Shopify Ties Up With Walmart; What Went Wrong At Quartz

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Setting Up Shop

Shopify landed a partnership with Walmart so that merchants that use the ecommerce software can sell on Walmart’s online marketplace. It’s a logical tie-up: Walmart wants to rapidly scale the brands and SKUs in its marketplace and Shopify can offer small merchants a valuable customer base, Bloomberg reports. Walmart particularly craves third-party merchant sales because they’re more profitable, since the retailer gets a fee and often doesn’t cover delivery costs. Shopify is the first outside ecommerce technology to sell on the Walmart marketplace. And less than a month ago, Shopify announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Facebook to operate as a back-end ecommerce technology solution for Facebook Shop, the social platform’s ecommerce sales product.

Cracked Quartz

When Atlantic Media formed Quartz in 2012, it envisioned a hip new business publication focused on global interconnectivity – basically, The Economist for socially-conscious millennials. Digiday’s Steven Perlberg examines how Quartz went from being a free, dynamic business news organization, experimenting with innovative editorial and ad formats, to being sold off in 2018 to a Japanese media company and now struggling to pivot into a subscription model. In its heyday, Quartz’s focus on quality ads really worked. The first two years of its business saw $75 CPMs, content sponsored by big brands, and ads that flouted IAB standards. But Quartz was ultimately unable to weather a number of changes – from Facebook’s infamous algorithm change to growing competition as other pubs offered native ads. Read more. Not mentioned in this story: Quartz’s long resistance to programmatic.

The New Face Of Retargeting

Criteo revamped its business model from pure retargeting to a holistic ecommerce DSP and ad network. And that’s meant a corporate overhaul as well. Megan Clarken, Nielsen’s former chief commercial officer, took over as Criteo CEO last November. Also last year, Criteo hired former Art.com President and CEO Geoffroy Martin as GM and EVP, growth portfolio. And this week, Criteo announced it hired Sherry Smith as managing director of retail media for the Americas. Smith was previously CEO of Triad Retail Media, the WPP shopper marketing unit that worked with Walmart (until Walmart in-housed its media business).

But Wait, There’s More!