Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Kevin Mannion, chief strategy officer at Advertiser Perceptions. The recession’s coming, or it isn’t. Facebook is in trouble. Facebook should have another sterling year. TV will shift to digital. TV… Continue reading »
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Pivot to Privacy Dear World, Trust Us. Your “friend,” Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook’s beleaguered founder and CEO penned a lengthy post on Wednesday promising a top-to-bottom privacy overhaul of the House That Zuck Built, from encrypted messaging to secure data storage. “As I think about… Continue reading »
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Family Dollar, the discount retail chain acquired by rival Dollar Tree four years ago, is struggling.
The chain, which has more than 8,200 stores, delivered 1.2 percent growth in same-store sales during the fourth quarter compared to parent Dollar Tree’s 2.4 percent.
It’s a pocket of difficulty in a sector that’s deemed one of the most defensible concepts in retail because it’s considered largely e-commerce proof; both Dollar Tree and Dollar General each netted more than $22 billion in revenue last year. But getting the model right is key.
Family Dollar, which was acquired by Dollar Tree in 2015 for $9 billion, continues to be a drag on the parent company. The acquisition has proved challenging because Family Dollar has a different business model, and the integration of the two hasn’t been easy.
Family Dollar is mostly aimed at lower-income families looking to save money; Dollar Tree is aimed at both lower-income but also middle-income families looking for cut-price items to complement a shopping trip. While the $1 price point is enough to fend off other budget retailers, moving into the $1 to $10 range, as Family Dollar has done, could open up Dollar Tree to competition from outside of the dollar-store category.
“Meaningfully higher prices could invite greater competition from Amazon and mass merchandisers,” wrote Morningstar analyst Zain Akbari, in a recent report.
Dollar Tree sells a range of home essentials for $1, focusing on private-label assortments, while Family Dollar relies more on national brands, with prices ranging from $1 to $10. Both businesses have minimal product overlap, but quick-use consumable products make up a major proportion of their offerings. To improve Family Dollar’s position, the parent company plans to close 390 stores, renovate 1,000 of them, and rebrand 200 Family Dollar stores under the Dollar Tree name. It’s an ambitious turnaround plan, but it may be too big a pill to swallow at this point.
“It has to do with integrating a very different concept,” said Loop Capital Markets analyst Anthony Chukumba. “[Family Dollar] was mismanaged for so long — there’s no magic bullet to fixing it; for example, their supply chain is terrible, there are a lot of out-of-stocks, and [staff] morale isn’t so good.”
Dollar Tree did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite the growth opportunity for dollar-store chains, it’s a competitive field. Dollar Tree’s chief competitor, Dollar General, is trying out smaller-format stores called DGX locations aimed at younger shoppers. Meanwhile, Walmart, Amazon and Target are growing their budget private-label offerings; for example, Target’s Smartly private-label brand features a range of essentials for under $2. In addition, in Family Dollar’s fourth-quarter earnings release Wednesday, the company reported a $2.73 billion goodwill impairment charge against the value of Family Dollar, and its underperformance prompted hedge fund Starboard Value, which has a 1.7 percent stake in Dollar Tree, to push for a sale of the unit in January.
Still, Dollar Tree is determined to turn around Family Dollar by closing underperforming stores, renovating others, adding alcohol to 1,000 locations, and rebranding to Dollar Tree stores where appropriate. It’s also testing a new layout called “H2” that includes a refreshed look and a higher number of freezers and coolers.
“Our H2 stores have generated increased traffic and strong sales lift in excess of 10 percent over control stores,” said Gary Philbin, president and CEO, on a call with investors Wednesday. “This new design has shown strong performance in a variety of locations, especially in locations where we’ve been most challenged.” H2 stores will also include some Dollar Tree private-label merchandise.
Brandon Fletcher, senior equity analyst at Bernstein, said Dollar Tree’s challenge is that Dollar Tree and Family Dollar serve two different sets of customers, and the lack of inventory overlap makes it difficult to rationalize the offerings under one banner. He added that Family Dollars are more often located in urban areas, opening them up to competition from other low-cost retailers.
Rebranding and renovating existing Family Dollar stores is also expensive. Philbin pegged the cost of an H2 store to be between $100,000 to $150,000. It’s a burden that supports the argument for a sale instead of a revamp.
