PayPal’s revenue grew 13% to $6.18 billion in Q3, slightly below the $6.25 billion high point of its July 28 guidance, “as back-to-school sales and travel were weaker than we expected,” said CEO Dan Schulman on a Monday call with investors. PayPal is experiencing “the impact of global supply chain shortages in our merchant base,” and consumer confidence is weakened “with the absence of stimulus payments,” said Schulman. “With the economy reopening, more people may be likely to do their holiday shopping in store, as confidence in delivery logistics is depressed from last year.” PayPal thinks “almost all of these issues are temporal, and consequently, we expect our revenues will accelerate throughout next year,” he said. Travel volume was strong in June and July, “then reversed” in August and September due to concerns about the delta variant, said Chief Financial Officer John Rainey. Though the company is off to a “solid start” for Q4, its growth rate “still remains slightly below our prior expectations,” he said. “Retail supply chain and labor market concerns which may impact the important holiday season have led us to adopt a more cautious stance for the fourth quarter.” Recent days have brought some improvement, but “at this point in time it's difficult to say definitively whether the stronger turns will persist throughout the quarter, or if this improvement is a pull-forward of consumer holiday activity,” he said. PayPal is downgrading its revenue guidance for the year by 0.5% compared with its early 2021 forecast, said Rainey: “But let me be very clear -- our key strategic initiatives are on track and performing very well.” The stock closed 10.5% lower Tuesday at $205.42. Schulman’s “big news” for the day was that Amazon will enable U.S. customers to pay with PayPal’s Venmo mobile payments platform at checkout, starting next year, he said. “This is obviously a very significant moment in our Venmo monetization efforts.” On market rumors that PayPal was pursuing a deal to buy Pinterest, “exploring all potential opportunities to enhance shareholder value is our responsibility,” said Schulman. But “only a select few deals will meet our very strict financial, strategic and capital allocation criteria,” he said.

Seon’s fraud protection app is available on Shopify, said the company Wednesday. The app's fraud checks for e-commerce merchants are said to help reduce chargebacks and lost payments and goods. No technical nor fraud risk knowledge is required to use the app, Seon said; integration can be set up with one click “to ensure a frictionless customer experience." Seon’s fingerprinting and data enrichment technology compiles and analyzes a trail of publicly available data belonging to an online user, including visited websites, email addresses and data submitted to online services. It checks over 35 social media and online signals, which, it said, a fraudster can’t match in scale. The analysis helps vendors improve risk assessment accuracy, reduce false declines and ensure orders are legitimate before fulfilling them, said the company.

Some 69% of consumers in a Feedvisor survey said they bought a product on Amazon in the past two months, and 72% are Prime members, but Walmart+ is gaining popularity, with 30% reporting they subscribe to Walmart’s Prime counterpart. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they visit Amazon at least a few times a week, up from 47% in 2019. Just over half of consumers buy last-minute holiday gifts from Amazon; 25% go to Walmart, 7% to Target, it said. About 45% of consumers have clicked on the "frequently bought together" recommendations at Amazon; 35% have explored the “items other customers buy after viewing that item,” it said. About 57% of consumers are shopping online more than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic, 64% of Prime members and 36% of non-Prime. The online survey of 2,003 U.S. adults was fielded July 13-16.

E-commerce’s share of overall retail “has reset lower than the peak last year,” said Shopify Chief Financial Officer Amy Shapero on a Thursday earnings call. The company expects Q4 to generate most of its 2021 revenue, but the revenue spread “will be more evenly distributed across the four quarters than it has been historically,” she said, citing potential impact from supply chain delays and higher costs for materials, labor, shipping and advertising. Spending for Black Friday and Cyber Monday “may be pulled forward.” Shopify expects its gross merchandise value to grow “substantially faster than the commerce market," Shapero said. E-commerce share remains several points higher than two years ago and is “poised to resume a more normalized rate of growth,” she said. In a reflection of in-store retail’s 2021 rebound, CEO Harley Finkelstein pitched traditional retailers on the call, saying the brick-and-mortar segment “reclaimed some of its share of retail.” He touted Shopify’s new point-of-sale software that supports in-store retail, allowing merchants to “transition seamlessly” between online and off-line selling. The e-commerce platform company’s revenue grew 46% year on year in Q3 to $1.1 billion. In social commerce, Shopify expanded its relationship with TikTok in the quarter, introducing product discovery and shopping tabs, linking products directly to a merchant’s online store for checkout, said Finkelstein. He also cited integration with Spotify, allowing artists to sync their product catalogs and showcase products on their Spotify profile (see 2110270043). The economy “remains resilient,” said Shapero, but with consumer spending on services and off-line retail expanding, e-commerce “is growing at a more normalized pace relative to 2020.” Shopify, in turn, expects to “grow revenue rapidly in 2021, but at a lower rate than in 2020.” Shares closed 7% higher Thursday at $1,457.

