Today in Retail: Nike Faces Quandary With Earnings Report on Deck; Shopify on Valuation Roller Coaster Ride

Today in retail, Wasoko targets supply chain inefficiencies, and Amazon is gaining on Walmart in the health and personal care segment. Plus, Nike preps an earnings report while facing inflation, and Kohl’s gets multiple bids in potential buyout discussions, including from Hudson’s Bay parent HBC Group.

Proactively Addressing eCommerce Delivery Delays Improves Customer Experience

Too many businesses are focused on customer acquisition and advertising rather than what happens after the purchase, said Andrew Chan, chief marketing officer and co-founder of AfterShip. In addition, businesses have not had a single place where they could go to find delivery information, so it’s been difficult for them to track the delivery performance of all their carriers.

On March 10, AfterShip launched a new OnTime Report tool that helps businesses monitor shipments and delivery times across more than 900 carriers worldwide. This new feature joins the company’s post-purchase and tracking platform that offers branded shipment tracking, notifications, returns and exchanges. The platform is used by anyone who has shipments, including eCommerce retailers, brands, business-to-business (B2B) sellers and third-party logistics firms.

Slumping Nike Faces $150 Sneaker Problem and Shift to Secondhand

Athletic shoe, apparel and equipment maker Nike finds itself in a bit of funk as it prepares to announce its fiscal third-quarter earnings results for the December through February period after the close of business Monday (March 21).

Leading into the report, shares of Nike have fallen 25% since hitting an all-time high of $179 in early November — a momentary blip that marked a tripling of its stock price from the lockdown low of $60 set in March 2020.

Analysts, on average, are looking for a modest 3% increase in revenue this quarter to $10.6 billion from a year ago at a time when core inflation is running at close to 8%.

Kohl’s Gets ‘Multiple’ Non-Binding Buyout Offers

Kohl’s got “multiple” preliminary offers from entities looking to acquire the department store chain, officials said Monday (March 21) in a company press release.

The proposals are “non-binding and without committed financing,” the company press release says, adding that Kohl’s has hired Goldman Sachs to coordinate the next steps with buyers.

Canadian department store chain Hudson’s Bay Company is one of the bidders, a person familiar with the talks told CNBC for its report Monday. Private equity firm Sycamore Partners had been rumored to be considering a bid last week when reports surfaced about interest by Hudson’s Bay, but it’s unclear if it was among the bidders to submit proposals by Kohl’s Wednesday (March 16) deadline.

Kohl’s wouldn’t reveal the identities of the bidders to CNBC and spokespeople for both Hudson’s Bay parent HBC and Sycamore Partners declined comment on the situation.

After Shopify Loses 60%+ of Its Worth Since November, Investors Suddenly See Value

Canadian eCommerce platform Shopify has been taking investors on quite the roller coaster ride lately, with its stock price dropping from a high of $1,690 in November to just over $510 in mid-March.

The stock surged to $780 by Friday (March 18) but looks to be slumping again, dropping slightly on Monday (March 21) and hovering at about $683 late in the day.

Shopify’s stock succumbed to an after-market correction Friday after a week on the upswing, although officials haven’t yet talked about what led to the upsurge and why they think there was a correction heading into the weekend.

Walmart Holds Shrinking Lead in Health and Personal Care as Amazon Momentum Builds

From an 8-to-1 market share advantage in 2014, to the 1.6-percentage-point margin at the end of 2021, Amazon’s efforts to chip away at Walmart’s lead in this key category have been notable and continue to pay off.

As PYMNTS’ new Whole Paycheck data shows, the mile-wide exponential gaps of yore are long gone, and have been replaced by something more akin to a 1.5% margin. In what has been a decade-long flat trajectory, Walmart closed the year with a 5.9% share in its second largest category (behind only groceries) compared to Amazon’s 4.3% stake.

The data also shows Walmart’s nearly $50 billion take in the health and personal care category has grown by about 30% over the past five years and is still about one-third, or roughly $13 billion, larger than Amazon’s total sales in this segment.

African B2B Marketplace Wasoko Takes On Supply Chain Inefficiencies

Since its launch in 2016, Wasoko has grown into a successful pan-African marketplace with more than 50,000 informal retailers in its network across East and West Africa — Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal — with revenue increasing over 500% in the past 12 months and more than 2.5 million orders completed during that time.

Through Wasoko’s platform, informal retailers can order products via SMS or mobile app, which are then automatically pinged to a warehouse or fulfillment center for free same-day delivery to their store — often in less than three hours.