“Dollar Tree significantly overpaid for Family Dollar, and this business is proving to be a meaningful distraction,” wrote Starboard CEO Jeffrey Smith, in a letter to Philbin in January. “The Family Dollar and Dollar Tree banners have not truly been integrated and are largely run independently, both from a store operations and supply chain perspective … beyond traditional organizational synergies in back-office functions, we believe that there is little benefit in keeping the Family Dollar and Dollar Tree businesses together.”
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BuzzFeed is ramping up its sales pitch to marketers interested in pairing the publisher’s ad capabilities with its growing commerce operation.
This week, BuzzFeed has started pitching advertisers on two new products: a branded commerce posts offering through which the publisher would create custom posts for brands and their products and drive users to purchase through affiliate links; and a new shoppable ad unit that would appear across relevant shopping posts on BuzzFeed’s website.
Among digital publishers, BuzzFeed’s ad business is large, responsible for the majority of the company’s revenues, which was north of $300 million in 2018. BuzzFeed’s commerce business, meanwhile, drove more than $250 million in transactions last year from affiliate sales and licensing revenue, according to Lee Brown, chief revenue officer of BuzzFeed.
With these two new commerce-based ad products, BuzzFeed hopes to “create a better connection between our ad business and commerce business,” Brown said.
BuzzFeed’s ads-and-commerce ambitions are now in its second year. Last year, the company drove more than $50 million in sales from deals that combined ads with commerce, a number the publisher expects to “significantly” grow this year off the back of these two new products and other advertising efforts, Brown said.
BuzzFeed’s latest efforts come as the publisher aims to diversify revenue — as well as its ad revenue — in 2019. The company recently underwent some layoffs and restructuring as the publisher looks to build a more sustainable business. During a speech at SXSW this weekend, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti is expected to announce that BuzzFeed will generate more than $100 million in revenue in 2019 from lines of business that didn’t exist for the company in 2017.
BuzzFeed’s pitch to marketers is that it already knows how to do custom native posts for advertisers. And the publisher has some experience in creating custom posts for commerce-driven marketers, such as this native post about a writer trying Quip’s toothbrush. Now, it wants to help marketers use those native posts to drive clicks and sales.
“With branded commerce posts, that’s us working with brands specifically around product features, benefits, how it compares to the marketplace, any special offers, and making sure the post is done in the brand’s voice,” Brown said. “It’s a whole post dedicated and specific to one brand.”
With the shoppable ad unit, BuzzFeed’s pitching its affiliate network, which has made the publisher a top-five referrer of traffic to Amazon today, according to SimilarWeb. “There are only a few of us [publishers] that can play in this space at the size and scale that we can offer,” said Brown.
With BuzzFeed’s reach, especially among young female audiences, the publisher has a chance to grab ad dollars from maturing direct-to-consumer brands and other marketers interested in commerce-driven publisher campaigns, said Kait Boulos, vp of marketing for Varick.
“Everyone is getting into the commerce game — it’s a wise thing and it’s something we are definitely watching,” Boulos said. “Anything that’s going to shorten a consumer’s pathway to purchase is going to be interesting for any marketer, right?”
Brown said BuzzFeed’s ads-and-commerce business has between 50 and 100 clients with work that spans everything from BuzzFeed being a consultant, doing a product workshop with the brand and regular affiliate sales. And while DTC brands are an obvious target for performance-driven ad products, Brown said BuzzFeed is eyeing a larger pie.
At the same time, DTC brands, which grew because of Facebook and Instagram, are also looking for alternatives, as ad rates on those platforms continue to rise.
“You can see how this would play for DTC brands and CPG brands, but also entertainment with ticketing, OTT with subscriptions,” said Brown. “It is across all verticals and categories.”
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Pinterest has been going after banks; not just for its upcoming initial public offering but in a quest for more ad dollars.
Buyers at three ad agencies who worked on financial services accounts told Digiday that Pinterest’s sales representatives have increasingly reached out to them over the last few months.
