It’s No. 1 in the Top 1000, Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American online retailers. Amazon is also No. 3 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database, which ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by 2023 third-party GMV.

“We already have made these investments, technologies,” Witcher said, speaking from Amazon’s perspective. “How do we create incremental revenue by applying those sunk costs to new opportunities for others to take advantage of those costs where we can benefit in a financial way? This has been part of Amazon’s strategy for quite a while.”

Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, spoke about different SaaS initiatives on a recent earnings call with investors for its fiscal third quarter ended Sept. 30, 2023.

Amazon’s fastest-growing sectors are ads and seller services, said James Risley, research data manager and senior analyst at Digital Commerce 360.

It shows that “while Amazon’s online stores are still growing well, its third-party sellers are the real growth leaders for the company,” Risley said. “Online stores only grew 2.0% in the first half of the year, though, and grew 7.0% in Q3, so the momentum is strong for first-party sales as Amazon potentially shifts its focus ahead of government pressure and a more savvy consumer who prefers direct relationships with sellers.”

Supply Chain by Amazon changes the fulfillment game

Two key Amazon software-as-a-service programs Jassy addressed were Supply Chain by Amazon and a growing generative AI initiative. New Amazon generative AI technology gives merchants the ability to create web pages and product imagery “with nearly endless flexibility,” calling it, along with Supply Chain by Amazon and AWS “the democratization of technology.”

Jassy said the company has seen “very positive early response from sellers to Supply Chain by Amazon.”

Supply Chain by Amazon is a fully automated set of services in which the mass merchant handles:

• Inventory pickup
• Shipping
• Customs clearance
• Ground transportation
• Inventory storage
• Replenishment

Amazon has been making “huge investments” in supply chain for more than a decade, Witcher said. The idea was that Amazon would eventually reach scale and those investments would pay off, he added.

“I think you’re starting to see that now, particularly because they’re starting to outsource delivery as a service,” Witcher said.

Amazon already has the infrastructure in place, so these are sunk costs, he said.

Amazon software as a service (SaaS) can change the game for third-party sellers

“Generative AI developments should be given more weight than Amazon let on,” Witcher said. “Using this innovative technology really gives Amazon the operational efficiencies in inventory planning and route planning that they need to realize the ROI of all these investments they made in supply chain.”

Witcher said AWS was the proof of concept that Amazon can create incremental revenue from its existing services and offerings. He said Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) “clearly” works for a lot of sellers.

“Now, Amazon’s removing the pain points of being a small-business seller,” Witcher said. “Nobody gets into the retail business saying, ‘I can’t wait to build web pages’ or do photoshoots. That’s not why they get into selling products. They want to sell products. Amazon understands this, and so they’re using this in a way to make it easier for third-party sellers to have that Amazon relationship and make more reasons to say why they should have the Amazon relationship. I think that’s really what this comes right down to.”

Generative AI technology and the Amazon ecosystem

Witcher said Amazon understands that mom-and-pop shops and small companies don’t necessarily have the time or skill set to generate web pages and product imagery.

“The ability to use generative AI just helps those sellers,” Witcher said. “There’s a compounding effect to this, which is: The easier it is for me to build websites, the easier it is for me to upload product pages. Then, it’s easier for me to sell on Amazon. Well, if I’m already selling on Amazon, then it’s easier for me to give Amazon my supply chain, pay for them to do my supply chain, pay for them to have Amazon Pay on my website. It just bakes you deeper into the ecosystem of Amazon as you start to find value in the things Amazon offers.”

He added that this is “certainly a differentiator” for Amazon compared with other marketplaces. However, he said, he expects other retailers to follow suit.

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The distributor operates 569 locations in 42 states and generated sales of $27.62 billion in 2022. It’s staging a full rollout of a new digital platform in early 2024 that will generate “hundreds of millions of sales,” said chief financial officer Peter Jackson on the company’s recent third quarter earnings call.

