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  • Thumbnail Whitepaper Full Assortment Grocery Channel 2

    Rakuten Intelligence: the rise of the full-assortment grocery channel

    Published Jul 23, 2018

    At long last, the U.S. online grocery channel has moved beyond Webvan. For those unfamiliar with Webvan, it was a California-based online grocery retailer that earned the dubious distinction of being the poster child of the original dot.com boom and bust. Prior to its 1999 Initial Public Offering, Webvan had raised nearly $400 million on sales of $395,000 and net losses of $50 million. At its peak valuation, Webvan was valued at more than $8 billion. In the end, Webvan had lost more than $800 million of investors’ dollars.

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  • Rakuten White Paper Gordon Wade Cat Man Toolkit 1

    Rakuten Intelligence: the new essential in the category manager's toolkit

    Published Oct 11, 2017

    The CPG marketplace is in unprecedented turmoil. The environment is changing more rapidly than practitioners can process and respond. Many leading brands are losing share, often to new and unexpected entrants such as the Dollar Shave Club, while Wall Street is demanding draconian cuts in spending to set shrinking growth. News of new store closings are coming in a daily drip, while healthy retailers such as Kroger are seeing a decade of uninterrupted growth come to a sudden halt.

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  • Rakuten Monogamer

    Monogamers, serial monogamers and polygamers: which users make a game successful?

    Published Apr 01, 2017

    Globally, mobile gaming is a $35 billion market, larger than both the console and PC gaming markets. Despite having existed for less time than traditional gaming categories, mobile gaming is experiencing the fastest growth across the entire gaming sector. The games that capture the majority of the revenues are microtransaction based, meaning they are free to play but include items or features that users can buy in-game. In this paper we studied the purchasing behavior of users across multiple mobile games and found predictors of games with high user spend.

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  • Rakuten Adsolutions

    Lookalikes looking too alike? How to differentiate models with purchase data

    Published Dec 07, 2016

    With platforms like Facebook offering advertisers multiple data sources and algorithms to create lookalike campaigns, the value of imprecise data at scale has vanished. Small samples of precise purchase data can significantly improve the ability to find high-value customers when amplified by user affinity modeling.

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  • Rakuten Amazonecho

    Amazon Echo: Seattle’s sonic boom is felt beyond e-commerce

    Published Apr 05, 2016

    Amazon has a sleeper hit on its hands with the Echo. Selling this product at its typically low (or no) margin, Amazon has planted a digital home hub, e-commerce order taker, personal assistant, digital jukebox, and, yes, speaker, in millions of homes. What is the story behind the launch? In the following white paper, we will explore the deep questions,

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  • Rakuten Jetdotcom

    Jet.com: How will it land?

    Published Apr 05, 2016

    Jet.com's launch was stratospheric, but what's the story behind the hype? With our panel of over 5 million online shoppers, Rakuten Intelligence can offer a precise, insightful read on what's on Jet's radar; including which headwinds it's facing, and how much runway it has as competition mounts against the biggest ecommerce players.

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  • Rakuten Io T Dashbuttons

    IoT Commerce: an early read on Amazon’s Dash buttons

    Published Apr 05, 2016

    Dash buttons are a new phenomenon and have not yet been heavily promoted by Amazon. As such, the number of people using the Dash Button is low (less than .1 percent of Slice’s panel bought a Dash Button). This white paper explores the earliest trends of Dash Button adoption and usage.

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  • Rakuten Subscriptionmodel

    Subscription model trend and growth

    Published Jan 07, 2016

    In the modest economic recovery that followed the Great Recession, a few innovative entrepreneurs bet that consumers were ready to buy again; but that purchase habits were amenable to change. More Americans were leasing cars and renting their homes rather than buying. The success of music and video services such as Netflix, Spotify, and Pandora proved that consumers would commit to subscriptions online. This led to the development of innovative new models from companies such as Birchbox, Ipsy and Dollar Shave Club, and Amazon, offering subscriptions on products. Today, subscription-based businesses have crept into virtually every category.

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  • Rakuten Primetime

    It’s Prime time for Need-it-Now

    Published Jan 07, 2016

    From the outset of the e-commerce era, consumers bristled at the interminable wait between ordering and receiving items. Amazon’s Prime program, introduced in 2005 with free two-day delivery, created a high bar for competitors. Many responded with free shipping offers of their own, but bet that consumers would be willing to wait. In 2014, for retailers other than Amazon, more than 68 percent of orders took five or more days from click to delivery; further widening Amazon’s lead. It is now abundantly clear that fulfillment capabilities represent a significant opportunity for competitive differentiation amongst retailers in an era when pricing gaps are narrowing.

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