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US shopping app downloads on Black Friday reached a record 2.8M installs
Many U.S. consumers spent this year’s Black Friday sales event shopping from home on mobile devices. That led to first-time installs of mobile shopping apps in the U.S. to break a new record for single-day installs on Black Friday 2020, according to a report from Sensor Tower. The firm estimates that U.S. consumers downloaded approximately 2.8 million shopping apps on November 27th — a figure that’s up by nearly 8% over last year.
However, this number doesn’t necessarily represent faster growth than in 2019, which also saw about an 8% year-over-year increase in Black Friday shopping app installs, the report noted. This could be because mobile shopping and the related app installs are now taking place throughout the month of November, though, as retailers adjusted to the pandemic and other online shopping trends by hosting earlier sales or even month-long sales events.
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
The data seems to indicate this is true. Between November 1 and November 29, U.S. consumers downloaded approximately 59.2 million shopping apps from across the App Store and Google Play — an increase of roughly 15% from the 51.7 million they downloaded in Novenber 2019. That’s a much higher figure than the 2% year-over-year growth seen during this same period in 2019.
Another shift taking place in mobile shopping is the growing adoption of apps from brick-and-mortar retailers. During the first three quarters of 2020, apps from brick-and-mortar retailers grew installs 27%. This trend continued on Black Friday, when five out of the top 10 mobile shopping apps were those from brick-and-mortar retailers, led by Walmart.
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
Walmart saw the highest adoption this year, with around 131,000 Black Friday installs, followed by Amazon at 106,000, then Shopify’s Shop at 81,000. Combined, the top 10 apps saw 763,000 total new installs, or 27% of the first-time downloads in the Shopping category.
Because the firms are only looking at new app installs, they aren’t giving a full picture of the U.S. mobile shopping market, as many consumers already have these apps installed on their devices. And many more simply shop online via a desktop or laptop computer.
To give these figures some context, Shopify reported on Saturday it had seen record Black Friday sales of $2.4 billion, with 68% on mobile. And today, Amazon announced its small business sales alone topped $4.8 billion from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, a 60% year-over-year increase, but it didn’t break out the percentage that came from mobile.
Sensor Tower and rival app store analytics firm App Annie largely agreed on the top five shopping apps downloaded this Black Friday. They both saw Walmart again beating Amazon to become the most-downloaded U.S. shopping app on Black Friday — as it did in 2019. The two firms reported that Amazon remained No. 2 by downloads, followed by Shopify’s Shop app, then Target. However, Sensor Tower put Best Buy in fifth place, followed by Nike, while App Annie saw those positions swapped.
Image Credits: App Annie
The rest of Sensor Tower’s top 10 included SHEIN, Sam’s Club, Klarna, then Offer Up, while App Annie’s list was rounded out by SHEIN, Sam’s Club, Wish, then Offer Up.
The pandemic’s impact may not have been obvious given the growth in online shopping this year, but the recession it triggered has played a role in how U.S. consumers are paying for their purchases. “Buy Now, Pay Later” apps like Klarna were up this year, even breaking into the top 10 per Sensor Tower’s data. The firm also noted that many new shopping apps launched this year focused on discounts and deals, and retailers ran longer sales this year, as well.
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Xesto is a foot scanning app that simplifies shoe gifting
You wait ages for foot scanning startups to help with the tricky fit issue that troubles online shoe shopping and then two come along at once: Launching today in time for Black Friday sprees is Xesto — which like Neatsy, which we wrote about earlier today, also makes use of the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera to generate individual 3D foot models for shoe size recommendations.
The Canadian startup hasn’t always been focused on feet. It has a long-standing research collaboration with the University of Toronto, alma mater of its CEO and co-founder Sophie Howe (its other co-founder and chief scientist, Afiny Akdemir, is also pursuing a Math PhD there) — and was actually founded back in 2015 to explore business ideas in human computer interaction.
But Howe tells us it moved into mobile sizing shortly after the 2017 launch of the iPhone X — which added a 3D depth camera to Apple’s smartphone. Since then Apple has added the sensor to additional iPhone models, pushing it within reach of a larger swathe of iOS users. So you can see why startups are spying a virtual fit opportunity here.
