Street Fight Daily: Amazon Tests Restaurant Deliveries, Etsy Highlights Local SMBs
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Amazon Is Quietly Testing a Plan to Take on GrubHub (Business Insider)
Amazon is currently testing a restaurant delivery service in Seattle. This appears to be related to the new Amazon Prime Now one-hour delivery service; news of the test follows reports that Prime Now will deliver beer, wine, and other booze to Seattle residents.
Etsy’s Updated Mobile App Lets You Locate Local Artisans (The Next Web)
Etsy Local now appears on the mobile app with a map of your local area dotted with all Etsy sellers nearby. These local listings include hours of operation and images of available items, and the app automatically recommends retailers or events.
Street Culture: SweetIQ Empowers Employees to Drive Independent Progress (Street Fight)
Non-structured employee bonding opportunities help provide a new perspective on topics that have often already been discussed at length in meetings and via email. Sometimes the best results happen naturally, as employees form relationships with each other outside of work.
Lyft Kills Off HotSpots as Uber Launches Copycat ‘Smart Routes’ Service (Recode)
Five months ago, Lyft launched a feature called HotSpots. Passengers could request rides at set pickup locations throughout the city for deeper discounts to its ride-hailing service. Without much notice, it ended the program on Friday, just as Uber is testing a copycat service called “Smart Routes.” What Lyft discovered — and Uber may find out soon — is that aggregating demand in certain areas didn’t improve productivity.
Elle Magazine Taps Beacons for Levi’s, Guess, Vince Camuto (MediaPost)
Beacon-triggered messages will be initiated by magazine advertisers as subscribers meander in and about stores carrying their favorite brands. Fashion magazine Elle has teamed with beacon platform Swirl so that in-market shoppers can receive highly targeted and relevant offers.
Why Mobile Could Make or Break Your Back-to-School Campaign (Street Fight)
Jillian Knox: When it comes to back-to-school 2015 trends, mobile stands out from the rest. While you may not have the resources to do what the major retailers are doing, you can still use mobile to carve out a bigger piece of the back-to-school pie.
PredictSpring Helps Brands Embrace Mobile Shopping (TechCrunch)
A former Google manager has launched PredictSpring, a mobile app development platform that allows businesses to create shopping-enabled apps without writing any code. Apps created on the PredictSpring platform are supposed to be “100 percent native”; important, because the big innovations in mobile have been on the app side rather than on the mobile web.
How One Venture Capitalist Is Quietly Reshaping Retail (Forbes)
Simon Venture Group set out to invest in retail innovations. In the past 15 months the group has invested in a beacon ad network provider, an Internet of Things network provider, a provider of parking tech analytics, a localized e-commerce provider, and a provider of real-time inventory management, and started thinking about the various synergies these companies could have if they worked together in an ecosystem.
87% of Potential Customers Won’t Consider Businesses With Low Ratings (Search Engine Land)
Myles Anderson: This year continues the upward trend of consumers putting stock in reviews, with more reading reviews than in previous years. It’s critical for local businesses to monitor their new reviews and act on them so that any negative reviews are managed carefully and quickly.
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