Defining a Digital Commerce Strategy to Win: 4 Questions Every Brand Should Ask

Digital commerce has changed business forever.

10 years ago would you even imagine talking to your phone to get recommendations for dinner, getting a real-time map to the restaurant helping you avoid construction, buying something on Amazon for delivery that evening while waiting for a table, and checking in on the kids via the security cameras during dinner? The least exciting thing you can do with your mobile phone nowadays is to make a call.

Commerce today is about customer experience, relationships and consistent personalization across all devices. It’s about discovery, attachment and intimacy. Even more, it’s about being able to future proof business models you haven’t even conceived yet.

For example, what is your commerce of things strategy? When will you be launching your first social commerce experience? The companies at the top of every industry are all working on these challenges and more. They know that their future depends on being able to pivot quickly, taking advantage of new touchpoints and technologies as soon as they arrive. The question is which commerce platform to choose?

From our experience, every brand should ask four key questions:

1. Does our business demand continuous differentiation? Does your company need to continuously differentiate itself from others through a superior user experience?

   Businesses competing only on price are in a race to zero. Industry leaders differentiate their brand through customer experience. Choose an ecommerce framework that can extend to new touchpoints and leverage new technologies — one that is adaptable and scalable and that offers true enterprise-grade commerce capabilities.

2. All in one? Or build with the best? Most commerce platforms are crippled by early architecture decisions and years of piling on one off customer requirements resulting in an inflexible monolith. These are still early days in terms of commerce platform maturity. New technologies are continuously being brought to market. It might sound easy to go with a turnkey commerce platform. However, all-in-one, full-stack, or monolithic solutions don’t give you the opportunity to easily take advantage of new touchpoints or applications. Worse, they might not be flexible enough to keep up with an evolving business strategy. Their technologies are fundamentally closed; requiring costly customization projects, or are limited to a subset of third-party applications.

   Today, many Fortune-1,000 companies are taking a best of breed approach to ensure that they offer commerce experiences that no one else does. And that’s not easy because as soon as new functionality hits the market, eventually everyone gets it. Remember when no one had product recommendations? “People who bought this item also bought this?” Now, almost every retail site has that capability. Dynamic pricing is currently being used by airlines, telecommunications and entertainment. Other industries won’t be far behind.

   Gartner Group is predicting that by 2018 half of all new commerce solutions will take advantage of no less than 15 different vendor applications. The single-stack, monoliths of the computing world would have you believe that their solutions are best of breed. However, when many of the best haven’t even been invented yet, how can that be true? If a commerce platform is not open and flexible it won’t be able to adopt new technologies swiftly.

3. Is our organization looking to change its business model?

   The digital economy continues to surface disruptive business models.

   If you are looking to transform your business, then an open, API-based headless commerce platform will be a good bet for the future. API-based commerce allows your system to easily connect to any front-end marketing application or technology and any backend or legacy system.

   What’s most important is how the API works. A hypermedia API allows developers to create connections to new devices and technologies more easily by exposing resources as simple links, making it easier to develop new business experiences.

   

   
   Cloud or Not? Moving to the cloud dramatically reduces computing costs. Running Elastic Path Commerce Cloud for AWS eliminates 90% of computing infrastructure and labor costs.

4. Cloud or Not?

   Moving to the cloud dramatically reduces computing costs. For example, we ran the numbers for our new Elastic Path Commerce Cloud for AWS. They showed that running in the cloud will eliminate 90% of computing infrastructure and labor costs. While that’s a compelling cost of ownership argument, there may be a technical or regulatory reason for not shifting your commerce application to a public cloud. In that case, choose a robust ecommerce platform for your on premise solution, but make sure that it provides the option to move to the cloud when constraints lift.

   There’s another reason to consider the cloud. The internet of things is going to increase the number of commerce touchpoints exponentially. If you are building customer experiences into more touchpoints, you’ll need to easily flex your computing power. Public clouds can on demand right-size the computing infrastructure you need to meet steady and peak demand.