“This summer I had an aha! moment when my boyfriend saw a pair of fancy shoes on a deep discount online and thought they would be a great gift. He couldn’t remember my foot length at the time, and knew I didn’t own that brand so he couldn’t have gone through my closet to find my size,” says Howe. “I realized in that moment shoes as gifts are uncommon because they’re so hard to get correct because of size, and no one likes returning and exchanging gifts. When I’ve bought shoes for him in the past, I’ve had to ruin the surprise by calling him – and I’m not the only one. I realized in talking with friends this was a feature they all wanted without even knowing it… Shoes have such a cult status in wardrobes and it is time to unlock their gifting potential!”
Howe slid into this TechCrunch writer’s DMs with the eye-catching claim that Xesto’s foot-scanning technology is more accurate than Neatsy’s — sending a Xesto scan of her foot compared to Neatsy’s measure of it to back up the boast. (Aka: “We are under 1.5 mm accuracy. We compared against Neatsy right now and they are about 1.5 cm off of the true size of the app,” as she put it.)
Another big difference is Xesto isn’t selling any shoes itself. Nor is it interested in just sneakers; its shoe-type agnostic. If you can put it on your feet it wants to help you find the right fit, is the idea.
Right now the app is focused on the foot scanning process and the resulting 3D foot models — showing shoppers their feet in a 3D point cloud view, another photorealistic view as well as providing granular foot measurements.
There’s also a neat feature that lets you share your foot scans so, for example, a person who doesn’t have their own depth sensing iPhone could ask to borrow a friend’s to capture and takeaway scans of their own feet.
Helping people who want to be bought (correctly fitting) shoes as gifts is the main reason they’ve added foot scan sharing, per Howe — who notes shoppers can create and store multiple foot profiles on an account “for ease of group shopping”.
“Xesto is solving two problems: Buying shoes [online] for yourself, and buying shoes for someone else,” she tells TechCrunch. “Problem 1: When you buy shoes online, you might be unfamiliar with your size in the brand or model. If you’ve never bought from a brand before, it is very risky to make a purchase because there is very limited context in selecting your size. With many brands you translate your size yourself.
“Problem 2: People don’t only buy shoes for themselves. We enable gift and family purchasing (within a household or remote!) by sharing profiles.”
Xesto is doing its size predictions based on comparing a user’s (<1.5mm accurate) foot measurements to brands’ official sizing guidelines — with more than 150 shoe brands currently supported.
Howe says it plans to incorporate customer feedback into these predictions — including by analyzing online reviews where people tend to specify if a particular shoe sizes larger or smaller than expected. So it’s hoping to be able to keep honing the model’s accuracy.
“What we do is remove the uncertainty of finding your size by taking your 3D foot dimensions and correlate that to the brands sizes (or shoe model, if we have them),” she says. “We use the brands size guides and customer feedback to make the size recommendations. We have over 150 brands currently supported and are continuously adding more brands and models. We also recommend if you have extra wide feet you read reviews to see if you need to size up (until we have all that data robustly gathered).”
Asked about the competitive landscape, given all this foot scanning action, Howe admits there’s a number of approaches trying to help with virtual shoe fit — such as comparative brand sizing recommendations or even foot scanning with pieces of paper. But she argues Xesto has an edge because of the high level of detail of its 3D scans — and on account of its social sharing feature. Aka this is an app to make foot scans you can send your bestie for shopping keepsies.
“What we do that is unique is only use 3D depth data and computer vision to create a 3D scan of the foot with under 1.5mm accuracy (unmatched as far as we’ve seen) in only a few minutes,” she argues. “We don’t ask you any information about your feet, or to use a reference object. We make size recommendations based on your feet alone, then let you share them seamlessly with loved ones. Size sharing is a unique feature we haven’t seen in the sizing space that we’re incredibly excited about (not only because we will get more shoes as gifts :D).”
Xesto’s iOS app is free for shoppers to download. It’s also entirely free to create and share your foot scan in glorious 3D point cloud — and will remain so according to Howe. The team’s monetization plan is focused on building out partnerships with retailers, which is on the slate for 2021.
“Right now we’re not taking any revenue but next year we will be announcing partnerships where we work directly within brands ecosystems,” she says, adding: “[We wanted to offer] the app to customers in time for Black Friday and the holiday shopping season. In 2021, we are launching some exciting initiatives in partnership with brands. But the app will always be free for shoppers!”
Since being founded around five years ago, Howe says Xesto has raised a pre-seed round from angel investors and secured national advanced research grants, as well as taking in some revenue over its lifetime. The team has one patent granted and one pending for their technologies, she adds.
