There’s an increasing focus on the omnichannel trend, and it’s driven by both online and brick-and-mortar natives:
- Customer-centric ecommerce brands like Bonobos opening their “guideshops”, which don’t have any inventory, or Warby Parker using data from their online shoppers to decide where to open their brick and mortar stores.
- REI giving all their associates mobile devices so that they can guide in-store review searches and price comparisons
- Zumiez letting you place online orders from a retail store, get online orders delivered same-day to a retail store, and accepting online returns in-store
- Amazon opening their proof-of-concept markets and buying Whole Foods
But omni-channel means that e-commerce is not longer the center — it’s just one channel.
Ecommerce platforms have evolved in stages:
- Shopping cart (just a payments interface added to your website)
- Ecommerce “solution” (everything you need to run your online store)
- Ecommerce “platforms” (everything you need to run your store + the hub for integrations with marketing automation, etc. tools to grow your business)
- But the ecommerce platform may no longer make sense as the business hub if it needs to include all the functionality necessary for in-store and other channels (can’t be good at everything)
- We may see a move back to a lighter-weight ecommerce flow, optimized for omnichannel data, that integrates with other solutions
We’ve already seen the democratization of tools and production: soon we’ll see the democratization of data.
The rise of easy-to-use software tools and dropshipping means that almost anyone can start an ecommerce business today. You don’t need to know how to write code or make your product.
This means the market is becoming flooded with products, many of which are nearly identical. Upstarts are largely competing on brand and with marketing to win customer loyalty, which is why we’re seeing the rise of brands who are maniacally focused on the customer experience like Warby Parker, Bonobos, Casper, Dollar Shave Club and others.
Data-driven automation is a huge component of their ability to create an excellent customer experience across channels, so that brands can ask questions like, “How do I show the right offer to this individual customer at the right time?” But answering these questions isn’t easy — Many of the companies who do it well have full-time data science teams who have built custom solutions to unify their omnichannel data.
The rise of AI and ML means that this type of analysis will be increasingly integrated in ecommerce platforms and so become available to smaller firms, who can then use it to automate their offers and customer interactions.
E-commerce platforms that can provide this level of intelligent automation will be the winners in the next phase of e-commerce competition.
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Read the full article: Staying Ahead of the Race: Emerging Technologies in Ecommerce Platforms and Carts