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Questioning the pros and cons of different commerce platforms? We can help you make the right decision. Contact Elastic Path for a complimentary Discovery Session.

from
http://www.getelastic.com/defining-a-digital-commerce-strategy-to-win-4-questions-every-brand-should-ask/

What's Hot (and What's Not) in Online Retail [Infographic]

Which keywords and products have been hot with online shoppers in 2017? To find out, SimilarWeb examined data for branded and non-branded search terms that have led the 100 highest-traffic retail sites in the United States this year. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

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https://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2017/32665/whats-hot-and-whats-not-in-online-retail-infographic

How Ecommerce Made in North America is Set to Shake Up Lifestyle Fashion in Asia Pacific

The Asia Pacific region is enjoying a retail spending boom. Steady economic growth has led to huge populations with more money to spend – and clothing and accessories are at the top of their shopping lists.

• Emerging online markets such as China and India have had double-digit growth rates in ecommerce apparel sales (Asia Pacific B2C Ecommerce Report, 2016).
• Asia Pacific retail spending is expected to triple to $600 billion, and 75% of luxury goods will come from China alone (McKinsey report on the global fashion and lifestyle market)
• Asian millennials will have more spending power than any previous generation – estimated to be $6 trillion in disposable income by 2020. They represent 45% of the region’s population, and 60% of the world’s total millennial population. (Enterprise Innovation)
• It’s a mobile-first economy for ecommerce. Smartphones delivered the majority of mobile transactions in every major global market, led by Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and Taiwan. More than 83% of Indonesia’s transactions are completed on smartphones. (Cashback Industry News)

Ecommerce platforms are a vital cog in winning global markets

North American brands are rushing to enter new geographies to increase revenues and their digital efforts are critical to their expansion. With a website, brands can reach customers without establishing a physical store, and create immersive and personalized shopping experiences.

State of Fashion 2017 report by Business of Fashion and McKinsey

Executives surveyed in the State of Fashion 2017, a joint study made by Business of Fashion and McKinsey, calls e-commerce “the single biggest opportunity of 2016.”  More than 60% said they would be investing more in omnichannel integration, ecommerce and digital marketing.

Agile ecommerce platforms help companies leapfrog to the top

Companies looking to expand globally need an e-commerce platform that can keep up with their growth and provide consistently positive shopping experiences, whether they are selling in Saskatchewan, Canada or Singapore, Malaysia. Challenges include:

• Scalability. The platform must be able to keep up with transaction volumes, especially during peak seasons like back-to-school and Black Friday.
• Customization. A new market requires changes in price, currency, language, tax regimes and available inventory among others. Certain features may have to be disabled for some regions.
• Speed-to-market. Platforms should allow rapid deployment to different countries, and be easily adapted for new technologies or opportunities. Every technical roadblock slows down global growth and has a real business impact.

The future of ecommerce growth

Global brands also need to consider how ecommerce itself is changing. The traditional view of a shopping cart and retail point of sale is becoming obsolete. “Point of sale is going to merge with online; offline and online will become one in the same,” said Peter Lukomskyj, VP of products at Elastic Path in an interview with Pymnts.com. Obvious examples include the Internet of Things, but as a whole it is the ability to create completely immersive customer experiences and monetize across all touchpoints.

This is particularly critical when studies show that Asia leads the world in immersive tech adoption. While several platforms offer scalability, speed and availability, API-based commerce platforms offer the flexibility to integrate easily with new technologies as they emerge. This can empower global companies to conquer new Asian territories, as well as embrace new ways of selling. Lukomskyj continued, “We’re able to take on the more traditional ways people transact, like point of sale, online, mobile, and also develop new consumption models. That’s where we see the real potential for growth.”

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Elastic Path works with global brands, including a major fashion retailer and a Fortune 1000 company, to create new and immersive shopping experiences in markets around the world. If you’re looking to expand into global markets, then consider an agile API-based ecommerce platform. Learn more about Elastic Path Commerce.

from
http://www.getelastic.com/how-ecommerce-made-in-north-america-is-set-to-shake-up-lifestyle-fashion-in-asia-pacific/

5 Ways a Hypermedia API Simplifies Ecommerce

Companies want to engage more customers, in more ways, and in more environments. But with all the new digital experiences available, consistency is proving difficult. Customers shouldn’t notice the technology but must remember the experience. That’s a tall order for ecommerce systems. We talked with Matt Bishop, Elastic Path’s principal architect, to understand more about how an API-based commerce system works and why hypermedia makes ecommerce easier.