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PayPal details its digital wallet plans for 2021, including crypto, Honey integration and more
PayPal this week laid out its vision for the future of its digital wallet platform and its PayPal and Venmo apps. During its third-quarter earnings call on Monday, the company said it plans to roll out substantial changes to its mobile apps over the next year to integrate a range of new features, including enhanced direct deposit, check cashing, budgeting tools, bill pay, crypto support, subscription management, buy now/pay later functionality and all of Honey’s shopping tools.
While PayPal had spoken in the past about bringing Honey’s capabilities into PayPal, CEO Dan Schulman detailed the integrations PayPal has in store for the deal-finding platform it bought last year for $4 billion, as well as a timetable for both this and the other app updates it has in store.
The Honey acquisition had brought 17 million monthly active users to PayPal. These users turned to Honey’s browser extension and mobile app to find the best savings on items they want to buy, track prices and more.
But today, the Honey experience still remains separate from PayPal itself. That’s something the company wants to change next year.
According to Schulman, the company’s apps will be updated to include Honey’s shopping tools, like its Wish List feature that allows you to track items you want to buy, price monitoring tools that alert you to savings and price drops, plus its deals, coupons and rewards. These tools will become part of PayPal’s checkout solution itself.
That means the company will be able to track the customer from the initial deal-hunting phase where they’re indicating their interest in a certain product, target them with savings and offers, then guide them through its checkout experience all in one place.
PayPal will also provide “anonymous demand data” to merchants based on consumer engagement with Honey’s tools to help them drive sales, the company said.
What’s more, PayPal put timeline on the Honey integrations and the other updates it plans to roll out over the course of the next year.
Bill Pay will start to roll out this month, PayPal said, with a large redesign of the digital wallet experience expected for the first half of 2021. Much of the new functionality will be arriving in the second quarter and the second half of the year, with a goal of having the majority of the changes rolled out by the end of next year.
This also includes PayPal’s plans for cryptocurrencies, announced at the end of October. The company aims to support Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin at first, initially in the U.S.
Speaking to investors during the earnings call, Schulman also noted when PayPal plans to bring crypto to more users and geographies. He said the ability to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies will first arrive in the U.S., then will roll out to international markets and the Venmo app in the first half of next year. (Currently, PayPal is offering U.S. users to join a waitlist for the new crypto features in-app).
Image Credits: PayPal
This change will allow PayPal’s users to shop using cryptocurrencies across the company’s 28 million merchants without requiring additional integrations on merchants’ part. The company explained this is due to how it will handle the settlement process, where users will be able to instantaneously transfer crypto into fiat currency at a set rate when checking out with PayPal merchants.
“This solution will not involve any additional integrations, volatility risk or incremental transaction fees for either consumers or merchants, and will fundamentally bolster the utility of cryptocurrencies,” said Schulman. “This is just the beginning of the opportunities we see as we work hand in hand with regulators to accept new forms of digital currencies,” he added.
PayPal also recently joined the “buy now, pay later” race with its new “Pay in 4” installment program that lets consumers split purchases into four payments. This debuted in France ahead of its late August U.S. launch and has since rolled out to the U.K. (as Pay in 3). This too, will become more integrated into the company’s apps in the months ahead.
Venmo — which the company expects to reach $900 million in revenues next year — will see the expansion of business profiles, and will gain crypto capabilities, more basic financial tools and shopping tools, as well as a revamp of the “Pay with Venmo” checkout experience.
Schulman referred to the company’s plans to overhaul its Venmo and PayPal apps as a “fundamental transformation,” due to how much new functionality they will include as the changes roll out over the next year as well as the new user experience — basically, a redesign — that will allow people to move easily from one experience to the next instead of having to change apps or use a desktop browser, for example.
PayPal’s earnings hadn’t excited Wall Street investors this week, sending the stock down on its lack of 2021 guidance. But the year ahead for PayPal’s digital wallet apps looks to be an interesting one.
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Millennial Media’s Paul Palmieri launches Tradeswell, a startup promising to fix e-commerce margins
A new startup called Tradeswell said it’s using artificial intelligence to help direct-to-consumer and e-commerce brands build healthier businesses.