“The other big important piece for us is digital, and we think that we already have a lead. We think we’re already the easiest to do business with, we’re the most efficient, we’ve got the best technology and we’re about to take a big leap in that space that we think is going to be both hugely beneficial to our customers, but also make us even more the supplier of choice and the partner of choice in this industry,” Jackson told analysts.

MyBLDR: Builders FirstSource’s digital platform

Builders FirstSource’s digital platform, called myBLDR, is built on digital infrastructure and modeling applications from Paradigm technology. It gives builders and contractors access to:

• Project document storage tools
• 3D homes previews
• Online material estimates and ordering
• Features to check delivery status, job scheduling and other tasks

“As we look forward to our full product launch in Q1, we have made it a priority to drive digital adoption across our operations. MyBLDR.com is designed to create efficiencies for both our team members and customers by offering improved transparency and engagement in the homebuilding process,” CEO Dave Rush told analysts, according to a transcript from SeekingAlpha.com. “Taken with our proprietary estimating and configuration tools, this gives our customers more control over the entire building process, saving both time and money for our customers and their clients, while making the homebuilding process more personalized.”

For the third quarter ended Sept. 30, Builders FirstSource posted net sales of $4.5 billion. That’s a 21.3% decrease from sales of $5.76 billion in the prior year. Net income was $451.45 million. That compares with net income of $738 million in third quarter of 2022.

“The feedback’s (about myBLDR) been great. We’re really pleased with the tools and the development successes,” Jackson says. “We’re meeting milestones and feeling really good about the product that we’re going to have to show the market. And we’re excited that the market’s going to be able to benefit from the tools to improve efficiency and take costs out.”

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The Top 1000 is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American online retailers. Amazon is also No. 3 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database, which ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by 2023 third-party GMV. The latest analysis of the industry as a whole is published within the 2023 Global Online Marketplaces Report.

How much did Amazon make in Q3 sales?

Amazon sales in Q3 grew 13% over $127.1 billion in 2022. In North America, Amazon sales increased 11% year over year to $87.9 billion. And internationally, Amazon sales grew 16% year over year to $32.1 billion. Sales from AWS, or Amazon Web Services, increased 12% year over year to $23.1 billion.

“We saw our highest quarterly worldwide operating income ever,” said chief financial officer Brian Nowak on an Oct. 26 call with investors. It increased $8.7 billion year over year.

Amazon operating income grew at a much larger percentage than total sales compared with Q3 2022 — 343%. That’s nearly quadruple Amazon’s operating income in the year-ago period, growing to $11.2 billion in the third quarter from $2.5 billion. AWS operating income was $7 billion, up from $5.4 billion in Q3 2022.

Fulfillment and supply chain investments pay off

“Our cost to serve and speed of delivery in our stores business took another step forward, our AWS growth continued to stabilize, our advertising revenue grew robustly, and overall operating income and free cash flow rose significantly,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement. “The benefits of moving from a single national fulfillment network in the U.S. to eight distinct regions are exceeding our optimistic expectations, and perhaps most importantly, putting us on pace to deliver the fastest delivery speeds for Prime customers in our 29-year history. The AWS team continues to innovate and deliver at a rapid clip, particularly in generative AI.”

In addition to taking a regional approach to its fulfillment network, Amazon has begun offering Supply Chain by Amazon, which Jassy referred to as “a fully automated set of supply chain services.”

Supply Chain by Amazon can:

• Pick up inventory from manufacturing facilities around the world
• Ship it across borders
• Handle customs clearance and ground transportation
• Store inventory in bulk
• Manage replenishment across Amazon and other sales channels
• Deliver directly to customers

And Amazon sellers can do all of that without “having to worry about managing their supply chain,” Jassy said.

Brendan Witcher, vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester, said Amazon is one of the best in the business at delivering. Because of that, he said, it will have the challenge of setting customer expectations to always deliver on time. Witcher said it was notable that Amazon is using AI to help with inventory planning and optimizing driver routes.

“The real litmus test for Amazon’s regional supply chain will be the ability to deliver one-day and same-day delivery this holiday season with this level of growth,” Witcher said. “Fortunately, some of the volume should spread out a bit given that holiday really began with Amazon’s customers with the October Deal Days sale.”

