The retail tech PR agency that backs its placement targets with a refund

We get your platform in front of the retail trade desks your buyers read, your CEO onto the stage at NRF, and your category story into the room where the contract gets signed. Outlets, placement targets, and dates go in writing before kickoff, behind a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back.

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The stakes

What sounding like every other vendor costs you

Most companies hiring a retail tech PR agency are not short of product. They are short of the one thing a retail buying committee runs on, which is evidence that somebody credible already vetted them.

Retail is a slow, conservative, referral heavy purchase. A regional grocer replacing its point of sale estate is making a decision it lives with for seven years, and the person championing you internally has to defend that choice to a CFO who has never heard your name. When your own category page is the only thing that comes up, they lose that argument quietly and you never find out why.

The bill lands in familiar places. You get cut from the shortlist before the demo, because the analyst brief named four vendors and you were not one of them. Your booth costs six figures and produces badge scans instead of stories. A well funded competitor with weaker tech gets written up in the trade press and ends up owning the vocabulary of the whole category. Your Series B deck has a press section with two funding announcements in it. And when a merchandising director asks ChatGPT which platform handles distributed fulfillment, the answer names three companies that have been written about, not the one that built the better system.

The SKUs

The retail tech PR work we run

Every scope starts from your ideal customer, your sales cycle, the retailers already live on your platform, and the desks their executives actually read.

Media relations across retail trade and business press.

Media lists built desk by desk, pitches written per journalist, briefings booked, and follow up worked by a person rather than a sequence.

Analyst relations and industry recognition.

Briefings with the analysts your prospects quote inside procurement, plus award entries and speaking submissions filed against deadlines that close months before the event.

Thought leadership and executive positioning.

Founder and CTO bylines, contributed articles, and reactive commentary pitched into the stories being written that week, so your CEO reads as a category voice instead of a supplier.

Event and trade show PR.

NRF Big Show, Shoptalk, Etail, and Groceryshop weeks: editor meetings locked in early, customer stories cleared and staged, news timed for the days the whole industry is paying attention.

Launch, funding, and customer win announcements.

New products, rounds, logos, partnerships, and acquisitions, sequenced so coverage clusters instead of trickling out across a year.

Digital PR, GEO, and reporting.

Earned links pointed at the pages that convert, reported as placements against target, outlet relevance, share of voice, branded search, pipeline influence, and where AI engines now name you.

The full menu sits on public relations services.

The store directory

The retail technology categories we cover

Retail tech is not one market, and pitching it as one is why generalist programs underperform here. We run campaigns across point of sale and checkout, digital payments, inventory management and supply chain visibility, retail analytics and demand forecasting, customer experience and loyalty technology, omnichannel and order management, headless and composable commerce, ecommerce platforms and marketplace tooling, retail media networks, store operations and workforce systems, loss prevention and computer vision, grocery technology, fashion and apparel tech, and AI shopping assistants.

If you sell to shoppers rather than to retailers, start on consumer technology PR. If your model is a software subscription, pair this with SaaS PR. Broader enterprise technology programs live on tech PR.

Two floors

The desks we pitch, and why trade beats tier one first

Trade credibility is what gets you into the consideration set.

One feature in Retail Dive, Chain Store Age, RIS News, Retail TouchPoints, Progressive Grocer, Retail Leader, Modern Retail, Sourcing Journal, WWD, or Footwear News does more for a retail tech sales cycle than a general business story, because the buyer, their boss, and the analyst advising them all read the same handful of titles. Trade credibility is what gets you into the consideration set.

National business and technology desks then do the second job.

National business and technology desks then do the second job: investors, recruiting, enterprise confidence, and your founder's own standing. Forbes, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Wired, and CNET matter for that. We work both, in that order, because the sequence is what makes the national coverage land at all.

The rollout

How the first 90 days run

  1. Week one: the scope goes in writing.

    Discovery with your founder and marketing lead, positioning against the two vendors you keep losing to, a share of voice read against them, and a target media list by name. The outlet tiers, placement targets, timelines, and deliverables are locked in writing before the first invoice.

  2. Weeks two and three: pitching starts.

    Messaging framework built, customer references cleared, bylines drafted, and reactive commentary pitched into stories already in progress.

  3. Days 30 to 60: first trade coverage.

    Retail trade desks usually move first. That is where your buyers live, and it is what national reporters check before they take an unfamiliar vendor seriously.

  4. Day 90: the tier one and analyst push, plus an honest review.

    Business and technology titles, analyst briefings, award entries, and a review against the targets in your scope, not a summary of our activity.

On our Forbes program the first opportunity usually surfaces between weeks 4 and 8, which is a fair benchmark for pace.

AI answers

Getting named when a retail executive asks an AI which vendor to use

Software shortlists no longer start on page one of Google. An operations director asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews which platforms solve their problem and gets three names back.

There is no second page, and no ad slot buys you in.

Generative engine optimization is less mysterious than the acronym suggests. Models repeat what they can verify. That means editorial coverage in publications they already crawl, your company and product names written consistently everywhere they appear, capabilities stated in structured data a machine can parse, and enough independent sources agreeing on the same facts that the model treats them as settled. A feature in a retail trade title a model already reads is the strongest input available, and it is the one input that cannot be bought by the link. That is why PR and search sit in one team here. See SEO and GEO and AI SEO, and pair this page with ecommerce SEO if commerce traffic feeds your own funnel.

Why AceIt

Why hire AceIt as your retail tech PR agency

Look at what the standard deal asks you to risk. Retail tech sales cycles run six to eighteen months, so a program signed in March gets judged on pipeline that will not close until the following year.