Financial brands, like banks, credit cards and other services, are not a new vertical for Pinterest. For example, Prudential Financial started conversations with Pinterest in 2017 and launched campaigns in 2018 and Chase has run Pinterest campaigns around home loans. But an increased push is a sign that Pinterest is looking for more ad dollars outside of its traditional scope in consumer packaged goods, fashion, beauty and retail. Pinterest was expected to generate more than $500 million in U.S. ad revenue in 2018, a 44 percent increase from last year, according to eMarketer. Pinterest confidentially filed paperwork to go public on Feb. 21 with a valuation of $12 billion, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
Allyson Griffiths, head of strategy and planning at iCrossing UK, said that Pinterest’s recent efforts to court financial brands makes sense given that some aspects of life planning can be financially costly. Pinterest defines itself as a place for inspiration for events like parties, weddings and home decorating, as evident by Pinterest’s roadshows to agencies last year. “This is the database on identity and intent,” Pinterest’s head of market development, Vikram Bhaskaran, told buyers at IPG Mediabrands in June 2018.
“Pinterest’s growth as a visual search engine means financial services brands can target consumers who are displaying clear signals around life moments. Looking for wedding makeup ideas? Baby clothes? Home renovation ideas? All of these are signals that can be used to better target specific financial products,” Griffiths said.
Pinterest’s global head of partnerships, Jon Kaplan, said the platform’s focus on inspiration makes it suitable for discovering products and services from brands, including financial companies.
“Whether it’s planning a major life event like buying a new house, doing a major renovation, getting married or becoming a new parent, financial services brands can help Pinners achieve their goals in an authentic way. These moments offer a great opportunity for financial services brands to surface content, ideas and advice on how to make these big life moments a reality,” Kaplan sent in an email.
Prudential Financial started talking with Pinterest in 2017 as the brand was looking for opportunities to reach more audiences, said Anna Papadopoulos, head of media and sponsorship, brand marketing and advertising at Prudential Financial. Pinterest appealed to Prudential due to its demographics (skewed female at various life stages) and the behavior of the users, she said.
“Pinterest offers benefits of both social and search worlds because it’s not a passive channel. We see how people are actively searching on Pinterest for ideas and open to discovering new content,” Papadopoulos said.
Prudential has since had “several” media buys with Pinterest, including one for its current campaign titled “The State of US.” The company has predominantly bought promoted pins for videos and the native units.
Pinterest has been maturing its ad product over the last year. It introduced a new video ad unit in June of last year and added more tools for influencer marketing last September. This week, Pinterest expanded its ad program to Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy. The company had expanded its advertising to France, its first non-English speaking country, last year. Pinterest also recently released a new tool called catalogs that lets retailers more easily manage pricing and inventory information for the products they feature on the platform.
But Pinterest expanding beyond its traditional portfolio of retail brands makes other buyers hesitate.
“If you can get travel and retail right, great, but you might want to stay in your lane,” said Jordan Jacobson, vp, head of social media U.S. at iProspect. “It’s the same thing for Snap: focus on those brands that care about 13- to 24-[year-olds].”
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To help diversify revenues and lessen reliance on advertising, Vogue and GQ publisher Condé Nast International has developed a five-stage framework for creating non-ad products that it can scale across its global business.
The publisher used the framework to develop its first B-to-B product, Vogue Business, which launched in January after six months of planning. Speaking at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe in Milan, Italy, this week, Ciara Byrne, director of business development said there are many more B-to-B products to come, such as services around recruitment and more concise intelligence reports.
“One of the first things we did for Vogue Business — because of the inherent risks of creating a B-to-B brand when most of our business and revenue comes from B-to-C — was to create an isolated team with more B-to-B experience under a different P&L,” she said. “Vogue Business is built off a subscription model, the U.S. has more experience in that. But we can pick up this best practice from our different markets.”
For Condé Nast International, over 100 years old with roots in print, finding new ways of working and organizing around product development isn’t easy. At any one time, Byrne’s team has about five different projects working through the five-stage framework, but not all will see the light of day. But finding sustainable ways of generating revenue outside of ads, or from professionals, is becoming more crucial for all publishers.
“My team develops businesses away from advertising, primarily for the Vogue title but not exclusively. That can scale across the title’s 24 markets,” she said. “There are some opportunities that a single Vogue market can’t execute on their own maybe because it needs economies of scale or it’s not profitable enough in a single market.”
