Ecommerce Trends 2018

An ecommerce framework or application that is stable and simple could make the difference in improving customer experience. It will make it easier to drive sales opportunities, increase organisational agility, and expand the overall functionality and services offered to customers in the future. The ecommerce application you choose should be resilient enough to adapt to changing B2B ecommerce trends.

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Why now?

Companies interested in buying wholesale inventory have previously relied heavily on printed catalogues, telesales teams and sales people who would visit them. Much has changed since then, especially with the rise of B2B ecommerce. B2B ecommerce continues to be a hot topic, and the number of ecommerce applications that serve these growing trends and interests continues to increase.

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What’s changed with ecommerce?

According to Forrester Research, B2B ecommerce generated $780 billion USD in revenue in 2015, and they predict continued growth to $1.13 trillion USD. This remarkable growth may be the result of intense digital transformation and growing reliance on online means of ordering, social sharing, and technological penetration. Interestingly, according to Forrester, 74% of B2B buyers research half or more of their work purchases online, and 93% of business buyers prefer to buy online once they’ve decided what to buy. A number of trends facilitate continued growth; often, functionality that is seemingly “irrelevant” for B2B customers turns out to be useful for this market. How come? According to BigCommerce, a B2C-oriented website nevertheless sparks the same interest from B2B buyers (even if that wasn’t the intention). This may be due to the research conducted by B2B buyers, who encounter B2C sites that may become suppliers. Forrester reports that 79% of companies have set up a dedicated ecommerce website to ensure that B2B buyers have a particular channel available to them, running in parallel to their B2C ecommerce website. In addition, Forbes reported that B2B buyers expect relatively the same standard of delivery expediency, such as just-in-time delivery, automated replenishment, partial delivery, multi-warehouse shipping, and returns management. According to Forrester, 69% of B2B companies will no longer print catalogues in the next five years. With the increasing focus on digital commerce, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of relationships with a company will proceed without a single interaction with a human being. Demand for functionality, trends, and their respective expectations come at a high cost for ecommerce webshops that are not able to serve the growing demands of B2B buyers.

Align your webshop with current ecommerce trends

There are a number of avenues your business can take to support growing trends and build the ultimate ecommerce experience that actually helps customers make purchases. Some of the most effective and sought-after include personalisation, customer engagement & CRM, data-driven optimisations and pricing scales.

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Build personalisation

If WOW’ing your customers has been a strong motivation for you, and if their loyalty plays a big part in your business model, personalisation should lie at the forefront of your ecommerce roadmap. Personalisation is focused on improving individual customer experience. Customer experience is the art of providing customers with an assortment of relevant functionality such as efficient shipping, dynamic pricing and a short way to the product. Webshops often invest considerably in UX (user experience), UI (user interface), logistics and shipping, and customer service to encourage customers to actually purchase.

Personalisation also covers another set of requirements that focus on merchandising. In order for B2B companies to provide customers with a personalised experience, webshops use a variety of means to gather data that is contextually relevant to the person who is interested in it. Webshops use the following information: search queries, purchase history, shopping cart contents/wishlists, commerce behavior (shares, product ratings, likes), geographic location, and customer segments (purchase history, recommended products).

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Localisation helps to tailor the content and experience of the webshop to the customer’s specific location (determined by the customer’s IP address). The idea is that the location already helps to segment aspects of the webshop, whose contents change depending on who is using it.

Other aspects like commerce behavior or purchase history often lead to relevant personalisation. A state-of-the-art ecommerce application should become increasingly tailored the more a customer uses it.

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Build relationships

Relationships with your customers give you a chance to bridge the gap and get closer to fulfilling their needs. Once you’ve identified customer touchpoints, you can cross-sell or recommend products that they have not yet found in your inventory. Your CRM tool (customer relationship management tool), once synchronised with all your channels of customer communication, is able to pinpoint the last email that was sent, when they bought something, when someone spoke to them in chat, and what was actually achieved. This allows you to learn your customers’ purchase behavior.

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Your CRM can be integrated in such a way that you can even get customers’ email correspondence, chat logs and frequency of customer support requests to determine whether an individual is an ideal candidate for loyalty programs, affiliate commission and so on. This lets you further segment customers according to their behavior and identify repeat buyers with greater potential.

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Build data-driven optimisations for CRO

CRO means conversion rate optimisation, the practice of improving the likelihood (rate) of someone buying from your webshop by optimising designs, language and texts. The usual manual approach has low potential, because it does not take advantage of data-driven applications that collect and assemble data in a meaningful way. Data is simply sitting around, waiting to be “activated”, so to speak.

A CRO-optimised webshop replaces gut feeling with data-driven decisions. Reliable long-term data collected over time (Google Analytics, ecommerce analytics, CRM, etc.) supports data-driven decisions. Avoid assumptions to ensure that you are making decisions based on actual facts. Data sources like heatmaps can provide a big advantage, showing exactly which parts of the page interest customers. Create categories based on what people are actually searching for rather than inventing a category you assume people would like. Using analytics and in-store data, you can, for example, provide a functionality or service that uses this data to generate categories closely linked to your CRM.

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Build it omnichannel

Omnichannel management allows brands to strategically integrate many different data sources such as customer experience, inventory, stock and a variety of APIs to extract relevant data. The collected data can then be aggregated and distributed across multiple communication channels like an ecommerce platform, social media or dedicated mobile apps. Brands are multidimensional, in that they provide customers with many access points through which they can purchase their products: for example, at a warehouse location, through social media marketing, in the online shop, by calling in, or by visiting the store. Knowing the customer journey is critical: while one channel may begin the journey, another channel may be more effective at closing the sale. The question is: what is the most effective channel for my business? How do customers begin their journey?

For example, a B2B buyer first encounters your products through your company’s LinkedIn page, clicks one of the products you shared, visits your webshop and browses your selection. The buyer learns that you have a warehouse where he can buy your products in bulk at reduced rates, and calls in. After some time, he creates an account with wholesale privileges and proceeds to order from the warehouse. This journey could have lasted anywhere from two days to two weeks; nevertheless, omnichannel management has allowed you to see this customer’s particular journey, and you’ve learned a lot about the importance of your company’s LinkedIn page as the catalyst for that person’s purchases.

The journey is not yet over, because you need recurring purchases to maintain inventory flow, so you activate remarketing campaigns targeting the demographic this person belongs to. Using omnichannel marketing, you can toggle campaigns and their respective channels to determine which perform best. Using your CRM and data-driven optimisations, you will tailor the webshop (as a channel) specifically for this demographic.

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Aligning your development initiatives with consumer demand and preferences will make the difference needed to outcompete your competition and secure customer loyalty. The window of opportunity is often small, and quick reactions to consumer trends will be essential for the continued success of your business. The decisive moment to fulfill your customers’ needs is now. Are you ready?

There are other trends we recommend that we have not covered in this article! Getting your ecommerce solution to a state that serves customer needs is one of the most important things you can do to improve your webshop.