The ecommerce industry has experienced a tremendous amount of growth in the past decade. Having jumped from 3.5% of all retail sales in 2008 to nearly 11.9% in 2018, this growth – in combination with a (still) relatively low market share – represents a huge opportunity for more innovative ecommerce companies looking to overtake their traditional counterparts.
However, in order to latch on to the ‘growth train’, these same ecommerce companies (and therefore, ecommerce managers) are going to have to put their best foot forward. In other words, they’ll need to be sure that they are providing a first-rate online customer experience. And the best way to do this is to start listening to the voice of the customer. After all, your customers can be your best resource in terms of understanding what you’re doing wrong (or right!) on your website or mobile app. So allow me to introduce you to online feedback…
https://mopinion.com/online-feedback-ecommerce-managers/
Serving over six million visitors each week, Dutch retail chain, HEMA is expanding rapidly. HEMA now has stores in nine different countries including the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Austria and soon in the United Arab Emirates. This tremendous growth certainly presents its challenges when it comes maintaining a smooth online customer experience – but it also represents an exciting digital undertaking for the Dutch company.
https://mopinion.com/customer-success-story-hema/
More shopping on mobile amplifies a persistent problem for online retailers. Growing cart abandonment. Research from Barilliance, an eCommerce personalization tools developer, illuminates the challenge.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultalbot/2018/06/27/why-cart-abandonment-rates-arent-falling/
The road to mainstream significance has been long and wavering for virtual reality (VR). Introduced to popular culture through classic science-fiction embellishment, it was written off time and time again as a fad and a fraud when real-world technology couldn’t live up to those depictions. But recent years have seen VR headsets (led by the Oculus Rift) achieve meaningful public awareness.
Now that VR is finally on the cusp of general acceptance, a whole world of possibilities has opened up for countless industries—most significantly the gaming world. But what of the ecommerce industry? With user experience (UX) an increasingly-vital factor for setting stores apart, could VR be the next destination for ambitious retailers?
Let’s consider the role that VR is likely to play in the ecommerce world over the course of the next 5 years.
https://techspective.net/2018/07/18/how-vr-will-transform-the-ecommerce-experience-in-the-next-5-years/
Consumers’ lives are getting faster and more connected. In this piece, Melanie Jensen, e-commerce manager, Aptos, tells RetailTechNews that to make sure retailers are reaching shoppers at every touchpoint, they need to ensure that they are optimised for life on the go. Nearly a third of online shopping across all retail sectors now occurs on a mobile device, which makes it clear that this is a platform that cannot be ignored.
Mobile apps evolved to make our lives faster, easier, and more convenient. It’s time that retailer’s apps followed these rules. All too often, retailers try to offer fun or ‘cool’ experiences, such as making digital outfits or virtually trying on cosmetics. However, if these extras are difficult to use or time-consuming, customers will quickly lose interest – and retailers could lose a sale.
To make sure that your mobile offering is up to scratch, here are five key things to consider when building your app:
https://www.retailtechnews.com/2018/07/23/what-to-consider-when-building-your-mobile-app/
It's an occupational hazard within the retail sector: Lessons learned in the market are usually learned the hard way. Adding insult to injury, there is a very low margin for error, particularly when changing course in the business does not correlate with shopper demands.
The good news for grocery retailers is that decades of lessons learned via brick-and-mortar initiatives for category management and shopper marketing can be applied to e-commerce with relative ease.
So why isn't this happening at a faster pace? There are two main reasons.
First, CPG brands have been slow to react to e-commerce and have failed to make the necessary investments. Second, in an effort to react quickly to e-commerce competition such as Amazon some retailers are rushing to "band-aid" solutions, rather than building capabilities that enable a customized user experience and the ability to harvest invaluable customer data.
With that in mind, here are three basic lessons from traditional commerce that can fuel e-commerce success.
https://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/blogs/3-brick-and-mortar-lessons-for-e-commerce/
If you’ve been paying attention to the application of artificial intelligence in retail, you may feel like the buzz around the topic has gone from zero to “arrived” in less than a year. In retail time, even at the speed of the modern consumer, that is incredibly fast.
Some of the hype has come from activity around specific use-cases for the application of AI in retail. While companies like Baidu profess over 100 AI capabilities, in retail it appears that use-cases are centering on four main areas:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nikkibaird/2018/08/13/retail-has-three-big-ai-dilemmas/
E-commerce business models are undergoing a dramatic shift. Initially businesses relied on consumers to do the 'heavy lifting' to discover the product and to make the purchase decision. The vendor's role was to ensure that the product was discoverable and — most importantly — available at the geographic location where the transaction potentially would take place.
But the new e-commerce business model is optimized by driving the consumer to subscribe to 'an experience.' Think of Spotify or Apple Music, for example. The customer purchases access to a seemingly endless supply of music and tools that ensure their experience is maximized. The focus of the experience moves from a 'warehouse experience' to more of a concierge, personalized and curated experience. The consumer has already purchased, and so the emphasis is placed on ensuring that they stay engaged and active. Most importantly, the service makes recommendations and learns what the consumer likes, making the discovery of music a delight. In this model the better the tools engage the customers the better the company will prosper.
https://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/blogs/digital-transformation-driving-the-personalized-retail-customer-experience/
Would you like to gather real time feedback from your online visitors as they shop? Perhaps you are doing this already but struggle to manage the data and pick out the important trends? If so, tune in to our upcoming webinar where we will be joined by special guests Stephan Brandenburg & Iris Rabenberg of major retail company, De Bijenkorf (part of Selfridges Group). These two will share some interesting details of how they gather and get the most out of their online customer feedback data.
https://mopinion.com/webinar-how-selfridges-group-utilises-online-customer-feedback/
For many retailers, improving the customer experience involves simplifying e-commerce to rely on fewer clicks and supplementing text search for the ever-potent, AI-powered visual search feature.
Whether it be for navigating outfit inspiration, as seen on platforms such as Pinterest and ShopStyle or creating hyper-personalized recommendations, witnessed in Spotify and Netflix, the bottom line is through these technologies, retailers further empower their shoppers and guide purchases.
In a similar mission, the winner of Digiday’s Best Retail Technology award, Syte, aims to provide a cutting-edge visual AI search, which offers the necessary immersive experience and improved user journey shoppers crave — all beginning with the shopper’s chosen image.
https://wwd.com/business-news/technology/visual-search-1202880164/v/
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