COVER STORY

3 Trends to Prepare & Accelerate Digital Commerce Transformation

By Rick Cecil, CEO, Bluespark

Performance vs Features in Retail eCommerce

By Neil Trickett, Managing Director, E2X

Strategies for an Accelerated World of eCommerce

By Kali Kasprzyk, Marketing Director, Echinda

eCommerce Website Accessibility: What It Is, Why It Matters

By Carson McComas, CEO, Fuel Made

3 Ecommerce Web Design Trends to Build Better Connections with Customers

By Omi Diaz-Cooper, CEO, Diaz & Cooper Advertising

Marketing in Action

Tyler Sickmeyer, CEO and founder of Fidelitas

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Automation: The Missing Link in Your E-commerce Business

By Mark Simon, VP of Strategy, Celigo

This is one of the busiest times of year for retailers with recent holiday sales and post-holiday returns. For many businesses who shifted to eCommerce in the wake of the pandemic, this influx of transactions comes with new challenges. Trying to manually handle orders, returns, third-party suppliers and international shipments is overwhelming, takes resources from revenue-generating activities, and creates a disconnected customer experience.

While it’s true that eCommerce makes it simpler for customers to order and receive goods, a business will not be successful without an automation strategy in place to streamline operations. Automation is necessary to be agile, especially in these volatile times with ongoing supply chain issues and shipping delays. A proper automation strategy can help you grow and scale operations, efficiently kick off new online sales channels, eliminate any human errors that impact your customers’ experience, ensure items are in stock through timely inventory updates, and fulfill orders faster.

Take, for instance, order fulfillment. Many ecommerce companies rely on third-party logistics (3PL) fulfillment, or they split their inventory between 3PL and their own warehouses. A lack of real-time inventory visibility across these various warehouses often results in delays and errors, leading to unhappy customers. By automating the entire process, businesses recognize massive operational efficiency gains by having accurate data for making real-time decisions.

Automation is necessary to be agile, especially in these volatile times with ongoing supply chain issues and shipping delays.

- Mark Simon, VP of Strategy, Celigo

Mark Simon, VP of Strategy, Celigo

Mark started his career as a software developer in 1997, building e-commerce applications and custom integrations for several years. He then co-founded and led technology and operations as CTO for Evo, a successful e-commerce company that grew from $0 to $13M in revenue in three years. He then moved on to start a career in consulting with Explore Consulting, where he spent the last 13 years specializing in NetSuite and custom software development.

Mark has worked with clients across several industries including multiple software clients and publicly traded companies pre and post IPO. His efforts for software clients included designing and developing automated processes for sales order processing, subscription management, and provisioning among others.

Below are 4 tips to creating a successful ecommerce automation strategy:

I. Map out all of your eCommerce processes.

First, walk through your order to cash process and identify and list all of your business’s applications and business processes. From there, you can branch out into dependent and adjacent business processes.

II. Identify the critical data that must be 100% accurate and timely.

Examples of this important information include your SKUs, orders, and finances.

III. Identify manual, slow and resource-intensive processes.

Take note of processes that cost you and your team valuable time, money and resources. For example, if your accounting team spends countless hours at the end of each month trying to close the books, look at automating your payout-to-reconciliation business process.

IV. Leverage best-of-breed tools for your integrations and business systems.

In a recent Forrester study, 74% of respondents said that an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is an important factor in their overall competitiveness, with 37% saying it was the single most important factor. An iPaaS provides a single point for business process automation, reducing manual tasks and errors and sparing valuable IT resources. Figure out the current cost of all manual processes and resulting errors at your company. Then, compare that amount with the total cost of ownership for automation through an integration platform.

The worst thing that can happen in retail is to miss an order or allow items to fall out of stock in peak ordering season. By automating operations with a proper integration platform, you can focus all your resources on the bottom line — selling products and providing exceptional customer service — rather than dealing with infrastructure issues.

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07/06/2024 04:54:40

COVER STORY

The 8 eCommerce Drivers to Master your Strategy

By Denitsa Kostova, Sr. Mrktg, Resolute Software

Online Commerce: Adapting to Customer Buying Behavior

By Anna Kiner, Strategic Director, Proximity

Human-Centered Design Approach foe the New Age

By Erin Presseau, Director of Mrkg & UX, SilverTech

6 Core eCommerce Design Principles for 2022

By Tim Frost, Creative Director, Whereoware

2022: The Year of Innovation & Disruptions in eCommerce

By Ritesh Osta,, Mrkg Head, Allride Apps& Innofied

Marketing in Action

Tyler Sickmeyer, CEO and founder of Fidelitas

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Bridging Digital and Physical Experiences

By Vijay Talreja, co-founder & Director, Adapty

While 2020 was the time in which we saw an eCommerce boom, 2021 stood as the era of challenges for the sector. Social media saturation, data privacy changes, and supply chain issues took retailers and aggregators on a rollercoaster unlike ever before.

Now, as we approach the third instalment of the pandemic, it has become absolutely crucial to understand the customer’s needs and their burgeoning expectations from an eCommerce platform. In my opinion, every brand must rethink its marketplaces from an experience perspective. The idea is to develop a customer journey that taps into the dynamic mindset of the modern shopper. And it all starts from setting a seamless design language.

With a slow return to the normal, platforms that make space for digital and physical interactions shall be the ones to stay. In addition to the added convenience of e-stores and eCommerce websites, brands also need to consider cutting a few extra steps if the customer were to shop in their retail outlets.

While earlier, the process of going to a shop and waiting in queue to checkout was plausible, it would now lead to a higher bounce rate due to the need for instant gratification. Hence, a new eCommerce design trend is to give your customers the option to check which products are in stock at their nearest shop, set up appointments and settle their bills online. To fully leverage the smartphone-dependent market, customer service can be integrated with live chat or video calls from within the app itself.