The company is led by Paul Palmieri, who previously took mobile advertising company Millennial Media public and then sold it to TechCrunch’s corporate parent AOL (now Verizon Media). Afterwards, Palmieri founded Grit Capital Partners, but he told me he decided to join Tradeswell as a co-founder and CEO because he was so excited about the vision.
Palmieri said that just as Millennial helped independent app developers get smarter about advertising, Tradeswell gives upstart e-commerce companies the data they need to compete with “the big platform behemoths.”
It’s no secret that a number of direct-to-consumer companies have struggled to make a profit due to challenging unit economics. Palmieri suggested that one reason for this is the fragmentation of their tools and data.
“If you’re selling something like Campbell’s Soup, you want to figure out, how is your tomato soup business and your chicken soup business?” Palmieri said. “Today, brands are saying, ‘How’s my Amazon business? How’s my Shopify business? How’s my Shopify business on Instagram?’ ”
So rather than relying on those platforms for data, Palmieri suggested brands want an independent platform that they trust to bring everything together, “where it’s a combination of a Bloomberg terminal plus a trading platform.”
Tradeswell’s AI focuses in six key areas of an e-commerce business: marketing, retail, inventory, logistics, forecasting, lifetime value and financials. Palmieri suggested that in some cases (like ad-buying), Tradeswell will replace existing software, while in other cases it will integrate.
“Think of us as a neural AI layer, where [a brand] might have different platform relationships, which are the fingers, and we’re the AI brain,” he said. “We’re giving brands insights and forecasts: If you make this change, we anticipate XYZ will happen.”
In some cases, like the aforementioned advertising, Tradeswell can also support full automation, so that merchants don’t have to worry about “setting up and tearing down hundreds of campaigns.”
The key, Palmieri said, is that the platform has access to the business’ full financials, so it can optimize for net margins, rather than simply driving the most impressions or clicks or sales.
While Tradeswell is only coming out of stealth mode today, it’s already been working with more than 100 brands. For example, Steve Tracy of Red Monkey Foods and San Francisco Salt Company said in a statement that the startup’s “unique, comprehensive, algorithmic approach has helped us grow sales, identify commercialization opportunities and forecast far more accurately.”
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How COVID-19 transformed the way Americans spend online
Ethan Smith is founder and CEO of Graphite, an SEO and growth marketing agency based in San Francisco. Ethan has served as a strategic advisor to Ticketmaster, MasterClass, Thumbtack and Honey.
COVID-19 has transformed the way Americans use their phones and the way they spend their time and money online. These shifts present both a number of challenges and a raft of opportunities for savvy growth marketers.
We’ve seen COVID-19 affect a number of verticals. A number of industries have taken a hit (like music streaming and sports), while some are expanding due to the pandemic (groceries, media, video gaming). Others have found distinctive ways to adjust the way they position and sell their product, allowing them to take advantage of changes in buyer behavior.
The key to being able to read and react to changes in this still-tumultuous time and tailoring your growth marketing accordingly is to understand how public sentiment is reflected in new purchasing behaviors. Here’s an overview of the most important trends we’re seeing that will allow you to adjust your growth marketing effectively.
By the numbers: A sheltering-in-place economy
Virtually all of the data we’ve seen shows a marked difference in buyer behavior following the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic on March 11, 2020. With consumers encouraged to stay home to deter the spread of COVID-19, it’s no surprise that the biggest change is the spike in online activity.
Image Credits: Branch (opens in a new window)
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What grocery startup Weee! learned from China’s tech giants
When Larry Liu moved to the U.S. in 2003, one of the first challenges he experienced was the lack of Chinese ingredients available in local groceries. A native of Hubei, a Chinese province famous for its freshwater fish and lotus-inspired dishes, Liu got by with a limited supply found at local Asian groceries in the Bay Area.
His yearning for home food eventually prompted him to quit a stable financial management role at microcontroller company Atmel and go on to launch Weee!, an online market selling Asian produce, snacks and skincare products.
Like other players in grocery e-commerce, the five-year-old startup has seen exponential growth since the coronavirus outbreak as millions are confined to cooking and eating at home. Nearly a quarter of Americans purchased groceries online to avoid offline shopping during the pandemic, according to Statista data. Online grocery giants Instacart and Walmart Grocery boomed, both hitting record downloads.
In a Zoom call with TechCrunch, Liu, who’s now chief executive of Weee!, said that COVID-19 played a “very important role” in his company’s recent growth, and paved its way to profitability.
