AI Articles and Analysis about E-commerce

The company that would become eBay was founded as a sole proprietorship under the name AuctionWeb in September 1995 by Pierre Omidyar. The company changed its name to eBay in September 1997. The company reports selling just over $7 million in goods before being a California-registered corporation in May 1996.

Per Alibaba’s annual report, its revenue in 2021 exceeded 717 billion yuan (approximately 109 billion U.S. dollars), while its active yearly customers reached nearly 1.3 billion people. As of March 2022, Alibaba trades on the NYSE and has an approximate market cap of $225 billion.

The company that would become PayPal Holdings first entered the electronic payments space in 1999, a year after being founded as Confinity. Confinity merged with Elon Musk’s x.com in 2000 and was renamed PayPal the following year. The company went public in 2002 shortly before its acquisition by eBay, through which it became “the site’s official payments provider.” eBay spun off PayPal as an independent company in 2015.

American Express began as a freight forwarding company in the mid-19th century. Expanding over time to include financial products and travel services, American Express today reports some 114 million cards in force and $1.2 trillion in billed business worldwide. 

Square is a financial services company that aims to “build common business tools in unconventional ways so more people can start, run and grow their businesses.” Founded in 2009 in San Francisco by Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey, Square reports total net revenue of $9.5 billion for 2020.

Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world by market cap. Founded in 1994 in Seattle, Washington, as a book-selling platform, Amazon has become a household name offering a wide variety of products and services. As of 2020, online retail product sales account for most of the company's net revenues, followed by third-party retail seller services, Amazon Web Services, and subscription services.

The retail industry could be losing nearly $1 trillion in sales annually due to business process errors that could be automated by AI, such as restocking in eCommerce. In this article, we discuss the top 3 most well-funded AI startups selling to the retail industry and how their solutions could help retailers and eCommerce sites save money lost to fraud and increase revenue through customer analytics.
Signifyd - Retail and eCommerce Fraud Detection
Signifyd is the most well-funded AI startup in the fraud detection industry for retail and eCommerce, having raised $180 million. They were founded in August 2011 and specialize in fraud detection for retail and eCommerce companies. Their most prominent offering is called “guaranteed fraud detection,” and it likely uses anomaly detection technology to recognize fraudulent transactions and prevent chargebacks. The offering was originally announced exclusively for the Magento eCommerce platform in 2017.

Many AI vendor companies offer AI-enabled products and services for pushing more and more products in front of customers. That said, it is not always clear how these solutions determine which products to advertise to which customers. Retailers and other businesses should consider what they need to do to prepare their enterprise for one of these solutions and familiarize themselves with how AI recommendations are built and trained.