A New Age of eCommerce: Answering new tech challenges Featuring: Ampersand / Rackspace / Salmon / Conexus
Introduction
WELCOME TO THE NEW AGE OF RETAIL. It’s not long since just giving your customers a good online experience was considered a big deal. That’s no longer enough: it’s about tracking, understanding, responding and analysing every source of data (from purchase journeys to user interfaces) for a smarter, more profitable business. Success means building an omnichannel retail experience that works seamlessly between devices, stores and every social touchpoint in-between.
This handbook tackles the challenges and opportunities of the Third Age of eCommerce. We’ve asked experts helping retailers solve these problems with agile, reactive and intelligent technology infrastructures.
Their advice is designed to do things that matter to you: sell more, delight customers and manage costs. Let’s meet them now.
Our experts are on the front line of the Third Age of Ecommerce. Their clients are the biggest names on the high street, household brands with award-winning websites. They’ve brought a clear view of the options facing retailers as they face up to challenges and opportunities promised by new technology solutions.
A New Age of eCommerce
MEET OUR EXPERTS
Darryl Adie Managing Director Ampersand Commerce
Nigel Beighton VP of Technology and Product, International Rackspace
Iain Devine Commercial Director Salmon
Paul Lynch Managing Director Conexus
Darryl founded Ampersand Commerce in Manchester in 2008 to help major retailers build better online stores using open source technology. Darryl has built Ampersand into a multi-award winning Magento Gold Solution Partner agency.
Nigel is responsible for Rackspace product and technology strategy, and was previously chief technology officer at lastminute. com. He’s focused on helping businesses of all sizes to get the most out of Rackspace’s cloud and managed hosting solutions.
Iain joined Salmon from IBM, where he has had various roles since 2001. At Salmon, he helps clients define, deliver and exploit multichannel commerce platforms, choosing from a variety of open-source and proprietary solutions.
Paul has over 25 years experience of working in the IT industry as a technical architect, pre-sales consultant and Sales Director. At Conexus, he works with brands on integrated systems for better ecommerce solutions, using Hybris technology.
A New Age of eCommerce
SECTION 1 FIVE CRITICAL SHIFTS IN ECOMMERCE TODAY
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1. OMNICHANNEL IS THE ONLY CHANNEL You may see them as channels but your customers see them as… you.
Darryl Adie Ampersand
Nigel Beighton Rackspace
Iain Devine Salmon
Paul Lynch Conexus
The boundaries and differences between online and offline are being blurred. Ecommerce used to be perceived as a silo, it’s now part of the core of the business.
Seamless commerce is what’s important to customers – as soon as a retailer puts any kind of obstacle in their way, you’ve lost them. Easy, convenient and intuitive is what keeps them coming back.
There are so many frustrated online shoppers out there, and they’d flock to a good service. They’re really responsive to the retailers offering the best, consistent service.
A successful omni channel strategy depends on enabling the single source of the truth that in the past we have tried to create through complex backend plumbing. Simple strategy is to use your commerce platform for all order orchestration.
A New Age of eCommerce
2. INSTORE IS INTEGRATED WITH ONLINE Shopping is still a social experience – not just a means to an end. Digital, meet human.
Paul Lynch Conexus
Darryl Adie Ampersand
Iain Devine Salmon
Click-and-collect is the biggest growth area in the last two peak trading windows. It’s a direct response to customers wanting the assurance of being able to access and collect their orders in a way that works for them.
We’re seeing a focus on what it takes to link up instore customer experience and online customer experience. That’s a key competency with forward-looking customers. It’s also about acknowledging customer preferences – for example, preferring to buy say shoes in a store, no matter how great your website is.
Things like queue-bursting capability – like extra assistants on the floor who can check stock and take payments during busy periods – that’s as important as knowing what they browsed for on the way to work. Actually facilitating the best possible experience instore and bringing the best-in-class tech right onto the shop floor, not just saving it for the website.
And once they’re in store, whether to click-and-collect or ‘showroom’ your products, it’s about offering a consistent brand experience. By the way, it’s really important to be able to recognise device-specific traffic - is it a tablet or a mobile? Tablets have higher conversion rates than mobiles.
A New Age of eCommerce
3. RETAILERS ARE DOING MORE WITH CUSTOMER DATA AND PERSONALISATION Clearly, the Third Age of ecommerce is the age of actionable insight. Listen harder. Act faster.
Darryl Adie Ampersand
Iain Devine Salmon
The aim for multi-channel retailers is the aggregation of online and offline data and using it for a more holistic customer experience. For most retailers, we’re still only talking about gathering the data though. The promise of Big Data and really mining it for insight is still a long way off for most.
Every consumer touchpoint potentially gives you actionable insight and useful data. But site analytics are done at a minimal level, broadly speaking. Consumers are way ahead of retailers on this in terms of their expectations – ie the trade-off between what they offer up in terms of data and what they expect to get back in tailored responses.
A New Age of eCommerce
4. BEHAVIOURAL COMMERCE BUILDS SALES. Learn from every interaction so you can improve every interaction. Make better choices.
