Numerous ecommerce merchants are taking pleasure in a robust holiday selling season even as some brick-and-mortar stores are seeing fairly flat Christmas sales. To make sure ongoing growth and success, Internet sellers might wish to challenge their companies to enhance in numerous areas in 2014.
Ecommerce and mobile-based ecommerce have actually grown substantially this year. Cyber Monday ecommerce sales, as an example, reached $1.735 billion wasing derived from desktop and laptop gadgets, according to comScore. Even Black Friday, which is much better understood for brick-and-mortar retail sales, saw online spending reach $1.198 billion in the United States, once more according to comScore. Mobile online spending might likewise have actually grown, as some reports show that mobile-based website traffic was up 55 percent around Thanksgiving.
Retailers, nevertheless, should not rest on their existing success, however rather need to challenge their companies to enhance in a number of areas, including free shipping offers, mobile optimization, customization, data driven choice making, and cross channel sales.
Offer Free, Two-Day Shipping
The very first difficulty for online sellers in 2014 could be to find ways to provide free, two-day shipping to all or a lot of shoppers. While it is likely there will still be minimum purchase and optimum weight demands and constraints, online consumers are going to expect faster complimentary shipping alternatives thanks, in part, to the growth in services like Amazon Prime and ShopRunner.
Amazon Prime, which costs $79.99 each year, offers shoppers free two-day shipping on orders put on Amazon.com and affiliated online merchants. ShopRunner offers a similar two-day shipping service with free returns for $79.99 annually or $8.95 per month. ShopRunner’s shipping advantages are likewise offered totally free to any American Express member. Other similar services are also likely to show up in 2014. MasterCard and PayPal, as examples, have both attempted free, two-day shipping offers already.
Think about order fulfillment services, dispersed storehouses, drop shipping, and even partnerships with other sellers to help fulfill this challenge.
Put Mobile Design and Marketing First
In November, IBM reported that mobile devices accounted for 31 percent of U.S. ecommerce-related web traffic around the Thanksgiving vacation this year, which 17 percent of ecommerce transactions originated from smartphones or tablets. Usually, tablet users invested more than $126.00 per order, and smartphone users invested about $106 per order.
This data shows that mobile ecommerce is not just a novelty, but rather a need to have for 2014.
If an ecommerce business is not optimized for mobile sales, 2014 is the year to handle that challenge, including offering a receptive design and mobile friendly payment alternatives.
Offer Personalization and Customization
Difficulty your business to finally start providing customization and customization both onsite and in marketing. The simplest place to begin could be with e-mail marketing. Work to segment email marketing campaigns so that they resolve consumers by name and with pertinent items and offers that are based upon a person’s or group of buyers’ stated choices or on-site habits.
Handling this difficulty indicates that the retailer’s marketing department will have to collect significant information about exactly what interests buyers and arrange separate, customized projects around those interests.
Customization and modification could be a substantial competitive advantage in 2014.
Use Big Data for Big Information
Big Data is a popular trend in business and in marketing. The concept can indicate various things to different businesses. For ecommerce, retailers need to seek to make use of Big Data to collect huge information, if you will, that could be made use of to make better buying and selling decisions.
As an example consider, Weather Trends International, a Big Data company that uses historic weather information and advanced data processing to accurately forecast weather condition 11 months in advance. This sort of Big Data information could show a snowboard and ski retailer what sort of winter significant ski resorts are most likely to have next year, and might notify getting and inventory choices.
Likewise, knowing that a particular area is going to have a warmer than typical July and August might affect how, where, and when a clothes retailer promotes shorts or bikinis on Facebook or AdWords.
In 2014, discover sources of great, functional Big Data, and put the resulting big information to make use of.
Offer Seamlessly Across Channels, Devices
Retailers online or in physical stores need to provide shoppers a seamless, cross channel shopping experience that makes getting things much easier for the customer. To remain to take pleasure in success in 2014, consider providing buyers the ability to share orders across gadgets, applications, and even marketplaces.
In practice, this could imply that products added to a cart in an online shop show up in the cart for the retailer’s iPhone app too. Or that a customer’s order history displayed on a retailer’s site reveals orders placed on-site and through a marketplace like Amazon or eBay.
Attempt to think of every method that a buyer might connect with an online establishment, then make all those touch points work together in 2014.