“When we designed our ecommerce system based on an API, the chief problem we needed to solve was complexity,” says Matt Bishop. Getting the combinations right considering all the factors that have to click into place is like solving a Rubik’s cube with hundreds of squares and a different color for every customer. We recognized three major layers of complexity:

• Complex state and data. Hundreds of elements including products, pricing, currency, tax regimes, preferences for currency and shipping, and more all interact with each other and impact other pieces of many different systems.
• Complex integrations. Commerce sits between customer touchpoints (CMS, web browsers, mobile apps and internet of things) and systems (tax, inventory, ERP, billing engines and rule engines). Any given digital customer experience can comprise 15 plus different pieces of technologies all working together.
• Complex customizations. Booking shore excursions while on a cruise is very different from buying cosmetics. Different purchases require different kinds of state at varying times in the customer journey – all published through different touchpoints. Allowing developers to “understand” complex customizations was important for us to solve.

“Taking these three layers of complexity together, we realized we shouldn’t make it more complex. So, we took the opposite approach. We decided to make ecommerce radically simpler,” says Bishop. “We set two goals for the Elastic Path API. It had to be easy to use and simple to extend.”

Hypermedia: a simple and elegant e-commerce solution

Elastic Path tried several API styles – SOAP, RDF from the Semantic Web, templated REST – and rejected each before looking at level three REST, then known as HATEOAS (or Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State) and recently renamed Hypermedia.

“We finally settled on using a REST level three hypermedia API because it alone could provide the simplicity of use and extension that we needed to solve the complexity problem,” says Bishop.

Hypermedia uses two concepts: resources and relationships. “Resources are things or the nouns of the system: carts, items, profiles, purchases. They have relationships to each other that are named. For example, an item has a relationship to price.”

To access a hypermedia API, simply go to the “home page” or root, which gives a list of links to start your navigation. Each link leads to a new link, or controls like “Add to Cart.” You can add, change or delete links completely.

“Understanding resources and relationships as well as how to access the API provides everything you need to successfully use a hypermedia API,” says Bishop. It’s that simple.

Advantages of a Hypermedia API

• Discoverability. Hypermedia allows you to follow links to discover related content and links – just like browsing a website. “Developers really like this experience,” says Bishop. “They don’t have to read documentation, study a book, or ask a lot of questions.” They can jump in, figure it out, and quickly use the API.
• Contextuality. Hypermedia allows you to personalize content for every customer. “You can shape the API based on their profile, and get them to do what you want, based on their role. You can add links, and remove links. This contextuality gives us a lot of power over the presentation layer. Clients consume the API without understanding the context because they don’t need to. Simple.
• Reactivity. As the name implies, reactive clients can recognize and react to resources (cart, price, item, etc.) but do not have intrinsic business logic. “Decisions are made by the server and provided as links in the API,” explains Bishop. “Instead of coding up a client, the API presents the link or chooses not to. This model allows us to reach all touch points simply and quickly.”
• Extendability. Just add resources and link to an existing resource to personalize the user experience. You can push a product on sale, select content based on a user profile, and filter recommendations. Similarly, to remove capabilities (like hiding the price) just remove the link. “The system never reacts to render it, and the price disappears without having to modify the item itself.”
• Stability. “Stability is important when the number of customer touchpoints increases. When you have dozens of touch points and many versions of an application, some may live in hardware that cannot be updated. Some of it may live in mobile devices that the client doesn’t want you to update or the vendor can’t provide updates for. Connected cars, connected homes, mPOS, clienteling apps, augmented and virtual reality all represent new touchpoints. You need a way for the API to be resilient, given the number of different clients and their varying abilities to access it over time. Hypermedia provides the right level of stability along with simplicity.

“Our decision five years ago to build a simpler way to create complex ecommerce systems was a good one,” says Bishop. “At the time, we were way ahead of the market. But today, Hypermedia APIs are now starting to lead the way in many other forms of complex systems, not just ecommerce, for all the same reasons.”

