Retail’s Summer Rundown

The summer is over, or as over as it needs to be for most of us to count it. Sure, there are a few “official” weeks to the season left, but with school back in session, pumpkin-flavored drinks making the rounds and Apple set to introduce the world to a whole new iPhone later this week, it’s beginning to look like autumn, everywhere you go.

Whether that is good news or bad news is a matter of personal taste. But whether Labor Day marks the end of one’s favorite or least favorite time of year, there is something about the season that tends to leave everyone feeling a bit off their game.

Perhaps it is the ebbing off of the heat or some lasting mental hangover from having spent too many days at the beach basting in the sun. Whatever it is, there is something almost slow feeling in the average human mind in the first day or two back from vacation.

But here at PYMNTS, we’d hate to think of anyone feeling a bit groggy or off their game. So, we decided to make you the retail rundown — the cheat sheet for the things in retail you need to be ready to discuss this fall.

What were the big three things sharp retail watchers should have seen this summer?

Walmart And Jet Attempt Taking Off Together

Few eCommerce startups enter the marketplace like Jet.com did, but then, few eCommerce startups have Jet.com’s pedigree. Founded by Marc Lore — one of the few and proud who took on Amazon and lived to tell the tale — Jet.com was created to beat Amazon. Lore’s first startup, Quidsi (parent of Diapers.com and Soap.com), managed to thwart Amazon’s attempt to crush it so well that Amazon bought it.

But last summer, Lore was back with Jet.com — an eCommerce marketplace that was going take a run at Amazon’s crown with a fancy algorithm that would price shoppers’ whole cart, instead of the individual items in it, on the basis of how far the goods had to ship or how fast they would get there. Consumers who shop efficiently (with goods clumped into a single warehouse, large baskets and flexible shipping goals) would save. Early on, there was also a $50 membership, though that was removed less than a month after launch.

While Jet garnered lots of attention — and even made some notable ground in customer acquisition — it was very expensive progress, and as summer began, the common wonder was: Would Jet have enough cash on hand to take on Amazon, considering how fast it was going through it?

Enter Walmart.

Walmart surprised everyone this summer with the news that it will be acquiring Jet.com for $3.3 billion in cash and stock.

This deal will mark the biggest eCommerce buy in U.S. history and is a sure sign that Walmart is not kidding around about maintaining its dominant retail position in the face of Amazon’s growing influence.

Marc Lore comes part and parcel with the deal. He will join Walmart as the firm’s top eCommerce executive, and he will replace Neil Ashe who joined Walmart in 2012.

The deal will be paid over time. The split will be $3 billion in cash and $300 million in Walmart stock. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2016.

The deal dovetails with the billions Walmart has already spent on eCommerce upgrades, including the construction of seven new distribution centers, the hiring of additional staff in eCommerce operations and the rollout of digitally enticing services, like Walmart Pay.

Now, the question is: Can the biggest retailer in the world — now powered by an upstart’s algorithm — challenge Amazon at its own game?

Bots

A year ago, very few people in the world were talking about the chatbot.

This summer, since Facebook announced its big bots play in April at its F8 conference, commerce news has been nearly dominated by bots, as it seem there has almost been a race to see who could get on Messenger with their talky AI.

And Facebook was certainly big in pushing that. By June, it had announced a suite a new tools for developers building chatbots to make the tech retail-friendly.

Said tools are powered by Facebook’s chatbot technology and were designed to make it possible for Messenger’s 900 million users to order goods and services within the app, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And by July, with 11,000 chatbots built and running on Messenger, it is hard to argue that merchants didn’t hear the call.

“We’re looking forward to building a future of amazing Messenger experiences powered by the community of developers, businesses and people who use Messenger every day,” Facebook VP of Messaging Products David Marcus said in a post announcing the figures.

It is worth noting, however, that Facebook may have brought all the fanfare, but it is far from alone working the bot revolution. Kik, Slack and Microsoft have all built bot platforms of their own of late.

It is also worth nothing that just because merchants build them doesn’t mean their consumers want them. The U.K.’s Aceworkgear rolled out bots earlier this year.

Then, it rolled them right back when it realized the bots were confusing its customers more than helping them.

Small Signs Of Hope

When the Q1 results for retail came out in early spring this year, there was not a lot of joy to be had in Mudville.

Retailers named Walmart, more or less, did alright in Q1, as did TJX. Everyone else had an awful lot of explaining to do to their investors, with no small amount of reassuring thrown in for good measure.

This time around?

Well, while the Q2 figures were not exactly a sign from above that all had returned to normal in the world of retail, there was perhaps some room to believe that a retail thaw managed to poke through after the long and shockingly frozen solid winter season.

The Q1 winners stayed on track. Walmart and TJX once again showed across-the-board growth. But the winners’ circle was a bit less narrow. Best Buy, despite wide predictions it was about to take a serious hit, managed to eke out a respectable report.

But even some of the losers from last time around notched decent results. Gap Inc. showed some signs of improvement, as did the long-suffering department store segment.

So, what did we learn on our vacation? Amazon now has two firms for the price of one gunning for it, bots are everywhere whether we want them or not and physical retail may be less dead than first reported.