Earlier this month, Retail
TouchPoints unveiled its fifth
annual E-Commerce Technology Preview, which includes insights from
industry experts at 12 solution providers. The guide offers an exclusive look
at what retailers need to do in order to achieve e-Commerce success in 2019 and
beyond. Key themes include:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine
Learning; - Voice Commerce;
- Personalization;
- Product Information Management (PIM);
- Experience Marketing; and
- Mobile-First Strategies.
In this Q&A, the RTP
editors identify what caught their interest throughout the 2019 E-Commerce
Technology Preview.
Debbie Hauss,
Editor-in-Chief: I agree with Clicktale’s Liraz Margalit that retailers
will be more successful if they effectively factor in human psychology and
emotions to their marketing efforts. And although it’s important to tap into
both positive and negative emotions to improve business outcomes, it’s possibly
hardest to ignore the negatives. As Margalit noted, “Unsurprisingly, failing voucher codes (83%), apps freezing prior to purchase (77%),
and slow loading pages (81%)”
are among the biggest issues frustrating shoppers during checkout. On the
positive side, though, “(31%) state
that they’d be willing to pay more
for a product or service if the mobile shopping experience is efficient,
while 43% reveal that they would pay more for items from brands that
provide a five-star shopping experience.” These insights are
significant and should not be ignored.
Adam Blair, Executive
Editor: I hate to sound like a stick-in-the-mud Luddite (actually, who am I
kidding — it’s my brand), but I really wonder if voice shopping’s revenue will
climb from $2 billion today to $40 billion by
2022. That would be a 20X increase in just four years.
Akeneo’s Frédéric de Gombert quotes this statistic to support his thesis — that
voice shopping will transform online commerce as we know it. I’m sure voice
shopping will grow, but I doubt it will expand that quickly. But even if he is
overly optimistic about the pace of growth, de Gombert’s advice to retailers is
solid. He recommends “optimizing product attribute data for relevant contextual
voice queries” as an important way for “brands to generate more customer
interaction and purchases.” The key word here is relevant: making
product offerings and recommendations relevant, “in a way that answers
a broad range of customer questions,” will be critical to retailers’
success — whether the consumer’s query comes in via voice, a typed search term
or as part of a targeted promotion.
Glenn Taylor, Senior
Editor: It’s funny how one trend shifts into another —when
discussing mobile sites a few years ago, experts always discussed responsive
design as a must-have. That conversation has evolved in the past few years to
the point where progressive web apps (PWA) are the hot new item —
web apps that function like actual web
pages but offer app-style benefits of working offline, including fast loading
times and instant discoverability. Magento touched
on the topic extensively at its Imagine 2018 conference when it
launched a PWA Studio. The guide’s commentary from Jason Woosley of Adobe
(Magento) reinforces the idea that this will be a technology that more
companies will prioritize to build out their mobile experience. If I’ve learned
anything from Woosley’s piece, it’s that even in this app-crazy world we live
in, people do still want to just seek out the site they’re looking for and
shop. As many as 60% of consumers
who use a smartphone to shop online have less than two retailer-specific apps
on their phone, and 21% don’t have
any at all, according to RetailMeNot.
Bryan Wassel,
Associate Editor: As Santi Pierini of CAKE highlights, the growing ocean of
consumer data means retailers need to interpret all that raw information, not
simply rest on it. Retailers have more data than they can use, and so they need
to move “away from traditional, silo-based approaches to measurement”
and take up more efficient data processing methods. One retailer measured the
success of its campaigns across multiple channels, giving it better insight
into how they were connected, which resulted in a 75.2% increase in
average monthly conversion rates and boosting its average
monthly revenue growth by 72%. As Pierini points out, “it’s no longer
sufficient for marketers to start the ‘getting to know you’ process once a
customer clicks ‘buy’ or signs up for a loyalty program or email
updates” — they must be looking at decision-making habits across the entire
journey.
