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The share of online purchases that shoppers return keeps rising: That鈥檚 a growing challenge for retailers seeking to rein in costs without hindering the customer experience.

Klarna: The buy now, pay later company expanded its Ads Manager to the UK and Sweden, but Klarna has been fairly quiet on the retail media front. It risks being overshadowed by other payments companies entering the RMN game. This was originally featured in the 蘑菇AV Daily newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.

Zara began testing a program for resale, repairs, and donations in the UK in late 2022, and H&M launched a new resale program in the US in March 2023. Shein鈥檚 P2P resale platform debuted in October 2022 and creates listings based on customer purchase history. But some of these efforts have also heightened criticism of the brands and their association with overproduction.

Canada ranked No. 2 globally in cross-border retail ecommerce buyer penetration, according to our December 2024 forecasts. More than half (56.1%) of digital buyers were forecast to make transactions outside of the country (mostly the US) in 2025. But tariffs on US consumer goods and services will reduce demand significantly.

This year, TikTok will pull in 22 times the ad revenues of fellow fast-grower Mercado Libre($1.02 billion), but Latin America鈥檚 largest ecommerce retailer will rapidly ascend the advertising ranks in the coming years. Amazon will get a growth boost from its OTT video service.

Charlotte Tilbury rolled out its first-ever ecommerce app, which features personalized recommendations, early access to new products, and a video library of how-to tutorials and other app-only content. Est茅e Lauder launched an app in the UK and Ireland that helps visually impaired users more easily apply makeup.

Marketers should embrace B2C tactics for customer experience (CX):. 54% of US and UK B2B marketers expect to spend more on content creation and strategy in 2023, according to Integrate and Demand Metric. 54% also said they will spend more on customer marketing.

The UK-based fintech established a presence in India in 2021 but didn鈥檛 get in-principle authorization from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to issue prepaid cards and digital wallets until this year. With the authorization, it will launch its app alongside domestic and multi-currency cards in 2025. The bigger picture: Revolut is rapidly growing its mix of products and services.

Outside of the US and China, the UK is the largest B2B digital advertising market. In the major markets of Western Europe, a relatively higher share of digital ad spending comes from B2B compared with the rest of the world. This will help put the UK, Germany, and France among the top countries for B2B digital ad spending outside of the US and China.

The news: Checkout.com added card issuing to its suite of offerings for clients in Europe and the UK, per a press release. The API-based service lets businesses create physical cards and single- or multi-use virtual cards. It鈥檚 also designed so that Checkout.com shares interchange fee revenues with its clients. Why it鈥檚 worth watching: API-based card issuing is setting the pace of payments innovation.

Germany and the UK, meanwhile, will both continue to see sustained growth. The UK is adding users fastest, but Germany is keeping pace. The pattern of hypergrowth was universal across the main Western European markets through the pandemic years. From this year onward, each of France, Italy, and Spain will begin to add users at a rate below that of the UK and Germany.

That increases the pressure on every retailer to find ways to distinguish their programs to keep shoppers enrolled. For example, beyond access to exclusive sales, Amazon Prime offers a broad swath of perks, including fast, free shipping; a free Grubhub+ membership; Prime Video streaming service; Prime Music streaming service; and photo storage.

And increased personalization is a top impact that US and UK banking and insurance executives expect will come from deploying generative AI (genAI) in their organizations, per an August 2023 FintechOS survey. GenAI opens the door for banks to deliver more personalized banking experiences.

And finally, we're in the UK to look at some of the legal implications that generative AI might throw up. At the end of last month, Getty Images issued a formal notification of impending litigation in the UK against text-to-image AI platform Stable Diffusion. Technology editor at France 24, Peter O'Brien, explains more. Peter O'Brien:.

Ingenico acquired UK-based software point-of-sale (softPOS) provider Phos, per a press release. Phos鈥� technology lets small businesses accept contactless payments with smartphones and tablets, and comes in a white-label version, enabling merchants to add their own branding. Visa and Mastercard are among the firms bidding to acquire cloud-based banking and payments platform Pismo, per Bloomberg.

This week, Disney鈥檚 EMEA division announced several new UK unscripted original titles for Disney+, including documentaries on sports brands, music, and fashion, with a focus on A-list collaborations. Warner Bros.

Amazon plans to open more Just Walk Out stores this year than ever before, adding to over 170 third-party locations at airports, stadiums, hospitals, and more in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. In July, the company also announced updates to Just Walk Out that boosts accuracy even in the face of camera obstructions, poor lighting conditions, and unpredictable shopping behaviors.

Ecommerce costs: Return rates for items bought online are 3 to 4 times more than those purchased in-store, per Appriss Retail. Online returns cost an average of 21% of their order value, per Pitney Bowes. Teamwork: Meanwhile, some companies with more mature logistics operations are offering up their services to others.

In September 2023, Alibaba-owned retail site Taobao launched AI shopping assistant Wenwen to improve customers鈥� shopping experience. It also rolled out other AI tools to help merchants generate images and text, analyze market data, and enhance customer service.

In terms of these other platforms carrying a lot of the broadcast, and I'm coming at this from a UK angle, again, as I often do, based in the UK as I am, Carina, you mentioned it used to be everything was BBC. Obviously no ad opportunity at all on BBC coverage in the country, but now, Discovery, carrying advertising, this must be a bit of a boon for marketers, right? Carina Perkins (16:52):.

A heat wave knocked out Google and Oracle data centers in the UK, exposing the fragility of thermally challenged data centers during summer months and extreme weather spikes. In Canada, a nationwide Rogers outage took out a quarter of broadband, payment systems, transport, government access, healthcare, and even 911 calls. October.

In September, Amazon announced that Prime Video will have ads by default beginning in early 2024 in the US, UK, Germany, and Canada. The move could shake up the market. We don鈥檛 forecast Amazon鈥檚 CTV ad revenues. But Amazon estimated that ads on Prime Video will reach more than 115 million US viewers per month, according to a pitch deck obtained by Insider.

And it鈥檚 not just the biggest platforms withdrawing deals鈥擜dobe鈥檚 acquisition of Figma also fell apart after investigations by UK and EU regulators and expected intervention from the FTC. Big Tech faces four ongoing antitrust lawsuits from the US government. US v. Google (search).