Amazon powers up its generative AI technology

Jassy echoed points about generative AI from Amazon’s Q2 call with analysts in August. He broke down Amazon’s generative AI into three layers.

1. Lowest layer: Compute to train large language models (LLMs).
2. Middle layer: LLMs as a service.
3. Top layer: Applications that run the LLMs.

The middle layer, Jassy said, allows customers to customize those models “using their own data but without leaking that data back into the generalized LLM.”

“In these early days of generative AI, companies are still learning which models they want to use, which models they use for what purposes and which model sizes they should use to get the latency and cost characteristics they desire,” Jassy said in the Oct. 26 call with analysts. He said Amazon Bedrock “is the easiest way to build and scale enterprise-ready generative AI applications.”

“It’s pretty exciting what they’re doing for third-party sellers on the capabilities of generating web pages, generating product imagery for third-party sellers,” Forrester’s Witcher said. “They really do understand the small-business seller, to be quite blunt.”

How is Amazon doing financially 2023?

For the fiscal third quarter ended Sept. 30, Amazon.com Inc. reported:

• $143.1 billion in Amazon Q3 sales. That’s up 13% from $127.1 billion in the year-ago quarter.
• Amazon sales in North America in Q3 grew 11% year over year to $87.9 billion.
• International sales increased 16% year over year to $32.1 billion.
• AWS sales in Q3 grew 12% year over year to $23.1 billion.

For the nine months ended Sept. 30, Amazon reported:

• $404.8 billion in Amazon sales. That’s up from $364.8 billion in the year-ago period.
• Year-to-date Amazon operating income reached $381.2 billion. That’s up from $355.7 billion in the comparable period last year.
• International sales grew to about $91 billion, up from $83.5 billion.
• AWS sales grew to nearly $66.6 billion from $58.7 billion in the comparable period in 2022.

Percentage changes may not align exactly with dollar figures due to rounding. Check back for more earnings reports. Here’s last quarter’s Amazon earnings article.

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“Our transformation focus is enhancing our digital offering, which is another way that we can more effectively connect our customers and suppliers to grow their businesses collectively and profitably,” CEO Sandy Douglas told analysts on a recent year-end earnings call. “Digital transformation is the key enabler to fully activate the commercial opportunities in our ecosystem, opportunities that many of the large retail chains are activating now.”

United Natural Foods makes a digital transformation push

In the past two years, United Natural Foods has hired Louis Martin to the newly created position of chief digital and transformation officer. It also opened Marketplace by UNFI, a B2B marketplace.

But at least in fiscal 2023, the digital efforts have yet to take full effect. United Natural Foods does not break out ecommerce sales. But for the fiscal year ended July 29, the distributor’s other sales were flat at $2.253 billion. That compares with $2.183 billion in fiscal 2022. That includes international customers outside of Canada, foodservice, ecommerce, the military, and other channels.

In comparison, total sales grew to $30.27 billion. That’s up 4.6% in fiscal 2023 from $28.92 billion in fiscal 2022. Net income was $24 million. That compares with $248 million in the prior fiscal year.

In fiscal 2023, United Natural Foods pumped $290 million in overhauling its distribution center operations and other technology, according to the company’s just-filed annual report. In fiscal 2024, United Natural Foods plans to infuse another $400 million into its ongoing digital transformation. It wants to “automate, optimize and expand our distribution network, and finance our technology platform investments,” the company says.

A big part of United Natural Foods’ major spending on better technology and operations is efficiency. It gives its 30,000 grocers faster and easier access to ordering and receiving orders, Douglas told investors.

“Our newest value-added supplier program, UNFI Insights, provides suppliers with granular understanding of sell-through data across natural and conventional channels directly through the myunfi.com supplier portal,” he told analysts, according to a transcript from SeekingAlpha.com.

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Home Depot ranks No. 4 in the Top 1000, Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of North America’s online retailers by web sales. Lowe’s ranks No. 12 in the Top 1000.