The five phases in the framework include discovering insights and understanding customer problems; defining ideas and asking whether the publisher should answer this; mapping and iterating the product; accelerating from a scrappy operation to a substantial product and then scaling the established product. Each of the five phases has activities, tools, experiments and discussion points, effectively working as a governing body.
“This brings the wider business on board and you can bring them with you when you go on to get investment,” said Byrne. “They understand why you have taken these decisions; it helps with the incubation phase.”
For Vogue, there was a clear strategy and opportunity around B-to-B. During the discovery phase, the publisher asked leaders in the fashion industry the biggest problems that they faced and what would make them more highly functioning. Particularly useful insights that shaped the idea stage, said Byrne, were that leaders were interested in the effects of technology on the fashion industry, the fact that clients operate in a global landscape but need local cultural nuance and the need to know how cultural trends affect their businesses.
For the second phase in developing Vogue Business, the publisher whittled down 100 different perspective ideas, developed four personas of potential customers and experimented with different copy and creative on social posts in order to work out what the audience wanted.
A small team of four people from the business, led by Lauren Indvik, now chief editor of Vogue Business, questioned the idea of Vogue Business in the third incubation phase. “Was it desirable, viable and feasible?” she said, “Can we turn a profit, and will it affect the rest of the business, which was probably the biggest risk of this, launching a B-to-B proposition when most of our revenue and business is B-to-C?”
An email newsletter was the best delivery mechanism to test out different geographies covering and different topics that Vogue Business should cover. The publisher initially opted to call it “Perspective” to give it more freedom and alleviate the risk from being associated with Condé Nast International or Vogue. The team tested sending out the newsletter daily and weekly, settling on bi-weekly. Some markets like the U.S. loved the personalization; others, like Russia, liked it less.
After seeing readers respond positively to an infographic about how much a runway costs, the team hired a designer and made data visualizations a key part of the offering. According to Byrne, readers have adapted their marketing budget based on stories it has published.
“The two measures we were looking for were, can we aggressively grow a highly engaged audience of international fashion professionals and can we create a product that’s different enough?” said Byrne. “We needed to really understand the risks. Vogue Business is a considered measured industry publication when Vogue is more consumer-focused, so there were risks inherent in that.”
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“The big dirty secret of the business is that nobody really knows if the direct-to-consumer model really works,” a digital brand’s founder half-whispered to me (on background, of course) last week.
It’s become a more common refrain recently. Some of it stems from the normalization of born-online brands as they start looking a lot more like traditional companies. “Direct-to-consumer” mostly meant the strategy of operating without middlemen (stores, mostly) and instead building direct connections with customers online. Ecosystems like Shopify helped that along. Many brands get to the $100 million mark easily — buoyed by big VC interest and of course, the marketing power of Instagram.
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Even for publishers that are actively diversifying revenue streams, the digital media business is extremely unforgiving. Spirited Media, a startup that was transforming from an ad-focused publisher to a membership focused one, ran out of time on its plan to build a stable of healthy, local news websites.
On March 6, the 5-year-old local media startup announced it had sold Denverite, a local news title it acquired through a 2017 merger, to Colorado Public Radio. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Shortly after that announcement, Spirited Media co-founder Chris Krewson announced that Spirited was also looking to offload its other two local publications, the Philadelphia-focused Billy Penn and Pittsburgh-based The Incline. Those sales would leave Spirited, which had once harbored dreams of becoming “the BuzzFeed of local news,” with a consulting business it announced in 2017 and a custom WordPress theme it had begun licensing to clients.
Jim Brady, Spirited’s CEO, said he felt compelled to sell Denverite after Spirited failed to drum up sufficient interest in a $1.5 million Series B round, which had been earmarked to invest in a leading revenue executive and to give the Spirited sites more time to grow their membership bases, which had grown to almost 2,800 members by the beginning of this year. According to Spirited’s own projections, the sites were on pace to achieve profitability by the end of 2019, Brady said.
Brady informed staffers of the decision to sell the local sites in January.
“We’d raised enough to keep going, but it’s been tight for us,” Brady said. “We couldn’t spend a lot on marketing. We were never able to hire a CRO-type person to attack the revenue challenge. For these sites to reach the level they can reach, they need those things.”
