Today in Retail: Grocers Take On Instacart; Walmart Launches Back-to-School Sale

Today in retail, Grove brings its sustainable cleaning products into three more retail chains, while Conn’s CEO sees payment options for everyone. Plus, Pinterest adds new shopping features, grocery sales are critical to Walmart’s last-mile transformation, U.S. retail spending was up 9.5% in June and Amazon pushes forward with livestream shopping.

Pinterest Rolls Out New Shopping Features

In the wake of an 87% increase in the number of merchant catalogs on its platform, Pinterest is rolling out features to offer a better shopping experience.

Last year, the number of Pinterest users who engaged with “shopping surfaces” on the platform increased by 215%, according to Jeremy King, the company’s senior vice president of engineering. The new shopping features, which include API for Shopping, allow brands and retailers to reach “high-intent Pinners during the earliest stage of their shopping journey with the most updated catalog data,” he said.

The company said it is boosting its investment in shopping and measurement features, such as catalog and product metadata management, to allow for more efficient, improved data quality for products. The API has led to a 97% accuracy level for price and availability data.

Grocers Turn to White-Label Solutions to Capture Instacart’s Wallet Share

Wholesaler Great Lakes Foods announced Wednesday (July 6) a partnership with white-label, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) online grocery solution eGrowcery to offer its independent supermarket operator customers access to the company’s online purchasing and fulfillment tools.

When third-party marketplaces were the only option for independents to get online, several issues arose threatening the long-term viability of the model. For one thing, the commissions that aggregators such as Instacart charge can be steep, especially when grocers are already operating with very narrow margins. For another, surveys revealed that shoppers were more loyal to aggregators than to the grocers themselves. Additionally, third parties stood between grocers and even the most basic data about their customers, such as contact information.

Grocery Sales Shaping Walmart’s Last-Mile Evolution

For the two biggest players in retail, grocery may well be the defining category that determines how the last mile evolves.

As reported by PYMNTS, the battle is a pitched one, as Walmart and Amazon joust day in and out for consumers’ mindshare and wallet share. Amazon has been investing heavily in its years-long bid to build out logistics and its Subscribe & Save program.

The category is a critical one for Walmart, too: It garners more than 50% of its revenues from food and beverage sales. That translates to about an 18% share of spending on those items, overall, compared to Amazon’s less than 2%.

Walmart Matches Target’s Back-to-School Blitz but Passes on Amazon’s Prime Day

Just one day after Target launched an early and expanded back-to-school promotion, Walmart has matched its rival’s offer with a student-linked sales campaign of its own.

In a blog post written Thursday (July 7) by the head of Walmart’s U.S. hardlines business, the retailer presented shoppers with a 6-point check list and a wide-ranging array of products including traditional school supplies, such as backpacks and pencils, as well as electronics, apparel, footwear and home furnishings — all with a bias toward value, reflecting the current economic climate.

Mastercard SpendingPulse: US Retail Sales Up 9.5% YoY in June

As prices continue to spike for essential items, U.S. consumer retail spending was up 9.5% year over year in June, according to the latest Mastercard SpendingPulse.

SpendingPulse measures in-store and online retail sales across all forms of payment, excluding automotive purchases. The latest report showed that retail sales excluding auto and gas were up 6.1% year over year, with rising prices for food, fuel and other necessities playing a role in the increase.

Excluding auto and gas, in-store spending was up 11.7% year over year in June, with eCommerce growing 1.1%. Overall, eCommerce sales are about double what they were in June 2019.

Grove Expands Its Sustainable Cleaning Products to Kohl’s, Giant Eagle, Meijer

In the latest example of the trend toward sustainability and an at-home lifestyle, environmentally friendly cleaning product company Grove Collaborative Holdings has expanded its retail store footprint, according to a Thursday (July 7) press release.

After debuting last year in Target stores, the products are now available at Kohl’s, Giant Eagle and Meijer. Grove, which is committed to becoming 100% plastic-free by 2025, has more than doubled its product assortment in all Target stores and on Target.com.

Conn’s CEO Looks Beyond Current Headwinds, Sees ‘Payment Options for Everyone’

It’s been 11 months since Chandra Holt was appointed CEO of Conn’s and just six months since the furniture, appliance and electronics retailer unveiled what she calls “our big, hairy, audacious goal” of becoming a multibillion-dollar omnichannel business by 2025.

Yet for all that action and ambition, this chain of 160 stores that dot the sunbelt from Virginia to Nevada has chosen a path forward that is directly tied to its 130-year-old roots.

Although Conn’s stores may look similar to many of its larger rivals and also carry many of the same products, its business model and customer base are distinctly different. For starters, Holt said, “we over-index in customers that have subprime FICO scores,” noting that Conn’s in-house financing currently accounts for 50% of the total business, while 6 in 10 of its shoppers are what she calls “financial access customers.”

Amazon Lures Influencers to Fire Up Livestream Shopping in US

Livestream shopping has taken off in China but has failed to launch in the U.S. market, something Amazon is looking to change by attracting the right influencers to promote goods on its platform. Chinese shoppers have embraced live eCommerce, but the U.S. market is still emerging and trying to gain traction, according to analysts, Financial Times reported.

Douyin, China’s version of short video app TikTok, has more than tripled sales year over year, selling more than 10 billion products since livestream shopping launched. Without a dominant livestream shopping force in the U.S., Amazon is looking to take the lead and become the central destination and fend off competition from TikTok, Instagram, and smaller newer startups like WhatNot, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, FT reported.