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A hypermedia ecommerce API isn’t like other APIs; some are less sophisticated and come with significant overhead. Brands using hypermedia APIs can innovate faster and deliver consistent customer experiences. How is your company handling ecommerce complexity? Learn more about hypermedia APIs in 10 Ways A Hypermedia Ecommerce API Leads to Developer Nirvana.

from
http://www.getelastic.com/5-ways-a-hypermedia-api-simplifies-ecommerce/

4 Key Questions to Ask Before Selecting an Enterprise Commerce Platform

The digital commerce platform market has undergone significant changes over the last several years. Acquisitions, technology advancements, and customer expectations have altered the commerce platform landscape and left brands wondering if their investment will realize an ROI, or more fundamentally if their platform provider will still be around in 5 years.

Protect the investment you are about to make by asking some simple, yet powerful, questions. The vendors actively pursuing your business need to ante up and demonstrate their capabilities today but also give you some degree of comfort for tomorrow.

From our experience, and assuming you have done some due diligence on the capabilities of each platform being scrutinized to ensure your requirements can be met, there are four key questions:

1. What is the product roadmap? Your business is not going to stand still in perpetuity, neither can your platform. Ask prospective vendors for an overview of their roadmap but look beyond simple features and find out if there is alignment on capabilities that you know are important to your business. As technology shifts occur, each platform needs to embrace those shifts to provide you with growth opportunities in the future. A good source of information on technology trends is the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, which provides “a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.” Thing Commerce, Augmented and Virtual Reality Commerce, API-based Digital Commerce and many more will shape the future of digital commerce for all industries. Are the vendors you are evaluating providing you with these tools, and others, to support your future initiatives?
2. Is the platform scalable? Deployment models significantly impact scalability but even then there are real limitations. The architecture of an application plays a significant role in determining scalability, and the types of business uses you have planned for the platform must be validated. Do you have peaks for certain types of requests? For example, is there a significant rise in the number of searches done for a specific period? Do you experience a rise in the number of transactions that need to be processed in a limited period of time?
   Consider these peaks and valleys and then ask your potential vendors for real data to ensure they can comfortably meet the peaks today but also in subsequent years. Better yet, ask them to prove they can meet your projections for the next few years and have them run a Proof of Concept to validate the platform scalability. And don’t forget to factor in deployment models! Perhaps a cloud deployment will work for your business, or maybe there are technical or regulatory reasons for using an on-premise solution. Be sure to find out if the platform supports both of these models and evaluate them separately. Moving to the cloud dramatically reduces computing costs. For example, we ran the numbers for our Elastic Path Commerce Cloud for AWS and know that running in the cloud will eliminate 90% of computing infrastructure costs. That includes servers, software and maintenance.
3. Will the pricing model enable you to grow your business without restrictions? Every platform purchase eventually hinges on the price, but think beyond the standard pricing agreement and consider the impact on your future business. Some vendors employ pricing structures that limit growth. Perhaps you want to sell in multiple countries with local commerce sites, expand to a new line of business, deploy to multiple business units or any one of many possible business expansion opportunities. Does the pricing model of the platform place significant, or any, upfront cost on pursuing these business possibilities?
   Your vendor needs to provide flexible models (you need options) that are tied to the business value they are providing, or more specifically helping you to grow your digital business. But more importantly they need to ensure that you can explore potential lines of business with minimal licensing cost, and instead support the success as you grow.
4. Is the vendor a partner? Often overlooked is the long-term business relationship required to make your investment a success. You need your platform vendor invested in your long-term success, a relationship that needs to be mutually beneficial.A true partner will solicit feedback on the future of your platform; understand your business and how they can help you realize your goals; quickly address critical business issues that are preventing you from transacting, and not get caught up in contract language tied to SLAs; advise you on how to get the most out of the platform; communicate effectively and often.You don’t need emails and phone calls every day but you need a partner who is aligned with your business vision, helps you when there are problems and treats you like you matter.