“It happened a lot faster than we expected, but we were growing rapidly with even more ambitious plans for expansion prior to COVID-19,” he said. “People are buying more because restaurants are closed. Many are first-time users of grocery delivery.”
The startup’s revenue is up 700% year-over-year and is estimated to generate an annual revenue in the lower hundreds of millions of dollars.
Online grocery, the WeChat way
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The best investment every digital brand can make during the COVID-19 pandemic
Steve Tan
Contributor
Contributor
Steve Tan is a Singapore-based serial entrepreneur and full-stack digital marketer with over 14 years of hands-on experience who is also the CEO and founder of Super Tan Brothers Pte. Ltd, which operates e-commerce, software, logistics, marketing, educational and investment companies around the globe.
Intuitively, stores that sell online should be making a killing during the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, everyone is stuck at home — and understandably more willing to shop online instead of at a traditional retailer to avoid putting themselves and others at medical risk. But the truth is, most smaller online stores have seen better days.
The primary challenge is that smaller shops often don’t have the logistics networks that companies like Amazon do. Consequently, they’re seeing substantially delayed delivery timelines, especially if they ship internationally. Customers obviously aren’t thrilled about that reality. And in many cases, they’re requesting refunds at a staggering rate.
I saw this play out firsthand in April. At that point, my stores were down 20% or in some cases even 30% in revenue. Needless to say, my team was freaking out. But there’s one thing we did that helped us increase our revenue over 200% since the pandemic, decrease refund requests and even strengthen our existing customer relationships.
We implemented a 24-hour live chat in all of our stores. Here’s why it worked for us and why every digital brand should be doing it too.
Avoid the common ‘unreachability’ frustration
When I started my first online store in 2006, challenges that bogged my team down often meant that my team’s first priority became resolving those challenges so that we could serve our customers faster. But admittedly, when these challenges came up, it became more difficult to balance communicating with our customers and resolving the issues that prevented us from fulfilling their orders quickly.
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Online marketplace OfferUp raises $120M, acquires top competitor letgo
OfferUp, a top online and mobile marketplace app, announced this morning it’s raising $120 million in a new round of funding led by competing marketplace letgo’s majority investor, OLX Group, and others. As a part of the deal, OfferUp will also be acquiring letgo’s classified business, with OLX Group gaining a 40% stake in the newly combined entity.
Other investors in the new round include existing OfferUp backers Andreessen Horowitz and Warburg Pincus. The funds will be put toward continued growth, product innovation and monetization efforts, OfferUp says.
The round will close with the closing of the acquisition, which is expected to take place sometime in May. To date, OfferUp has raised $380 million.
The acquisition will see two of the largest third-party buying and selling marketplaces — outside of Craigslist, eBay and Facebook Marketplace, of course — become a more significant threat to the incumbents. Together, the new entity will have more than 20 million monthly active users across the U.S. For consumers, the deal means they’ll no longer have to list in as many apps when looking to unload some household items, electronics, furniture or whatever else they want to sell.
“My vision for OfferUp has always been to build a company that helps people connect and prosper,” said Nick Huzar, OfferUp CEO, in a statement about the acquisition. “We’re combining the complementary strengths of OfferUp and letgo in order to deliver an even better buying and selling experience for our communities. OLX Group has unparalleled expertise and clear success with growing online marketplace businesses, so they’ll be a great partner as we continue to build the widest, simplest, and most trustworthy experience for our customers.”
OfferUp also acknowledged that mid-pandemic is an odd time to announce such a deal — especially at a time when the COVID-19 outbreak is affecting its own employees, its partners, and the buying and selling community itself. And this will continue for some time.
However, Huzar positions the deal as one that will allow the business to grow, despite the current state of affairs.
“This news helps us to continue to innovate and grow, in spite of these challenging times, and continue to deliver on that promise,” Huzar noted, in a company blog post.
For now, the OfferUp and letgo apps will remain separate experiences and no disruptions to any sales will be made. Consumers will also be able to download both apps to iOS and Android devices for the time being, too.
But soon, both sets of users will gain access to a larger network of buyers and sellers, along with nationwide shipping options, and trust and safety problems. We understand this will involve allowing users of both sets of apps to see more posts and interact with more buyers and sellers — so some sort of merging of the two networks is at play here. There will be additional changes to improve the user experience for all users in the future, as well, but the company isn’t sharing details on that today.