Home Depot revenue and sales

Home Depot reported sales declined 2% year over year to $42.9 billion in the second quarter. Comparable sales were down 2%, too. Net earnings also declined, to $4.7 billion in 2023 from $5.2 billion in Q2 of 2022.

The home improvement retailer managed to grow online sales slightly, even as total sales declined. That also represents a change from Q1 of 2023, when online sales declined 2.9% year over year.

“We know the vast majority of our customers engage with us in an interconnected manner. Whether it be through project inspiration and research, transacting, fulfillment or support, our customers blend the physical and digital world,” Billy Bastek, Home Depot executive vice president of merchandising, told investors in a call.

Just under half of online orders were fulfilled through stores, he said. 

Lowe’s revenue and sales

Lowe’s reported $25 billion in total sales for the quarter, declining 8.9% from $27.5 billion in 2022. Net earnings also declined, to $2.7 billion from $3 billion. Comparable sales also decreased 1.6% year over year, Lowe’s said. 

Strong online sales and professional customers also offset lumber deflation and consumers pulling back on discretionary spending, Lowe’s said. About half of online sales are picked up in stores, the retailer said.

“Our investments in our Total Home strategy continued to drive growth across Pro and online this quarter,” Marvin Ellison, CEO and chairman, said in a statement.  “And we are excited by our recent launch of same-day delivery nationwide and the expansion of our rural merchandising framework to roughly 300 stores.”

Big purchases declined

Lowe’s and Home Depot executives both pointed to a pullback in consumer spending on large DIY projects in the quarter. Meanwhile, consumers remained willing to spend on smaller projects. 

“While there was strength in categories associated with smaller projects, we did see continued pressure in certain big-ticket, discretionary categories. We remain very positive on the medium-to-long-term outlook for home improvement and our ability to grow share in a large and fragmented market,” Bastek said. 

Transactions of $1,000 and up decreased 5.5%, Home Depot said.

“After three years of unprecedented demand in the home improvement market, we continue to see softer engagement in big-ticket discretionary categories like patio and appliances that likely reflects a pull forward of these single-item purchases and deferral,” Bastek said.

Home Depot and Lowe’s both serve a mix of B2B and DIY consumers. Home Depot historically has more professionals, with sales split about 50-50, while Lowe’s makes about one-quarter of sales to home professionals.

Many home projects and improvements that might have otherwise happened in 2022 and 2023 were pushed forward by consumers during the pandemic, growing the home improvement stores’ bottom lines, says Edward Yarbrough, senior analyst at financial investment firm Edward Jones. Those consumers are then not pursuing those projects this year, producing slowdowns for Home Depot and Lowe’s. However, an aging housing stock means that the long-term outlook for DIY and home improvement is good, Yarbrough says. 

Lowe’s is catching up to Home Depot in online sales

Although Lowe’s grew online sales at about six times the rate of Home Depot, it’s not a totally fair comparison, Yarbrough says. Until the last few years, Home Depot was “a step or maybe several steps ahead of where Lowe’s was. I think it’s Lowe’s kind of catching up, so it’s a smaller base, and probably that makes it easier to grow,” he said.

Neither retailer disclosed what percentage of total sales are made online. Digital penetration of home improvement retailers in the Top 1000 only reached 11.2% in 2022, up slightly from 10.8% in 2021.

“Lowe’s has always been playing catch up in online sales, but they’ve succeeded in using their network of stores to keep the pressure on Home Depot,” says James Risley, senior analyst at Digital Commerce 360. “Both retailers have consistently been able to fulfill around half their orders from stores since before the pandemic, using a more unified inventory system to help reduce fulfillment costs.”

Lowe’s invested in its online infrastructure, making it more capable of handling online orders. In the second quarter, Lowe’s improved online shopping experience and grew conversion, the retailer said without revealing more. It also added an online fit calculator and improved search and recommendations.

Lowe’s has been more active in advancing digital initiatives for the consumer market as well, with flashy in-store wayfinding in its app and room measuring tools using augmented reality.

