It’s Time to Invest in Commerce Enablement: The Present
- Sid Mookerji
- Mar 25
- 2 min read
Part II
Here is part two of a three-part series discussing why it is time to invest in Commerce Enablement. Here is a link to the first blog published last week. Click here for the Silicon Road portfolio.
What is the path of least resistance for today’s consumer? Judging from their revenue and earnings, Amazon and Walmart have more than answered this question. While competitors like Target and traditional department stores fell further behind last year (4), Amazon and Walmart together accounted for a sizeable part of the industry’s overall $5.3 trillion in sales. (5)
Newcomers like TikTok, Shein, and Temu contributed a notable $50 billion to that total. The word “revolutionize” gets thrown around a lot in the e-commerce space, but these three companies’ innovations in marketing, personalization, and merchandising warrant the phrase.
When Gap reduced its merchandising schedule from six months to two in the late 2010s (6), it was newsworthy. Now, Temu and Shein produce garments within days (7) —designing versions of Internet-hot outfits and accessories quickly enough to satisfy their Gen Z audience. If a dress makes a splash on the red carpet, Shein has the social monitoring to know it’s a trend in the making—and the manufacturing capacity to meet that demand before it fades.
Beyond trend forecasting and “on-demand manufacturing,” though, what kind of enablement is making a clear difference for brands and companies?
Here’s a quick tour of some recent answers:
Closing the deal, consumer-by-consumer. Social media commerce ventures like ChatLabs are using AI to hone and compress the outreach-to-purchasing timeline—meeting consumers where they spend the most time, offering them hyper-personalized deals, and making their shopping as swift and seamless as they expect. (8)
Meeting regulations automatically-including tariffs. Logistics risk management companies like Tradeverifyd tackle consistent challenges for anyone with a global supply chain, preventing customs-based losses by delivering and documenting supply chain transparency (proving that no components have been produced using child labor, for instance). (9) This capability is even more crucial now that tariffs are in play: companies will need to prove where their components have been in order to calculate their tax obligations.
Video is king. Knit uses AI analysis of focus group data to assist market researchers, generating instantaneous quantitative and qualitative analysis of video data so retailers can make informed decisions about offerings and frameworks. (10) Knit also offers to assemble representative groups of consumers for the groups, thus replacing and accelerating the work traditionally handed over to consultants.
Getting the most from your data. I-Genie draws actionable brand- and product-positioning insights from publicly available search and social media data as well as consumer reviews, purchasing histories, and other streams. Through next-gen benchmarking, trendspotting, new product ideation, and even acquisition candidate identification, they have increased the top line of brands from Bayer and Coca-Cola to Unilever.
Part three of this series will explore the near future of e-commerce, including the potential for investors interested in e-commerce technology.
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5 U.S. Dept of Commerce; figure excludes cars, gas, and restaurants.