Ecommerce platform selection and integration: a guide
The content for this briefing has been reproduced from Econsultancy’s Ecommerce Best Practice Guide.
Seven Chinese ecommerce companies you should know about (other than Alibaba and JD.com)
If you keep tabs on the Chinese ecommerce industry, you’ll almost certainly be familiar with the “big two” of Chinese ecommerce: Alibaba and JD.com.
How do you build an ecommerce retail startup from scratch?
Ecommerce technology is improving all the time, but the retail market also grows more competitive.
What must it be like to start your own ecommerce venture from scratch?
Postcards Home founder, Lucy Coleman, has recently done exactly that. Her business offers homeware and gifts from independent designers around the world; Lucy describes it as ‘products that transport us to our favourite places’.
I caught up with her to ask about her journey so far.
Four key highlights from our new Technology for Ecommerce Report 2015
Fantastic news for retailers: the ecommerce marketplace is maturing and the cost of ecommerce platforms is generally declining.
However the demand for services and solutions remains high, which means there’s an ever-growing appetite for new functionality to help businesses increase sales, improve customer engagement, reduce costs and extend their reach.
Five key considerations for a multichannel ecommerce replatform
Implementing a new ecommerce platform is one of the biggest technical decisions that a retailer can make.
A successful replatforming can be the key to effective multichannel growth and can future-proof a retailer against ever-changing consumer demand.
With so much at stake it’s important to make sure that a project starts in the right place. To this end, I’ve put together five key things to consider in ensuring a scalable ecommerce replatform.
And for an in-depth look at this topic, download the new Econsultancy Ecommerce Platforms Buyer’s Guide 2014.
Three important trends impacting the ecommerce technology market
According to the new Ecommerce Platform Buyer’s Guide 2014, online retailers are thriving.
Retail is transforming itself from a local industry into one which is fundamentally about competing globally in international markets.
The IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index saw the 2013 UK online retail market grow 16% to £91bn, with ecommerce accounting for 21% of the country’s entire retail market.
Five fallacies of bricks and mortar retail that show the convergence of online and in-store
There’s a stat that every retailer should sit up and take notice of. It’s this: half (49.5%) of total U.S. retail sales today are impacted by the web in some way.
What this means is that although online sales represent roughly 10% of all retail, a large majority of your customers interact with your brand online as part of their unique customer journey.
This raises a particular question about in-store tech. Are we about to see a convergence of point of sale (POS) systems and ecommerce platforms?
That’s essentially the nub of this article. Will retailers start to see no difference between online and off-, in terms of data, logistics, shipping and ultimately customer experience? Do some consumers, or even retailers, already think this way?
I’ve been looking at the results of a survey of 200 retail business and technology executives in the US and Europe, conducted by The University of Arizona in association with the National Retail Federation and Demandware.
To add some perspective, here are some of the findings in the context of five fallacies of bricks and mortar retail. Five arguments for a changing customer who is driving many retailers to consider a single platform.