Monthly ecommerce #5

Welcome to Grinteq Monthly — a destination for the hottest happenings in the ecommerce world. In this month’s edition: Apple’s upcoming feature to make payments seamless, Shopware’s external funding, Google’s fresh lawsuit, and Salesforce Safety Cloud to help businesses get together safely.

Apple Unveils Mobile Payments with Tap to Pay feature

A fact: 90% of US merchants offer Apple Pay to their clients. To extend Apple payment capabilities, the brand revealed a new Tap to Pay feature. It lets retailers take digital payments with no need to develop mobile apps or integrations.

How it works: a merchant installs a supporting mobile app and holds the iPhone near the customer's one to complete the payment. This means a big shift for small brands and individual entrepreneurs, who now will be able to offer secure and fast checkout to their customers.

Stripe will start suggesting Tap to Pay to its clients from its launch in spring. Other leading payment processors and apps have joined the list within a year.

The feature will be released for iPhone XS and later models of Apple devices, including the Apple Watch.

Shopware Gets its first outside $100M funding

Shopware, an ecommerce software provider, has announced to receive $100 million funding. It's the first time in more than 20 years of its operation that the platform raised external investment.

Due to it, the company will focus on international growth and building new industry partnerships. Though Carlyle and Paypal are among investors, the Hamann brothers, the co-founders of Shopware, will remain its co-CEOs and major stakeholders.

Shopware is a german open-source platform offering highly-adaptable ecommerce solutions to brands worldwide. Established in 2000, it's now the 7th most popular platform in the Enterprise category, powering 100K ecommerce brands (BuiltWith).

Google Sued for $2.4BN for Manipulating Search Results

PriceRunner, a price comparison service provider, charged Google for competition grounds. According to PriceRunner, Google exploits its supremacy as a search engine market leader to position its own results at the top.

The company demands $2.4 billion to be seeking damages for the profits it could not make in Britain since 2008 and also in Denmark and Sweden since 2013.

This's the second time the European Commission accused Google of antitrust policy violations. In 2017 Google fined a record $2.7 billion for abusing its dominance in search results and demoting rival services.

Salesforce Introduces Safety Clouds for Managing Employees Health

Salesforce, the global CRM provider, has announced Safety Clouds. The solution helps companies and communities create safer experiences.

After 2 years of endless pandemic limitations, companies start to return to offline activities. Safety Cloud allows communities to manage health validation initiatives and organize all the data in one place. Get Playbook.

Among its capabilities are:

  • sharing health status like proved Covid test or vaccination.
  • direct upload or connection to other digital health passes like CLEAR or SMART Health cards
  • getting health status information from third parties like Covid test results directly from a lab
  • automate routine processes like mailing pre-event Covid testing kits or sending alerts to a team automatically
  • collect all necessary data in a single view

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