2022 is going to be all about the experience. Every brand must rethink its marketplaces from an experience perspective.

- Vijay Talreja, co-founder & Director, Adapty

Awarded as Top 25 Most Influential eCommerce and Payments Professionals of Asia by CMO Asia, Vijay Talreja is a Co-Founder of Adapty (https://adapty.com), a leading digital commerce and customer experience having offices in the USA, UAE, and India. He helps customers to adapt to the rapidly changing business environment and demands. As a leading digital customer experience professional he helps design and implement solutions that drive customer engagement and business growth.

Vijay is also a Co-Founder of Bynocs (https://bynocs.com), a uniquely designed cloud-based digital therapeutics platform for binocular vision assessment & therapy. He has been one of the chief architects of this platform and continues to passionately drive the product roadmap.

I. Blurring the boundaries between physical and digital

II. Better filtering controls

Thanks to on-demand production and a wide range of lookalike products, digital inventories will know no bounds in 2022. To help the customers navigate their way through all the options, eCommerce brands shall need to develop a streamlined shopping experience that taps concurrently on the areas of personalization and filtering. This would include creating a default sorting for a particular customer while further narrowing their search to a specific product.

Therefore, we’re going to see product filters that resemble contact forms, whereby each field is placed for capturing the fastest input. The concept is to make the entire process as intuitive and natural as possible, ensuring shorter journeys that inevitably lead to better conversions.

III. A holistic customer experience

As I said before, 2022 is all about the experience. Whether it be the unconventional layouts or the sophisticated voice interfaces, eCommerce design shall be judged and appreciated only on three factors—engagement, availability and consistency. Considering that the customer finds the right product at the right time is not enough anymore. There must be interactive elements embedded in each platform that clearly communicate with the shopper’s pain points, delivering an effective solution across the brand’s ecosystem, irrelevant of their device, location or language.

Every ancillary product and service needs to be readily accessible on the product display pages based on an omnichannel accumulation, analysis and implementation of the customer’s data. Conclusively, eCommerce retailers need to expand their offerings to become a one-stop-shop in their respective sectors.

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07/06/2024 04:54:40

COVER STORY

The Essentials: Customer-Centricity, Convenience & Engagement

By Gerry Szatvanyi, CEO of OSF Digital

Automation: The Missing Link in Your E-commerce Business

By Mark Simon, VP of Strategy, Celigo

Bridging Digital and Physical Experiences

By Vijay Talreja, co-founder & Director, Adapty

4 Ways to Use Visual Commerce in 2022: What retailers need to know

By Samuel Cane, MD, Astound Commerce UK

Is it time to get back to Customer Experience (CX)?

By Adam Pearce, CEO, Blend Commerce

Marketing in Action

Tyler Sickmeyer, CEO and founder of Fidelitas

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4 Ways to Use Visual Commerce in 2022: What retailers need to know

By Samuel Cane, Managing Director, Astound Commerce UK

Long gone are the days when a single product photo alone is going to get the job done to convey and sell your products. Retailers today have to think about visual marketing and employ creative solutions to keep customers engaged if they want to stay ahead of the curve. Visual commerce will play a massive part in that—it will be essential to helping customers find the products they want. As consumer engagement becomes increasingly important, retailers will need to create unique and memorable shopping experiences. Brands that can effectively use these technologies will be better positioned to turn browsers into buyers.

So forget lengthy written descriptions on your product pages—instead think interactive content, videos, user-generated content (UGC), and augmented reality—with the understanding that visual commerce will become commonplace (and more importantly, expected) from your customer base.

So how can you help your customers in this space? Here are my top four shout-outs.

Brands like furniture behemoth Wayfair have fully harnessed the power of visual search. Projecting 2021 sales to come in around $13 billion, Wayfair is an example of visual search at its finest, having integrated the technology with furniture shopping. On the brand’s website or app, shoppers will tap the camera icon, and then take or upload a picture of the product they want. Wayfair will then match the image against its millions of products and surface the results visually, helping visitors find what they are looking for faster—saving time and serving up tons of customer satisfaction.

Visual commerce will play a massive part in keeping customers engaged. It will help brands turn browsers into buyers.

- Samuel Cane, Managing Director, Astound Commerce UK

Need Bio

I. Implement and enable visual search

II. Harness the power of UGC

Consumers crave authentic real-life videos, images, and reviews, created by people, rather than brands. 80 percent of consumers consider photos from other customers more valuable than those from brands or retailers, according to research by Power Reviews. They also found that product sales increased by 91.4 percent when customers interacted with UGC before purchase. So utilize all of the glorious UGC your customers create and weave it through your site—particularly on product pages and in galleries.

III. Embrace QR codes

If you’re not using QR codes yet, you need to be. With devices now recognizing them directly in camera apps, they're easy to scan and are perfect for integrating physical products with digital content, regardless of whether it is a UGC video of your product, a website, or a social media page. You can also stick a QR code on a physical product to extend its real-world existence into the digital universe for the best offline/online experience.

IV. Incorporate interactive 3-D visuals on configurable products

Everyone loves spinning these things around—it’s a perfect solution. The fact is that up to 80 percent of shoppers who can personalize a product will return to your brand. By creating a customized experience for each individual, interactive 3-D product personalization platforms help you stand out in the scroll while boosting conversion rates up to 50 percent.

In short, visual commerce is becoming an increasingly important part of any successful retail strategy. By using interactive visual content, you can make it easier for your customers to find what they're looking for and ensure that they have a positive experience on your site and in your physical store.

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07/05/2024 19:20:36