Letgo is bringing to the table an app with more than 100 million worldwide downloads, so there is a potential to reactivate some of the lapsed users who aren’t currently shopping or selling on its marketplace today. The two apps were often neck-and-neck in terms of their app store category rankings, though on iPhone OfferUp has maintained a slight lead. (See App Store and Google Play charts below.)
However, letgo’s business outside of North America will be separately owned and operated as part of the OLX Group, the companies said.
“Letgo and OfferUp have always shared the same core vision for how large America’s secondhand economy can become — harnessing tech innovation to bring about an extraordinarily positive impact on consumers’ wallets and also on the environment,” said letgo co-founder Alec Oxenford. “Bringing our apps together moves us much closer to that vision,” he added.
Prior to this deal, OfferUp had seen a number of executive departures, including the exit of Engineering lead and VP Peter Wilson in 2017, VP of Product Chloe Harford in 2018, VP of Employee Experience Deb Nielsen in 2018, subsequent VP of Employee Experience Sarah Bilton in 2019, and Chief Experience Officer Jerry Howe in January 2020. CFO Rodrigo Brumana has also left, which was previously unreported. The company’s interim CFO is Chief Growth Officer Ian Fliflet, and OfferUp is actively hiring for a new CFO, we’re told.
Huzar characterizes these changes as part of the challenges with growing a startup and getting the right people into place.
“As the company grows up, so must leaders and so must the culture. I think a lot of times when you’re scaling businesses…you go through evolutions where leaders really need to evolve and change,” he says. “If you look to Bill Carr, for example, our COO, you know he helped build out Amazon Video from nothing to over 2,000 employees. We had nobody in the halls of OfferUp that had seen that scale before,” Huzar added.
There’s some admiration for Amazon’s culture, as well.
“There are clearly things that Amazon has done very well — like their ability to innovate at scale is unbelievable,” Huzar says. “We do think people [who] come out of Amazon have great startup DNA. They’re very scrappy. They dive deep into the business and understand things. They can think big. There’s a lot of value I think from that business that I really appreciate,” he added.
OfferUp also just hired former ChannelAdvisor VP Mark Vandegrift as head of e-commerce this month, as the company focuses on growth and scale.
But not all employees have been on board with these exec shakeups. More than a handful of employee reviews on Glassdoor and chatter on networking app Blind speak to various company culture issues, women being treated inequitably, negative office politics, and attrition — including among senior management.
In addition to the COVID-19 crisis, OfferUp may have needed to merge to scale and compete with the marketplace giants. User growth was slowing, for instance — the userbase was 42 million annual users in 2018 that only grew to 44 million in 2019. Presumably, slower revenue growth had followed. (Huzar declined to speak to current revenue and valuation.)
A combination of OfferUp and letgo could help to strengthen numbers outside of coastal cities, like Seattle, L.A., and Miami, where OfferUp was historically strong. Letgo was stronger in other parts of the country, like the Midwest, Huzar says. OfferUp will also bring its shipping business to letgo, which could be particularly helpful now as people are looking to sell household items for extra cash.
The deal is still subject to regulatory approval. If given, the combined businesses will be operated by OfferUp, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash. Huzar will continue to be CEO of OfferUp and chairman of the board. Oxenford, meanwhile, will join the board and serve as a senior advisor to OLX Group and Prosus.
Because the deal is still in the process of closing, the companies can’t speak to any team changes, including potential layoffs as a result of overlapping positions or other redundancies, we’re told.
Updated 3/25/20, 4:00 PM ET with additional quotes and background, following Huzar interview.
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Grocery delivery apps see record downloads amid coronavirus outbreak
As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the U.S., grocery delivery apps have begun seeing record numbers of daily downloads, according to new data from app store intelligence firm Apptopia. On Sunday, online grocery apps, including Instacart, Walmart Grocery and Shipt, hit yet another new record for daily downloads for their respective apps, the firm says.
Comparing the average daily downloads in February to yesterday (Sunday, March 15), Instacart, Walmart Grocery and Shipt have seen their daily downloads surge by 218%, 160% and 124%, respectively.
Typically, these apps (except for Shipt) see tens of thousands to as many as 20,000+ downloads per day. But on Sunday, Instacart saw more than 38,500 downloads and Walmart Grocery saw nearly 54,000 downloads, the firm says. Shipt, though hitting record numbers, saw only 7,285 downloads on Sunday. To some extent, its lower figures could be due to Target’s move to integrate Shipt’s grocery delivery service, which it owns, into its main app.