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Are there more questions? Definitely. But you don’t have to do it alone. Contact us for a complimentary Discovery Session to help with your selection process for a commerce platform that truly meets your business vision and needs.

from
http://www.getelastic.com/4-key-questions-to-ask-before-selecting-an-enterprise-commerce-platform/

The Google Search Volume of Major Brands vs. Challenger Brands [Infographic]

How much more are major, established brands searched for on Google compared with smaller, challenger brands? An analysis by SLANT examined Google search trend data for 20 categories in the United States. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

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https://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2017/32538/the-google-search-volume-of-major-brands-vs-challenger-brands-infographic

Ecommerce Technology: Augmenting Reality Augments the Bottomline

Augmented reality is an ecommerce technology changing the way people buy online. Different from virtual reality in which the real world is replaced by the view inside virtual reality headsets, augmented reality blends online, mobile and real-world experiences.

According to the Walker Sands Future of Retail 2017 Report, consumers still enjoy the ability to touch and try a product. It’s the main reason why shoppers still prefer physical stores over Amazon and eBay.

Augmented reality helps recreate that from the convenience of their home factor. It answers the practical questions of, “How will this look on me?” or even “Will this sofa match my wallpaper?” It neutralizes the fear that a product that looks good onscreen won’t work in real life.

Elastic Path has worked on countless projects building new online experiences for companies to help them transform to the digital economy. One of our clients, Virgin Media, launched an app with augmented reality features as early as 2012.

Read the Virgin Media case study.

E-commerce technology helps people choose products virtually
We’ve seen how technologies are bringing to life strategies that help people choose products without experiencing them in person. Now you can place new furniture in your living room, paint the same room with different colors, try on shoes, eyeglasses and clothes, apply makeup and nail polish, design the interior of your new car, attend a conference and more – all virtually.

Augmented reality pioneers
Retail giants like IKEA, Sephora and Disney, have already incorporated e-commerce technologies that let customers “try before they buy.” NARS cosmetics uses Facebook’s 360 technology to interact with 3D makeup tutorials. Ebay has partnered with Myer to create the world’s first virtual department store. Ali Baba has also announced plans for their own digital store, equipped with a robot consultant who can interact with customers and recommend products, like Amazon’s Alexa.

Heavy investment means augmented reality pioneered by the big companies, will rapidly become more affordable and a more pervasive e-commerce technology. Digi-Capital estimates that by 2020, the market will reach $120 billion, with e-commerce taking 30% share. That’s just three years away, but not impossible given the great amount of research that’s going into new e-commerce technologies. In the first months of 2016, augmented reality investment reached a record $1.1 billion. That’s more than enough for companies to push forward important new shopping technologies like computer vision and augmented reality.

Augmented reality closes the last gap
Augmented reality solves the one limitation of e-commerce: the lack of sensory immersion. Currently, most websites and apps can recommend products based on browsing history and past purchases, but these are still just static product images on a screen. When customers can interact with products in a more meaningful, more personalized way, sales improve dramatically.

For example, Sephora had been creating makeup tutorials for years, based on a tested retail formula that consumers are more willing to purhase a product if they know how to use it. When the company partnered with the augmented reality platform Modiface, they created an irresistible offer. Combining powerful facial recognition software, and frame-by-frame scans that determine shades and products in a photo, visitors can see how a tutorial works on their face and can place featured products directly into a shopping cart from the tutorial.

Experience-based commerce at its best
This is experience-based commerce at its best. The customer doesn’t just contemplate how a product looks on them. They “know” and with objections aside, they can then instantly purchase, without having to access another interface. One of the attractions of e-commerce is that it ushered in incredible shopping convenience. No more getting in a car, driving to the mall, finding a parking spot, etc. However, sitting on a couch ordering new items can require a leap of faith many are not prepared to take. An e-commerce technology like augmented reality can help convert those folks to the faithful.

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Bringing together commerce capabilities with customer experiences and new augmented reality requires a flexible, extensible e-commerce platform. Learn more about Elastic Path Commerce.

from
http://www.getelastic.com/ecommerce-technology-augmenting-reality-augments-the-bottomline/

The Interactive Content Marketing Purchase Funnel Guide

Looking to maximize your interactive content? Use this interactive content marketing purchase funnel guide to help you draw your audience into your content marketing yielding measurable results.

The post The Interactive Content Marketing Purchase Funnel Guide appeared first on Heidi Cohen.

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