TikTok’s on-again, off-again romance with ecommerce is warming up for the holiday season. The company has reportedly begun to test of an in-app purchase feature called TikTok Shop with selected U.S. partners. Previous tests ran in the U.K. and Southeast Asia.
Freshpaint, which offers no-code connectors to capture and activate customer data, has added $14.5 million in funding and a freemium starter product. The company says that “all the existing tools to collect and use customer data were specifically built for developers who live in the codebase, so we set out to make customer data accessible to everyone who is not a software engineer.” Some people may disagree.
Some Shopify users have spotted a ‘search for anything’ test that lets them search all merchants for products based on keywords or previous purchases. It would be a huge change for Shopify, which until now has given merchants isolated stores of their own. The company previously said it wouldn’t move in the multi-merchant marketplace direction but stuff happens.
The past year has been tough for all kinds of tech investments. This LUMA report offers an overview of martech, adtech, and content tech financial activity in public markets, private financing, and mergers and acquisitions. To summarize a mixed picture: the bleeding has stopped but growth has not yet resumed.