Local news has long been an immensely challenging space for publishers, and Spirited Media attacked the problem with an open mind. When it launched in 2014, events, sponsorships and advertising were the centerpieces of its revenue model.
But after missing its 2017 advertising revenue target — $280,000 — by 20 percent, Spirited laid off salespeople and reporters to buy itself more time as it pivoted in another direction. Later that same year, Spirited announced it was tacking away from advertising in favor of memberships and a consulting business.
“There’s no point in us going head-to-head with Facebook, Google and a slew of local competitors,” vp and co-founder Chris Krewson wrote in a Medium post explaining Spirited’s plans at the time.
By the end of 2018, when Spirited had begun pitching itself to possible investors, five different revenue streams – events, advertising, memberships, consulting and platform licensing — accounted for double-digit percentages of Spirited Media’s revenue, Brady said.
After launching its first membership, on Denverite in February 2018, Spirited’s focus on membership had suffused into the organization. Reporters were expected to participate in events that Spirited properties held; candidates for editorial positions were asked, during Spirited’s hiring process, if they were comfortable regularly meeting with readers and members, Brady told Digiday last year.
Initially, the plan had been to launch membership tiers, the priciest of which would cost $500 a year. Most recently, it had moved to a pay-what-you-want model.
By the beginning of 2019, the three sites had attracted nearly 2,800 paying customers combined, Brady said, around twice the nearly 1,500 they’d gathered as of late August 2018. During the summer, a majority of those members were contributing around $115 per year on a recurring basis.
But to get to profitability, those streams had to keep growing. Per Brady, the sites would have needed to attract 5,000 paying members to achieve profitability, a number Brady felt was achievable, given the growth they saw over the first 12-odd months.
It would have had to hit that mark without much of a marketing budget. Spirited’s strategy placed much of the onus on the journalism its reporters produced. Rather than invest in growing its sites’ marketing or events teams, it invested in growing its newsrooms and its product. None of the sites in the Spirited stable had more than one person devoted to events, full time. In 2018, those three sites put on over 100 events, up from around 50 in 2016.
Aside from a few exceptions, such as Patch, local news has been under enormous pressure ever since programmatic advertising depressed the price of display ads and turned digital media into a scale game that most publishers are incapable of competing in. Though recent brand-safety concerns have made some advertisers more concerned with context, the new reality of the digital advertising landscape requires publishers to diversify their revenues, said Fran Wills, CEO of the Local Media Consortium. “We need both those tides to rise,” Wills said.
Those factors put even more pressure on local news products, especially younger ones, to make tough decisions about how to grow: Where should you invest for sustainable growth?
“I knew from the beginning at Billy Penn that people loved what we did but not enough people knew what we did,” Krewson said. “But when you’re starting out, do you put up a billboard or hire two reporters?”
The post ‘It’s been tight for us’: Why local media company Spirited Media ran out of time appeared first on Digiday.
Convenience stores, restaurants, and brick-and-mortar retailers continue to go cashless in a convenience play, while an ethical backlash, led mostly by advocacy groups and some politicians, is also happening.
Blue Bottle and Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta are two of the most recent facilities to announce that they’ll either be going completely cashless or are starting to test it out.
Yet just last month, the city of Philadelphia passed legislation requiring most stores to accept cash, with some exceptions.
It’s not just Philadelphia — legislators in other places have considered banning cashless stores, including New York City, New Jersey, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. — all with lawmakers who say they discriminate against the underbanked, and communities who can’t access credit cards.
Cashless stores are also entirely illegal in Massachusetts, though that’s not a recent trend — it’s been the case since 1978.
Given that laws against cashless stores are being taken up by some of the largest cities in the U.S., retailers can no longer afford to ignore the cashless backlash. And politicians are getting more vocal about calling retailers who don’t accept cash discriminatory. Still, some retailers taking a wait-and-see approach, arguing that the number of truly cashless stores is small, and a ban on cashless stores shouldn’t apply to all retailers.
By going cashless, retailers can’t ignore that they’re trading convenience for economic equity, said Scott Astrada, the director of federal advocacy for the Center of Responsible Lending, a policy group that researchers issues of financial and economic inequity.
“I think that the option to pay in cash, can’t be understated as opening up opportunities for [all] individuals to shop at the store,” Astrada said.