In fact, the Target app has also broken records for daily downloads, the report found. On Sunday, Target’s app saw more than 53,100 daily downloads; a month ago, it was seeing 25,000+.
Walmart very recently announced it would merge its grocery delivery service into its main app, as Target has done. But for now, consumers are still seeking and downloading its standalone grocery app at record levels.
These grocery delivery apps are in demand more than ever during this health crisis.
With government mandates to practice “social distancing,” U.S. consumers have been stocking up for long weeks to be spent at home. Stores were cleared of key supplies, like toilet paper, and several also saw long lines and crowds as panic-buying set in. Grocery delivery and pickup, meanwhile, presents an easier option — as well as one where you could limit your exposure to other people. With grocery pickup, consumers only have to interact with a single store employee from their curbside parking space. And with grocery delivery, most orders can simply be left on the doorstep with no person-to-person contact required.
Several grocery delivery services, including Instacart and others, promoted the fact they would add a “contactless” delivery option, which helps contribute to the huge sales boost. On Thursday, Instacart said its sales growth rates for the week was 10 times higher than the week before, and had increased by as much as 20 times in areas like California, New York, Washington and Oregon.
Apptopia’s report didn’t analyze the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on Amazon’s grocery delivery business, which includes Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods deliveries. This is more difficult to do because Amazon grocery orders aren’t placed inside a dedicated app, as with Instacart. However, Amazon confirmed a technical glitch on Sunday affected online orders through both its grocery delivery services, which the company attributed to the increase in online shopping.
“As COVID-19 has spread, we’ve seen a significant increase in people shopping online for groceries,” an Amazon spokeswoman explained, in a statement shared with Bloomberg. “This resulted in a systems impact affecting our ability to deliver Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market orders [on Sunday night]. We’re contacting customers, issuing concessions, and are working around the clock to quickly to resolve the issue,” they added.
Amazon Prime is also expected to experience delays and shortages as consumers stock up on non-grocery household items, the company says.
But even as grocery delivery booms, the market for food delivery apps has not seen the same results.
Despite promises for contactless delivery from several providers, including Uber Eats, food delivery apps are not experiencing a similar surge in daily downloads. According to Apptopia, the food delivery market earlier in March was starting to cool off. It later began to pick up but then cooled off again as consumers realized the expense of ordering food compared with home cooking, and because some consumers view restaurant delivery as not being as safe as cooking at home.
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Alma is a Klarna-like payment startup that lets you buy now and pay later
Meet Alma, a French startup that helps you offer a new payment option for your expensive goods. Like Klarna, clients can choose to pay over three or four installments. But the comparison stops here, as Klarna isn’t available in France. Alma just raised a $14.1 million (€12.5 million) funding round.
Idinvest, ISAI and Picus Capital are investing in today’s funding round. Additionally, Alma has opened a $19.2 million (€17 million) credit line to finance merchant payments.
As a merchant, when you integrate Alma in your payment flow, your customers can choose Alma to make it less intimidating. Instead of getting charged when you pay, you can choose to buy now and pay over three or four installments. Merchants get paid instantly.
“We handle risk and cash advance in house,” co-founder and CEO Louis Chatriot told me. “When it comes to the risk of non-payment, we have implemented a series of verifications, filters and algorithms in order to detect fraud and high-risk profiles.”
The company creates multiple categories depending on your profile. It can ask for more information if Alma has some doubts, such as API access to your bank statement. Assessing risk is particularly difficult in France, as there’s no central credit scoring system.
Merchants can choose to pay the processing fees in full — 3.8% of the transaction for a payment in three intallments, 4.2% for a payment in four installments. But they also can share the processing fees with the end customer.
Alma is compatible with most e-commerce platforms, such as Shopify, Magento and Prestashop. Merchants can also offer Alma as a payment option in retail stores.
Over 1,000 merchants are using Alma already — the startup processes tens of millions of euros of transactions per year. Clients include Bobbies, Asphalte, Cowboy, Weebot, The Cool Republic and The Socialite Family.
With today’s funding round, the company wants to attract more merchants and launch two new payment options — pay later and a more traditional option to pay now. In addition to that, Alma currently redirects customers to its own checkout page. The startup wants to integrate its payment widget directly on e-commerce websites.
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