Ecommerce Is The New Box To Check
ADWEEK|October 2, 2017

AMAZON HAS LED THE WAY IN TURNING WEB COMMERCE INTO AD SALES. CAN A BULK-GOODS STARTUP BE THE NEXT BIG THING?

Christopher Heine
Ecommerce Is The New Box To Check

This month, shoppers looking to stock up on Halloween candy can buy 160 mini chocolate bars for a mere $16 on ecommerce site Boxed. And starting this week, the confectionery marketers looking to target them with ads can virtually jostle for position like trick-or-treaters searching for the last Snickers in a plastic cauldron.

That’s because Boxed, a 4-year-old digital wholesaler with a few million monthly customers, is introducing a real-time auction platform for its top-of-the-page, sponsored search results. The New York-based company has offered ads for a few years through its sixperson sales team, but is now aiming to ramp up revenue from its ad inventory by pitting bidder versus bidder—and in the process, take away a chunk of business from ecommerce powerhouses Amazon and Walmart, each of which has been in the real-time-bidding game for a few years. Boxed will also be going up against the formidable Jet.com, the Walmart-owned ecommerce site that debuted its initial ad offering in August.

Ecommerce advertising is heating up to seize the huge opportunity provided by the digital retail market, estimated to exceed $400 billion in the U.S. this year, according to the National Retail Federation. But even with stakes that high, what makes Boxed think it can compete with retail titans, chiefly Amazon?

This story is from the October 2, 2017 edition of ADWEEK.

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This story is from the October 2, 2017 edition of ADWEEK.

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