A 2017 FDIC survey found that nearly a quarter of U.S. households are unbanked (meaning they don’t have access to a checking or savings account at an insured institution), or are underbanked (they have access to a checking or savings account, but also rely on alternative financial services, like payday loans, to pay the bills). That translates to about 32 million households.
Black, Hispanic, low-income, and less-educated households are more likely to be unbanked — so by refusing to accept cash, retailers are making it harder for customers from these demographics.
The cashless movement remains small — and for some in the industry, certain retailers are less likely to have customers who are among the underbanked.
Retailers who have adopted cashless payment systems at their stores include Bonobos, Everlane, Indochino, Reformation, and Casper. Restaurant chains like Sweetgreen and Dos Toros have also stopped accepting cash. The most-cited argument for going cashless is that it’s convenient: it speeds up the checkout process. Restaurants that carry cash may also be a greater target for robberies — Sweetgreen executives have said that before it went cashless, several of its stores would be robbed a year.
“We’re a digitally-native brand and our showrooms are essentially an extension of online platform, so it came naturally to us,” Michael MacIntyre, vp of Omnichannel for Indochino, said in an email.
Indochino sells custom men’s suits, starting at around $400, and all 41 of Indochino’s showrooms use cashless payment systems. “Our Style Guides use iPads to create an online profile for the customer; through this platform, they add a measurement profile, which we create a pattern from; they build an order with customer’s fabric choice and garment customization options; and they then take payment online,” MacIntyre said.
MacIntyre said that its showrooms do accept payment by installments via Klarna, which takes check, and is looking at peer-to-peer payment options like Alipay and ACH bank transfer as they go international.
The National Retail Federation, the largest trade organization for retailers, argues that retailers should be allowed to choose how they want to accept payment, and doesn’t want legislation passed banning cashless stores.
But it’s also trying to downplay the popularity of cashless stores.
“The fees are [still] too high when a customer pays for a purchase with the credit card,” NRF spokesman Craig Shearman said. “The fee takes 2 or 3 percent of the purchase prices, and while that doesn’t sound like a lot, industry-wide that adds up to about $80 billion a year…[cashless] is very isolated at this point, there isn’t really a trend industry-wide of retailers going cashless. This is not something you’re doing in your major department stores or chain discount stores.”
But at the very least, the number of consumers paying cash is going down. A 2018 study from according to research from retail and hospitality consulting firm IHL found 30 percent of all retail purchases are now made in cash.
Richie Siegel, founder and lead analyst of consumer advisory firm Loose Threads, said that many of the digital-first companies Loose Threads works with find that “it’s so much easier to open up a Shopify point-of-sale” when they start launching their first brick-and-mortar stores than accept cash. He says that for retailers who sell nonessential goods, like beauty products or accessories, he still doesn’t see a need or demand for them to start accepting cash.
“I think in the food area specifically is where it’s the most fraught or debated, but in other consumer categories, [accepting cash] is less of a need,” he said. “If you went to Goop and they didn’t take cash, I don’t think if many people would think of that [specifically] as elitist, because they already think of Goop as elitist.”
If Philadelphia’s legislation is any indication, many of the cities considering banning cashless stores will likely include carveouts. Parking lots, and stores with membership programs, like Costco, are exempt from the program. Philadelphia city council members have said that the language in the legislation should allow Amazon to continue to open its next-generation, cashier-free Amazon Go stores in the city, considering that Amazon has a membership program in Prime. But Amazon’s legal counsel has said that the company is still concerned that the language isn’t strong enough, as an Amazon Prime membership is not required to enter the stores.
“I think what the Philadelphia legislation is you can have protections for communities that rely on or use cash for their daily needs and have a reasonable consideration for businesses,” Astrada said.
Some facilities are taking steps to ensure that customers without access to credit cards can still pay for goods, but it’s still a small number of them. Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz stadium, for example, will have an ATM where customers can insert cash to receive pre-paid debit cards that they can use to purchase food and drink.
Even if retailers aren’t sweating the cashless backlash yet,If more cities follow suit, they may have to start considering other ways to let consumers pay besides a Square or Shopify point-of-sale system.
“When you talk about the convenience of paying — you can’t ignore almost the quarter of the population,” Astrada said. “I think this move toward a cashless economy really elevates that issue.”
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