The volume of “returning visitors to online stores” was up fourfold in first-half 2021 from a year earlier, indicating the “explosive growth in digital” during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler on a Q3 call Tuesday. “As the world begins to reopen, shoppers are returning to stores.” Brick-and-mortar isn’t dead, but “omnichannel is in full force,” he said. Google searches for “open now near me” are four times higher globally than last year, he said. “Strong growth in local shopping queries means people are researching their visits to stores more often before they go.” Google monitors shopping activity globally “as vaccination rates climb and local regulations ease,” said Schindler. “The consumer shift to digital is real and will continue even as we start seeing people return to stores.” Consumer shopping habits have “have ebbed and flowed over the last 20 months, but the underlying takeaway is that people want more choice,” he said. “They want more information, more flexibility, and we don't see this reversing.”

Retailers are under “enormous pressure” to deliver a seamless shopping experience this holiday season amid widespread concerns of supply chain disruptions affecting inventory, said a Tuesday report from business analytics firm Anodot. About 85% of 106 retailer survey respondents last month expected a year-on-year sales bump for holiday shopping, but 42% worried that supply chain disruptions would negatively affect product inventory and on-time delivery. A mid-September consumer survey of 1,057 U.S.-based respondents said a negative experience with an online retailer is somewhat, very or completely likely to turn them away from a merchant, and most likely to Amazon, it said. “Supply chain disruptions have caused inventory issues that have shoppers nervous and retailers feeling unprepared,” said Anodot CEO David Drai, saying AI can help prevent customer experience and supply chain problems. AI has improved the online shopping for dealers using AI for fraud detection (81%), customer retention (55%), targeted campaigns (22%), dynamic pricing (20%), server monitoring (19%) marketing automation (19%) and identifying sales trends in different geographies (18%), said the report. Among priorities for consumers when shopping: easy-to-use websites (53%), in-stock inventory (50%), competitive pricing (57%) and a fast checkout and payment process (46%).

Amazon teams have been “hard at work for months, focusing on capacity and demand planning to balance our customers’ needs against any supply chain or transportation challenges that may occur,” blogged John Felton, senior vice president-global delivery services, Monday. Among its efforts for the holiday season, Amazon invested in forecasting technology and worked closely with vendors to get products in fulfillment locations “close to customers” along with “people, aircraft, ships and buildings” to get product from point to point, Felton said. Amazon organized its global logistics network to better manage inventory flow and increased the ports of entry across its network by 50%, doubled container processing capacity, "and expanded our ocean freight carrier network partnerships to secure committed capacity into critical ports within our network,” he said. Later this season, Amazon will have more than 85 aircraft in its fleet “ensuring ample capacity” to transport customers' packages, said the executive. The Amazon Freight network operates more than 50,000 trailers that haul freight worldwide, with tens of thousands of drivers employed by small businesses to make shipments possible, Felton said. Last-minute shoppers will have access to “millions” of items with same-day delivery, with orders arriving in as little as five hours “from click to doorstep” in 15 metro areas, he said.

Starting pay at Amazon for 150,000 seasonal jobs is $18 an hour in hundreds of U.S. cities as the company looks for holiday season workers in a tight labor market. It’s offering sign-on bonuses up to $3,000 and an added $3 per hour “depending on shifts” in certain locations, Amazon said Monday. Jobs in Amazon’s operations network include stowing, picking, packing and shipping. New hires will be fully trained, and all facilities follow “strict COVID-19 health and safety protocols,” it said. Jobs “can be the start of a future, long-term career inside or outside of the company,” Amazon said. The highest number of seasonal jobs are in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, it said.

Amazon misled the House Judiciary Committee and potentially lied about self-preferencing business practices when former CEO Jeff Bezos and other executives testified, committee members wrote CEO Andy Jassy Monday. Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y.; House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I.; House Antitrust Subcommittee ranking member Ken Buck, R-Colo.; and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., signed the letter, requesting the company “correct the record” by Nov. 1. Citing news reports, the lawmakers described “a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India,” and similar evidence about Amazon placing house-brand products ahead of competitors. They requested “exculpatory evidence to corroborate the prior testimony and statements on behalf of Amazon to the Committee.” The committee is considering a referral to DOJ for a potential criminal investigation, they wrote. Amazon and its executives didn’t mislead the committee and the company is seeking to correct inaccurate reporting, a spokesperson emailed: The company has “an internal policy, which goes beyond that of any other retailer’s policy that we’re aware of, that prohibits the use of individual seller data to develop Amazon private label products.” Potential violations are investigated, and search is developed to feature items customers want, regardless of whether they are in-house products, the company said.

Consumers will pay 20% more for their holiday gifts this shopping season as retailers face an additional $223 billion cost of goods, Salesforce forecast Friday. It advised retailers to “get ahead of margin and price pressure by communicating clearly and often” with customers. After record online sales in 2020, the global online shopping spend will rise 7% to $1.2 trillion this holiday season, said the report, with U.S. e-commerce customers expected to spend 10% more at $259 billion. Citing scarce inventory and global supply chains that are “still playing catch-up,” the customer relationship management service firm predicted consumers will be hungry for pre-sales. Black Friday will “give way to something like a pre-Cyber Week” with multiple Black Friday-like sales events forecast to bring in $31 billion in U.S. online spend, $141 billion globally, before Cyber Week even begins, it said. With Apple and Google phasing out cookies and third-party ad-tracking, brands will need first-party data to find and engage customers, said the report, recommending loyalty programs, social and influencer engagement and personalized email marketing.