“I think some of those tools push users into stores, so the fact that its online sales growth has been outpacing Home Depot still shows that those kinds of investments are paying off,” Risley says.

Home Depot earnings

For the fiscal second quarter ended July 30, 2023, Home Depot reported:

• Total sales declined 2% year over year to $42.9 billion.
• Home Depot online sales grew 1%. 
• Comparable sales declined 2%.
• Net earnings declined, to $4.7 billion in 2023 from $5.2 billion in Q2 of 2022.

Lowe’s earnings

For the fiscal second quarter ended August 4, 2023, Lowe’s reported:

• Total sales declined 8.9% to $25 billion.
• Net earnings declined from $3 billion in the year-ago period to $2.7 billion.
• Comparable sales declined 1.6%.

Percentage changes may not align exactly with dollar figures due to rounding. Check back for more earnings reports.

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Freightos, a newly minted public B2B marketplace for air and ocean freight, brings together shippers and freighters. And while the company expects to post a loss in its upcoming second quarter earnings later this month, the B2B marketplace is showing strong signs of generating more transactions.

Freightos marketplace transactions

For the year, Freightos expects its B2B marketplace to potentially generate more than 1 million transactions. That number is considerably higher than the 229,211 transactions achieved in the first quarter. And it’s up from the range of 239,500 to 244,500 transactions expected in the second three months of the year. Freightos will break out earnings on Aug. 21.

“A record 239,000 transactions were booked on the platform in Q2, up 59% from Q2 2022, continuing Freightos’ streak of record transactions,” the company says. “This strong growth, against the backdrop of an ongoing freight market downturn, demonstrates the momentum of Freightos’ mission to digitalize international freight.”

Freightos has two revenue streams. The first is WebCargo, a platform for buyers and sellers of freight services to perform various actions such as generating price quotes and other tasks. The other Freightos revenue stream is a solutions unit that provides users with software tools and data to help automate their pricing, sales, and procurement processes.

As a result of reduced market freight rates, gross booking value (GBV), the total value of transactions on the Freightos’ platform, will come in below expectations, the company says.

“Transactions growth was supported by a 10% year-on-year growth in unique buyer users, reaching 16,438. Carriers selling on the platform remained stable at 37 in Q2,” Freightos says.

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President and CEO Andy Jassy told investors on Amazon’s Q2 earnings call that the ecommerce giant has been improving its artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. It has also been making its fulfillment network more efficient. Jassy also said Amazon Business, its B2B division, is one of its fastest growing offerings.

Amazon is No. 1 in the Top 1000, Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American online retailers. Amazon is also No. 3 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database, which ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by 2023 third-party GMV. The latest analysis of the industry as whole is published within the 2023 Global Online Marketplaces Report.

For more detailed coverage, read our Amazon Q2 earnings story.

1. Amazon has been refining its AI

Jassy last week said AI “is going to be at the heart of what we do.” Moreover, he said every business division within Amazon has multiple ongoing generative AI initiatives.

Among those initiatives, Amazon has built CodeWhisperer, an AI-powered coding companion that recommends code snippets directly in the code editor. This is meant to accelerate developer productivity in the coding process.

But Amazon’s work in the AI sphere is still in an early phase, he said.

“Generative AI has captured people’s imagination, but most people are talking about the application layer, specifically what OpenAI has done with ChatGPT,” Jassy said. “It’s important to remember that we’re in the very early days of the adoption and success of generative AI, and that consumer applications is only one layer of the opportunity.”

2. Faster fulfillment in Amazon’s Q2 and beyond

In its fiscal Q2, Amazon reduced the miles its drivers traveled to deliver packages to customers by 19%, Jassy said. It did so through “regionalization,” or its logistics overhaul that shifts its fulfillment network from a national one to a network divided into eight regions that can each operate on their own.

This has led to a 20% reduction in number of touches for each delivered package, Jassy said.

“When shipments come from fulfillment centers that are closer to customers, they travel shorter distances, which cost less in transportation, gets there faster and is better for the environment,” Jassy said.

