These Are the Brands Americans Trust the Most

Who do you trust? A recently released survey showed which brand name products reign supreme among American shoppers.

BrandSpark International determined the most trusted brands in America by asking American shoppers about their favorites. The market research firm surveyed 38,000 people between Oct. and Dec. 2015 and recorded their “top of mind” answers. “The annual BrandSpark Most Trusted Awards honors the brands Americans trust most, those they would recommend to friends and neighbors,” president and CEO Robert Levy said in a press release. “This award boosts shoppers’ confidence when making a purchase decision in store aisles.”

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How To Get Paid Faster from Home Depot

Home Depot is a great company – but let’s face it, they do what a lot of big businesses do: They pay kind of slow. I know this because I have clients who do business with them. Typical terms are around 60 days. These terms are not uncommon when dealing with larger companies. And yet, it’s a huge issue for smaller companies.

That’s because smaller companies need cash. By the time one of my clients sells product to Home Depot or a larger company all of their money has been spent on buying the raw materials, producing the product, paying people, maintaining overhead and shipping the items…and then it’s another 60 days until the cash comes in. Big businesses have greater cash reserves and large credit facilities made available by banks who are more than happy to lend them money. Small companies don’t have these resources at their disposal. They just wait.

Until now. There is an enormous change happening in payments processing, a change that will impact any small business doing business with larger companies. Technology is driving this change and a company named Taulia is right in the middle of it. Taulia, founded by former entrepreneurs who wrote payment processing software for SAP, raised about $15 million in additional financing last January and is now valued at close to $1 billion – and there are rumors that they’re considering a public offering in 2016.

“This company makes a lot of sense,” says Josh Hannah of Matrix Partners, one of Taulia’s earliest investors and a board member. “I love companies that find legacy-related inefficiencies that have persisted for years then make them efficient.”

How is Taulia solving these problems? Take Home Depot (or John Deere, EBay, Grainger, Salesforce, PayPal, Coca-Cola Bottling Consolidated, Hallmark Cards, Johnson Controls, Graphic Packaging, Pacific Gas & Electric – all customers, according to the company). You’re a small company selling product or providing services to one of these giants. You ship your product/do your service, send your invoice…and wait to get paid. Meanwhile, other bills need to be paid. Your bank is offering you less credit (if any credit at all). Factoring and micro-finance options are expensive. You’re trying to grow but you’re restricted. You need the cash now.

But what if Home Depot comes back to you and says “Look little guy – we value you and we’re happy to pay you earlier. Just find your invoice in our online portal and click the button that says ‘pay earlier.’ It’s as simple as that.” And it really is that simple. Taulia’s software is written to integrate with their customers’ back end systems. A portal is provided to the small business suppliers, either by Taulia or from the large company. If a small supplier chooses to be paid earlier the payment will be made, net of a discount. The discount is ultimately split between the big company and Taulia. I’m simplifying a few things here, but you get the point.

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Instacart Confirms $220 Million Investment

Instacart has confirmed its giant $220 million investment led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which Re/code previously reported values the grocery delivery startup at $2 billion. Now the real work begins.

Instacart, whose service lets people order groceries from local stores such as Whole Foods and Costco and have them delivered on the same day, faces a long list of challenges to live up to the hype that comes with such a deal.

One challenge will be managing a colossal — and growing — network of contractors who are either stationed in stores picking the groceries off the shelves or delivering the orders to customers’ doors. CEO Apoorva Mehta confirmed that Instacart is experimenting with outsourcing some deliveries to third-party companies, but declined to give more details about which companies or how heavily Instacart is moving into this new model. Such a move may help Instacart deal with demand when it moves into new cities, or perhaps it’s being done for financial reasons. But it’s always risky to outsource part of a consumer-facing experience.

In the future, Instacart may also have to find a model that works well outside of major metropolitan areas if it wants to build a true nationwide business. Mehta said the company’s current valuation is based exclusively on operating in metropolises. He also hinted that the company could choose to expand to international urban centers before going to rural America.

But he said Instacart may decide to tweak its model if and when the time comes to expand into smaller cities and towns.

“Maybe you don’t need to do one-hour delivery,” he said. “Maybe it’s same-day delivery. Maybe it’s also click and collect,” a model in which customers order groceries online and pick them up outside the store, which Instacart has started experimenting with.

Instacart also will need to continue to secure close relationships with grocers, in part so the inventory it shows on its site and app is the inventory that it ends up delivering to its customers. Mehta says his company is building software that some grocers are using to reflect a more accurate picture of their inventory online.

Lastly, the company will have to be smart about expansion into categories outside of groceries, which Mehta said will happen eventually with the help of the gobs of new cash he just secured. Mehta may also have to convince one of his investors that it’s a necessary move.

“From my point of view, we just need to be the supermarket’s best friend,” Michael Moritz, chairman of Sequoia Capital and an Instacart board member, said in an interview with Re/code. “We can be a fantastic supermarket delivery service and just have a fantastic company — end of sentence.”

That’s pretty definitive. I then asked him if that means he’s not a fan of Instacart’s desire to enter other categories?

“I cannot imagine running out of opportunities to deliver groceries to Americans who want to shop online,” he answered.

Moritz’s caution may come from experience. He was a board member of Webvan, the grocery delivery startup that went bust in 2001 because it expanded too quickly and couldn’t control its costs.