Our side of the agreementnot one missed placement
The program you signed, or your money back
  • Placement targets, outlet tiers, timelines, deliverables · agreed before kickoff
  • Not delivered on the timeline we committed to · refunded
  • A named journalist says yes nobody honest sells another person's decision

Meanwhile you commit five figures a month, wait two quarters, and accept a coverage report as evidence. If nothing lands, you have burned the budget that would have paid for your trade show presence, missed the news window around your funding round, and arrived at renewal with the same two competitors still owning the category conversation. The agency keeps the retainer. You keep the silence.

So we wrote the risk into our side of the agreement. Placement targets, outlet tiers, timelines, and deliverables are agreed before kickoff, and if we do not deliver what we committed to, on the timeline we committed to, you get your money back. That covers the program you signed, not one missed placement. We guarantee the work and the agreed deliverables rather than promising that a named journalist says yes, because nobody honest sells you another person's decision. Say it any other way and the refund would be theater. Not one agency ranking beside us on this search puts anything comparable in a contract.

Three more answers to demand from every vendor on your list. Senior people run your account, with no junior account manager learning retail on your budget. Replies land in 1 to 2 hours, not next Thursday. And PR, SEO, and web sit in one team out of Austin.

Proof

Proof with numbers attached

1M+Brand impressions Vezbi, a community super app, crossed on targeted organic PR while entering the U.S. market
50+Placements the Forbes program stands at, across 12+ industries
4,200+Visits one anonymized client turned a single feature into, with branded search up 38% and 12 secondary pickups
DA 94Authority of the backlink that same feature earned

Client coverage has run in

Also Inside Retail, Sourcing Journal, Industry Dive, Ad Age, and CIO.

Vezbi, a community super app, crossed 1 million brand impressions on targeted organic PR while entering the U.S. market, the Vezbi case study. The Forbes program stands at 50+ placements across 12+ industries, and one anonymized client turned a single feature into 4,200+ visits, branded search up 38%, a DA 94 backlink, and 12 secondary pickups. Client coverage has run in Inside Retail, Sourcing Journal, WWD, Industry Dive, Adweek, Ad Age, CIO, Forbes, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Fast Company, and Mashable. The rest of the record sits at case studies.

List price

What a retail tech PR agency costs

Of the agencies ranking on this search, almost none publish a price. You fill in a form, sit through two calls, and receive a number shaped by how much they think you can pay. We do it the other way round, and our tiers are published.

Forbes campaigns are scoped and priced in writing before kickoff. Programs that pair earned media with search run mid five figures to six figures annually against a 12 month roadmap. Project based, retainer, and performance oriented engagements are all available, price and scope go in writing before kickoff, and the refund sits behind all of it. To sanity check the return first, run your own numbers.

The honest filter

Who this fits, and who it does not

Shortlistedit fits

It fits retail technology vendors selling into chains, grocers, and specialty retailers, commerce platforms and marketplace tooling, payments and checkout companies, supply chain and store operations software, and funded startups that need press behind a round before the next raise. It also fits established vendors who quietly became the incumbent and never told anyone.

Cut before the demoit does not

It does not fit companies that want a named publication promised by Friday, teams shopping purely on the lowest monthly rate, or vendors whose only news is that they exist. Retail journalists want customer names, deployment numbers, and a point of view about where the category is heading. If no retailer will go on record and you have no data to share, we will say so on the call rather than bill you for two quarters to reach the same conclusion.

Questions

Asked before every retail tech engagement

Anything else, email [email protected] and it comes back in 1 to 2 hours.

Retail technology PR is earned media work for companies that sell software and hardware to retailers rather than to shoppers: point of sale, inventory, supply chain, analytics, loyalty, commerce platforms, and store systems. It covers positioning, media relations with retail trade and business press, analyst relations, thought leadership, event PR, and crisis communications. Success is measured in shortlist inclusion and pipeline, not clip count.

Because retail buying committees rarely take an unfamiliar vendor seriously without third party validation. A chain replacing its checkout or fulfillment stack is signing a commitment it lives with for years, and the internal champion has to defend that choice to finance and IT. Trade coverage, analyst mentions, and executive commentary give them the evidence to do it. Coverage also feeds your rankings and the AI answers that now start most software shortlists.

The media map and the calendar. General tech PR chases launch news and startup desks; retail tech coverage lives in titles like Retail Dive, Chain Store Age, RIS News, and Progressive Grocer, and moves around an industry rhythm built on NRF, Shoptalk, peak trading season, and retailer earnings. A generalist agency without those relationships spends your first quarter building the media list a specialist already has.

A written target list, a messaging framework, and coverage mapped to your sales cycle. In practice that means retail trade placements first, then business and technology titles, plus bylines, analyst briefings, award entries, and event coverage. Reporting shows placements against target, share of voice against named competitors, branded search movement, and pipeline influence. All of it runs against targets agreed before kickoff and backed by our refund.

Plan on 30 to 60 days for the first trade placements, with national business and technology coverage typically following in the second quarter of a program. Trade desks move faster than national ones because they need vendor news to fill the beat. On our Forbes program the first opportunity usually surfaces between weeks 4 and 8. Whichever date you can hold us to gets written into your scope before kickoff.

Ask six things: which journalists at named retail titles they placed in over the last 90 days, who actually works your account day to day, what their reporting shows beyond clip counts, how fast they reply, what the engagement costs, and what happens if the coverage never arrives. Most agencies answer that last question with a shrug. Ours answers it with a refund written into the contract.

Next step

Judge the plan before you fund the retainer

Give us three things: your product page, the two vendors that keep beating you to the write up, and the retailers you want on your logo wall. You will get the story angles worth building, the trade desks we would work first, the week we expect your first coverage, and the numbers we would sign. Every engagement carries a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back.

Get your free retail tech PR plan See what we charge

Every engagement carries a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back