He said Amazon’s development and expansion of same-day fulfillment facilities has driven this increase in efficiency. He added that the same-day facilities are Amazon’s fastest fulfillment mechanism and one of its least expensive.

The same-day facilities are located in the largest metro areas around the country, Jassy said. Amazon intends to double the number of these facilities, he said.

“While we’re seeing strong early results from this regionalization effort, we still see several ways in which we can be more efficient in this structure and we believe will improve productivity further,” Jassy said. “We’ve also re-evaluated virtually every part of our fulfillment network this past year and see additional structural changes we can make that provide future upside.”

3. Big business, small business

Jassy emphasized Amazon Business’ $35 billion annual run rate for gross sales. It serves more than 6 million customers.

Still, he said, Amazon has only a fraction of the features it needs “to address more of the enterprise at this point.” For example, there are features to make bigger procurement workloads easier for companies.

Merchants that use Amazon’s “Buy with Prime” feature, on average, increased their shopper conversion 25%. That “makes a real difference to their business,” Jassy said.

He added that those who “participate in Prime Day activities, in aggregate, experienced a 10x increase in daily Buy with Prime orders during the sales event period versus the month before we announced Prime Day.”

Although Jassy and other Amazon representatives did not mention its small business sellers on the Q2 earnings call, Amazon did mention them in its earnings release.

It said more than 60% of Amazon sales in its marketplace came from independent sellers, most of them small and medium-sized businesses.

U.S.-based independent sellers sold more than 4.1 billion products and averaged more than $230,000 in sales, Amazon said. It also announced a filter on its marketplace to search for small businesses.

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146 retailers in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 1000 use PayPal for payment processing, more than any other vendor. 21 retailers use it for payment security and fraud prevention. The Top 1000 is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest ecommerce retailers in North America by sales.

PayPal says losses are temporary

PayPal shares slumped in the second quarter as the company set aside more money to cover souring loans it has made to merchants.

PayPal’s adjusted operating margin narrowed to 21.4% in the second quarter. That’s down from 22.7% in the first three months of the year, the company said in a statement. That missed the 22% guidance the company had previously provided.

“We saw some increased losses in our PayPal business-loan portfolio,” chief executive officer Dan Schulman said in a telephone interview. “We tightened on originations and we’re seeing the effects of that in the quarter. I expect that to be a temporary blip across results.”

In recent years, PayPal expanded its loan offerings for the millions of merchants that process payments across the firm’s many platforms. The company offers business and working-capital loans. The business loans can be as small as $5,000 and as big as $150,000 for repeat borrowers.

The results echo those of American Express Co., which last month said it’s begun to see softness in its portfolio of cards dedicated to U..S small business. The Federal Reserve said that a “significant” share of banks reported having tightened standards on loans to small businesses in the second quarter.

Spending is up, but investors are concerned

Spending growth on PayPal’s platforms accelerated in the second quarter, meanwhile, as consumer confidence continues to soar amid moderating inflation.

Total payments volume rose 11% to $376.5 billion. That’s higher than the $372 billion average of analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg and faster than the 10% growth the company posted in the first three months of the year.

PayPal has benefited from the ongoing strength of U.S. consumers and their increased willingness to travel and spend more on experiences in the aftermath of the pandemic. Consumer confidence advanced to a two-year high in July, aided by a strong job market and easing inflation.

“Ecommerce seems to be bouncing back as inflation cools,” Schulman said. “You’re seeing a return in discretionary spend.”

PayPal’s increased provisions come as investors have grown increasingly concerned about pressure on margins. That’s because the company continues to invest in its unbranded-payments technology. Shareholders fear that business is less lucrative than the branded PayPal checkout experience.

That pressure seemed to continue in the second quarter: Volume through PayPal’s branded checkout options climbed by a percentage in the “mid-single digits,” compared with 11% growth for the company overall. In the quarter, PayPal saw its transaction margin — a measure of how profitable the firm’s core business of processing transactions is — shrink to 45.9%, marking the third consecutive quarter that metric narrowed.

