup that has developed the first proprietary Foundation Language Model for marketing (FLM, DALM), and is training autonomous AI agents to work collaboratively with humans as an extension to the marketing team to manage business’ marketing end-to-end. As such, Marketeam leverages AI to create targeted marketing campaigns, optimizing customer segmentation and predictive insights for better customer reach. For the holidays, it can analyze vast amounts of data to identify customers likely to engage with specific holiday offers, leading to a more efficient allocation of marketing budgets and higher conversion rates. With AI-driven campaign creation, Marketeam enables retail marketers to personalize messaging, creating a seamless and impactful customer experience… all without increasing your team size!
Some brands need to improve their in store operations to match the prowess of their online stores. This is where retail tech platforms can also help in the holiday season.
iCape: iCape’s AI driven, hardware agnostic solution enables bricks and mortar environments to digitize and generate data of their physical customer behavior as that of online customer. The solution enables bricks and mortar environments to digitize and generate data of their physical customer behavior as that of online customer, aided with a mobile application and dashboard platforms that convert this valuable data into actionable insights.
AriGo: AriGo is a store optimization platform that recommends optimal placements for new products, enables real time modifications, advises o actiosfor new product introductions, issues out of stock (OOS) alerts, and much more. AriGo’s transformative AI engine, AriSto is a game-changer revolutionizing how stores and shelves are optimized, which is key for the erratic holiday season when these can be unpredictable.
Moonshot: Moonshot uses AI analyzes an ecommerce site’s behavior and measure performance versus comparable stores, construct variants using Gen-AI, and automatically changes the website’s front-end, with no developer or code needed. As such, it is able to evaluate on real users, running multiple tests swiftly and simultaneously. By predicting which items will sell quickly, brands can continuously optimize their site for a better performance, both during the holiday season and beyond.
Cluster: Cluster brings together the most granular, cross-channel e-commerce market and product data, so marketplaces and online brands can create the best buying experience for their shoppers from tracked channels like Amazon, eBay and more. It specializes in Amazon storefront optimization, empowering brands to enhance their Amazon presence through advanced data analytics and automated adjustments. Their solutions focus on boosting discoverability, managing inventory levels, and increasing conversion rates by continually refining storefront performance based on dynamic market data. During the holiday season, such storefront optimization tools are essential for brands aiming to maximize visibility on Amazon. Their data analytics and automated adjustments ensure optimal product discoverability and stock availability, helping brands capture holiday demand and convert more sales.
Bright Insights: Bright Insights from Bright Data addresses these issues by providing real-time, AI-driven ecommerce insights across all marketplaces, languages, and countries. During the holiday season, retailers and brands face intense pressure to stay competitive, managing challenges like dynamic pricing, shifting demand, and stock optimization, and such capabilities can set this platform apart from others. It also delivers access to metrics like competitor pricing, consumer trends, and market share, retailers can respond swiftly to market shifts, making strategic adjustments that ensure they remain agile and competitive throughout the holiday season.
Noogata: A data intelligence platform, Noogata empowers brands hosted on Amazon, to analyze shopping patterns and behaviors. As both startup brands and established brands have Amazon storefronts today, it is key in enabling them to drive better sales. By identifying trends and predictive insights, it enables retailers to forecast demand and create more targeted holiday marketing campaigns.
With a couple of weeks left until the holiday rush, you still have time to pick one or two retail tech recommendations for the holiday season from the list above and implement in time to make a difference on this holiday season’s sales.
These startups and innovations highlight the increasingly sophisticated ways brands and retailers can engage shoppers, personalize experiences, and streamline operations. With record-breaking sales expected, brands equipped with the right tech will be positioned to capture a significant share of the holiday season’s online shopping activity.
If you need guidance on which retail tech and innovations will be the best fit for your brand, we are happy to help. Let’s chat!
