Trends in E-Commerce

E-commerce vendors used to try to control the customer and their shopping experience. Now, consumers are rapid acquiring new ways of searching, discovering and purchasing new items, both consciously and subconsciously. The vendor has lost control, the customer is in control, no longer the passive target, but the active discoverer of your company, and, of course, of your competitors.

While consumers used to search for products manufacturers’ sites or Amazon.com, search engines have become the starting point, exposing the user to a plethora of opinions, reviews, ads and recommendations for alternative products.

Many points along the trajectory of creating and refining product space awareness influence the eventual purchase. As increasingly more individuals express their interests on the web readily to their friends and to people with similar interests, a more serendipitous trend of discovering new items through social recommendations has emerged.

This trend can be observed in several places. In social networks such as Facebook, people see what items their friends have purchased or are interested in, and in specialized social shopping sites such as ThisNext.

The important underlying trend is that very little of the search and discovery process happens on the actual e-commerce site. It is no longer about customer acquisition and capture! Moving onto the perspective of running an e-commerce operation, many of the technologies required to power e-commerce operations (content management, payment, A/B testing, CRM, bandwidth, storage etc) are being commoditized and today readily available as services.

Companies now need to focus on their data strategy: What data should be published on the site itself to create a better user experience and enhance the success of the store? Should it be revealed that there are only two seats left on a flight at a certain price? And how can technologies such as AJAX help both the business and the shopper?

With the rapid uptake of social media, the notion of the standalone sites has been disappearing. E-commerce sites now have the potential of being represented across the web. Data strategies now include widgets to replicate the company’s presence on blogs and profiles of individuals. What APIs should companies create that encourage third party developers to create applications that will benefit both developers and customers, and thus also the company?

What does it mean for e-commerce to become “social media friendly”?

Speakers :
-- Andreas Weigend
-- Mehrdad Piroozram