“We understand that over the medium to long term, we need to deliver growth in our transaction-margin dollars to ensure we sustainably grow our earnings,” Schulman said on the conference call.

Block raised its forecast, but investors seem unsure

Block Inc., Jack Dorsey’s payments company, tumbled as much as 14% after reporting results that fell short of some analysts’ expectations.

Jefferies Financial Group Inc.’s Trevor Williams said in a note that Block’s earnings report “lacks oomph.” That’s even after the company increased its adjusted profit outlook for the rest of the year. BTIG LLC analyst Lance Jessurun called Block’s July trends “disappointing.”

Williams cited limited upside for Block’s Cash App, which started as a person-to-person payments app and now offers access to a variety of financial products. He also called “tepid” one measure of how many dollars are processed by Block’s payments systems.

Both Cash App and Square, a payments platform geared toward small and midsize businesses, beat expectations in the second-quarter.

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Lindsay Mikos, senior director, retail omnichannel, Walgreens told Digital Commerce 360 that digital orders drive incremental value for the retailer.

“We’re able to engage with them more often [online] and give them more relevant offers,” she said.

Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. reported U.S. retail digital sales were up 19% in the second quarter 2023, ended May 31, on top of a 25% gain in 2022.

Walgreens digital sales

When compared with Digital Commerce 360’s Top 1000 retailers in the category, Walgreens 2022 web sales growth reached 35.0% compared with 2022. The only retailer to outpace this was Rite Aid, which increased web sales by 65% in 2022.

Other retail chains in the top five include:

• Ulta Beauty
• Bath & Body Works Inc.
• CVS Caremark Corp.

Key takeaways

• In 2022, Walgreens completed 35 million pickup orders and one-hour deliveries from its stores.
• 21.1%: Walgreens’ 2022 share of 2022 digital sales in the Top 1000.
• Walgreens is in the Top 1000 fastest growers in the health/beauty category.
• 52.7%: Walgreens’ share of 2022 web sales in the Top 1000 health/beauty retail chains

The median average ticket for the 56 ecommerce retailers in the Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000 in the health/beauty category hit $93 in 2022, a rise of more than 12% from the $83 recorded in 2021.

However, much of that rise can be explained by inflation, which stood at 6.5% year-over-year in December 2022.

Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. ranks No. 19 in the Top 1000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American online retailers.

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BigCommerce leadership update

BigCommerce has named Steven Chung, a technology industry veteran and experienced ecommerce sales executive, as its president. Chung will oversee the BigCommerce’s sales, marketing, and services organizations.

Steven Chung

Prior to joining the BigCommerce, Chung most recently worked at Delphix Corp., an enterprise software development and IT operations company. He led Delphix’s strategic growth as its president, worldwide field operations since December 2020.

From May 2016 to December 2020, he served as senior vice president, worldwide sales, customer success, and services at Pagerduty, Inc., a digital operations management platform for businesses.

Prior to those roles, he has held numerous leadership roles, including at Demandware, Inc., which Salesforce acquired in July 2016. He served as senior vice president, worldwide sales from January 2013 to April 2016, and at OneLogin, Symantec, MicroStrategy, and PwC Consulting.

He holds a B.A. in liberal arts from the University of Michigan and an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California.

As president, BigCommerce will pay Chung a base annual salary of $460,000. He will be eligible to participate in an annual bonus program, with a target bonus of 80% of his annual base salary, BigCommerce says in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“As the global sales leader at Demandware when they moved upmarket, Steven wrote the playbook for a modern SaaS company to take on the enterprise ecommerce incumbents,” says Demandware CEO Brent Bellm.

BigCommerce earnings

BigCommerce also released its second-quarter earnings.

For the quarter ended June 30, revenue totaled $75.4 million. That’s up 11% from $68.2 million in the year-earlier quarter.

Net loss was $19 million. That compares with $39.6 million in the second quarter of 2022.

Percentage changes may not align exactly with dollar figures due to rounding.

Check back for more earnings reports.

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The post BigCommerce names an ecommerce veteran as president appeared first on Digital Commerce 360.