Subscription based offerings saw a huge boom again in 2021. They offer fantastic benefits from a cash flow and profitability perspective, but also have their challenges. The trend in 2021 was to reduce the risk for the end consumer - no contracts, just cancel when you need to. While i’d advocate keeping the flexibility for the customer, this means the experience for the customer has to be excellent. For example, brands that integrate SMS with subscription payment services like Recharge offer an easy way to pause, cancel or order additional products with subscriptions. There’s no need for logging in, just a simple response to an SMS.

If brands continue to ride the subscription wave in 2022, it's going to get even more critical that the CX is both simple and enjoyable to be part of as a customer.

Cookies, iOS - need I say anymore. 2021 saw many eCommerce brands needing to re-evaluate their relationship with ads. The ability to acquire and retarget has fallen away, and whilst paid will always be part of the mix, I strongly feel that extracting zero party data and better CX is going to be key in 2021. So for example, if previously brands had been directing paid traffic to a product page for conversion, but now finding this unaffordable, why not using email capture/sms capture first? By then partaking in some automated conversational marketing that is part of the CX, this allows brands to better position personalized recommendations for products. Yes it takes more time, but ultimately margins will be better.

I’m certainly not here to burst the bubble, but I do feel that getting back to the customer is key. The eCommerce industry has been one of the few industries that have benefited from the global pandemic, but let’s not lose this advantage now by forgetting what drives the growth.

And then, shoot, a competitor comes along. They don’t have all the features. They just have a simple and fast site, and all of a sudden the penny drops and you realize that quite frankly that is the sort of user experience you prefer yourself.

You realize you don’t need an overloaded, bloated customer experience, that despite claims of a mobile-first approach in your organization still reeks of a desktop feature overload that does not translate well to mobile, in part due to the 30+ plugins someone has made a business case for in order to entice customer loyalty that then load competing javascript into your browser.

So what has changed? What is the secret of your competitor’s slick site? Well wind the clock back 20 years ago and to speed up sites we used to do something called statically generating them. Rather than one page that calls a database to get a Product, we would in the background pre-build 100 HTML pages to avoid a real-time database call. That went away after Broadband, cloud computing etc. But recently, via an architecture called the Jamstack, that 20 year old approach is back. It’s simple, it’s fast, and coupled with the latest and greatest cloud tech and CDNs—turns out it works. Triumph for the old folks.

The assumption was that this would not catch on, that this would only be useful for certain things, but coupled with the never-ending increase in mobile dominance, and throw in a pandemic increasing work from anywhere and fluid circumstances - and this simpler-but-faster approach has a real appeal. If you haven’t already, as much as AWS, Google and Azure you’ll start to hear of other companies (leveraging these leviathons) called Netlify and Vercel who have hit the right combination of tech to enable these fast but simple sites.

But what about the features? Turns out you don’t have to trade them all in. Even in this simple but fast approach you can do some pretty nifty things—including a/b testing and personalization, but it takes a different approach. Hey, you needed a new frontend anyway!

So my advice in this space is to beware the feature merchants and take control of your customer experience through a modern take on an old tech pattern that really works in 2022. Speed wins, and speed coupled with slick content is cost effective. If you don’t take this approach, your competition will!