Mehta declined to specify a timeline for expansion into non-grocery categories or provide details of which categories.

“This is an enormous market and we have so much to do here. I’m not surprised [Moritz] said that and clearly it’s a great observation,” Mehta said. “The way I think about it is: We have strategic reasons why we’ll go into other categories and experiment and prove out other things. Of course this is a decision we’ll make as a team, as we need to.”

In addition to Kleiner Perkins, new investors in the round included Thrive Capital, Comcast Ventures, Dragoneer Investment Group and Valiant Capital.

Link to article here

Costco ‘shocked’ by one-day sales of $3.5M on Alibaba’s TMall site

Costco will expand more heavily into China after it sold $3.5 million worth of goods over a 24-hour period with the help of Alibaba.

In October, the Seattle-area retail giant announced it was partnering with Alibaba to enter the China market for the first time. In doing so, Costco planned to sell some of its merchandise, including some of the Kirkland brand products, to consumers visiting the Tmall e-commerce platform.

As part of an Alibaba announcement today regarding Tmall Global’s performance, Costco said it sold $3.5 million worth of merchandise on Singles Day, which is China’s equivalent Cyber Monday.

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Costco works with Alibaba to limit risks as it enters China

CHICAGO — By selling directly to Chinese consumers on Alibaba’s platform, a move announced last week by the American retailer Costco Wholesale, it aims to employ local knowledge and a low-cost structure to avoid missteps that caused even Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, to stumble in China.

Many global retailers opening in China have struggled to find product mixes and store designs that appeal to local customers. In addition to Walmart, others like Best Buy and eBay have fallen short of expectations in one of the fastest-growing consumer markets.

Costco’s virtual storefront on the Alibaba site Tmall is designed to help the company study consumer shopping habits with no brick-and-mortar costs and fewer risks, signaling a new approach to expanding in China.

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Home Depot, Lowe’s Bring the Internet of Things to DIYers

Home improvement stores, destinations for the do-it-yourself consumer, have long sold the hammers, nails and tools people need to fix up their houses.

Now large chains such as Home Depot and Lowe’s are selling virtual tools — sensors, Wi-Fi enabled appliances and software — to help those customers monitor and control their homes from their smartphones.

It’s an attempt to tap into the Internet of Things — technologists’ term for a network of connected sensors, devices and objects. In its early stages, the Internet of Things attracted tech companies such as Nest, the connected-thermostat manufacturer bought by Google in January for $3.2 billion, and Smart­Things, a District-based start-up selling home automation kits.

 

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Ex-Amazon Manager Gets Funding to Help Retailers Battle His Former Employer

Guru Hariharan spent half-a-decade at Amazon.com AMZN +0.67%, but says he had little face-to-face contact with the man he considers his idol, CEO Jeff Bezos. A former junior engineer who rose up the company ranks before departing in 2009, Hariharan only ever talked to Bezos once in his five-and-a-half year Amazon career, answering questions for him and his senior executives during a three-hour annual review.

“If you think about labor as the most painful thing in life, that surpassed it probably,” says Hariharan, who remembers spending several weeks preparing a six-page document on the successes of Amazon Webstore, a service offered by the Seattle company to other business building online retailing sites.

Long removed from those ulcer-inducing meetings, Hariharan is hoping that his new startup, Boomerang Commerce, can turn the tables and cause Amazon’s CEO some headaches as it aids the e-commerce giant’s competitors. A big data analytics company that provides online retailers with price-tracking services, the Sunnyvale, Calif. firm announced on Wednesday that it had raised $8.5 million from Madrona Venture Group and Trinity Ventures that will help it expand its operations and offerings.

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Lowe’s channels science fiction in new Holoroom

The home improvement store announced Wednesday that it has built a “holoroom,” which uses 3-D technology and augmented reality to allow users to “walk” through a floor plan of their home (or dream house). In the 20-foot by 20-foot specially designed room, customers can move anything from furniture to toilets and swap out floors and paint colors with the swipe of a finger on an iPad.

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Home Depot to roll out new Customer Order Management System

Home Depot announced on its Q1 earnings call that it has gone live with its first in-store implementation of a new customer order management system (OMS), with plans to roll it out across its U.S. supply chain by the end of 2014.

The system “is designed for greater visibility and execution of special orders by our associates and a frictionless experience for our customers,” said Craig Menear, Home Depot’s president of U.S. retail, during the earnings call.

“When customers place an order they can understand the status of that order, including where it is in the process of manufacturing,” Menear said. “And our associates will have visibility into store arrival so they can better answer consumers’ questions during that process. It’s also a coordinating effort that drives back into our manufacturers and our suppliers, allowing coordination all the way through the supply chain.”

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Home Depot Cleaning Up This Spring

Home Depot ( HD ) is one of the most fully mature companies on the market, which is to say, they have been around long enough that they have already expanded rapidly in the areas conducive to rapid expansion, fallen into slow growth in areas conducive to slow growth and failed entirely in areas conducive to failure. Their cavernous stores are loved by professionals and do it yourselfers, as well do-it-for-me-ers, and while they do well when people are buying houses, they do just as well when many people are merely renovating. Home Depot shares the market with Lowe’s ( LOW ), of course, and the stores are so similar that they are starkly differentiated only by Home Depot’s deep commitment to a witheringly flat, stale shade of orange.

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