Darryl Adie Ampersand
Iain Devine Salmon
You’ve got customers’ need for immediacy and instant gratification and the question is, how can software address that? So you can see online, or you get a text saying that the dress you want is in store but once you get there, it’s gone. Retailers always battle with the problem of holding stock at the right levels, versus disappointing their customers.
Consumers understand that they go in-store for a different purpose to shopping online. Sometimes retailers don’t get this! Some do – so after checking out the goods in person, you can use your phone instore to scan a QR code for extensive product data or customer reviews. That’s a level of detail which a customer service assistant wouldn’t be expected to know and it’s a good extra element to optimise conversions. The idea of considered purchase journeys, no matter what the product. A New Age of eCommerce
5. LOCAL BUSINESSES, GLOBAL MARKETPLACE Wherever you are, your customers should think you’re just round the corner. Be relevant.
Darryl Adie Ampersand
Iain Devine Salmon
Paul Lynch Conexus
Companies have to make sure their online user experience meets the cultural needs of a new country. For example, there’s a very specific lookand-feel to Japanese sites, and Western retailers have to adapt their brand to suit. Most retailers are apprehensive about this, but there are a lot of opportunities there if done correctly.
Your success or failure is really determined by your technology in this area, particularly back-end considerations like distribution, fulfilment and inventory management. Say you’re thinking about expanding to Germany – it doesn’t necessarily follow that you should site all your centres there. There’s often also unexpected issues around say data privacy, which can be completely different between countries.
This is high on everyone’s agenda. What doesn’t work is just dragging and dropping your current setup into a new country. You need to understand the local market really well. For example, many Europeans don’t trust credit cards, and prefer bank transfers, or can even be invoiced for the goods. Factoring this in to conversion rates and the site design – the whole end-to-end customer promise – is crucial.
A New Age of eCommerce
SECTION 2 FIVE TECHNOLOGY IMPERATIVES IN TODAY’S ECOMMERCE
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1. DELIVER SCALE FOR AGILE SCENARIOS
There’s one conundrum facing just about every ecommerce operation: how to scale to deliver an omnichannel strategy without eroding these notoriously wafer-thin retail margins. The emerging consensus says ecommerce platforms need to evolve from their point-ofsale beginnings. That means extending to interact with customers (wherever they may be) and integrating with the backend systems that manage processing and fulfillment.
The drive to scale for new markets is huge. Responding to a promotional drive and setting up a microsite is fast and responsive. But the reality of increased demand for many is an epic fail: crashes, slow response times and website going down at peak times.
EXPERT TIP Justify the investment by showing how existing platforms will struggle to meet customer demands for seamless interactions and performance.
Paul Lynch Conexus Customers will need to move away from low-cost boutique platforms to scalable and robust solutions. Traditional point-ofsale solutions are dying. Our customers are re-platforming as part of their developing omnichannel strategy. There’s a mentality that web equals cheap technology. And a client might push back on a dual hosting solution as they think it is more expensive. But the cost is much lower than what they could lose at Christmas if the site crashes. A New Age of eCommerce
2. PROMOTE RELATIONSHIPS AS WELL AS PRICES
Retailers don’t have a divine right to the own the customer. The only thing standing between consumers and a commercial relationship with manufacturers is the quality and value of the retailer’s service. There’s no shortage of ways to use technology to deliver a service that customers value more than price. It’s about using algorithms to deliver intelligent and personal experiences that help users make great decisions.
EXPERT TIP Focus on adding value. You need to go beyond a transactional relationship to protect yourself against the disruptive forces looking to court your customers.
Nigel Beighton Rackspace Yes, retailers can take payment reliably, but they’re not good at dealing with customers who are trying to make a decision. What’s often missing is the interface to make easy, obvious, comparisons in the relevant context. Take open-source software like MongoDB – it’s great at building large product catalogues, and very complex inter-related product descriptions. The old relational technologies have been blown out of the window. These are game changing technologies and what’s more, they’re accessible and easy. A New Age of eCommerce
3. SIMPLIFY AND DRIVE BETTER USER EXPERIENCES
Who doesn’t have huge aspirations to create a site with a spectacular look and feel? But many ecommerce sites are guilty of focusing on features and functions that hinder rather than enhance user experience. And, to make things worse, the net result is often overcomplication that confuses users with bewildering pages and navigation.
Most of the best sites follow the ‘don’t try too hard’ mantra. It’s not just about closing every possible transaction. It’s about helping people find the right thing, with tools like elastic search, to stop them dropping out completely. Great search technology demands data storage and server capability to make elasticity possible even during times of high connectivity or traffic demands.
EXPERT TIP Remove complication and clean up really busy web pages that are hard to navigate and add fast search technology for a real valueadd for shoppers.
Iain Devine Salmon It’s still about improving customer experience massively – like having a beautiful native-app mobile experience with one-button purchasing, not some clunky interface. Things like one-click order tracking, text messages when your goods are dispatched – all really important parts of the jigsaw.
A New Age of eCommerce
4. DEPLOY REAL-TIME DATA FOR CUSTOMER LOYALTY
How do you get a picture of a customer, stopping short of asking them to drop everything (including their basket) and tell you? The answer involves using real-time data to deliver loyaltyboosting experiences that surprise and delight your customers in equal measure.
Looking at real-time stock information will tell you who’s browsing what and find insights to help with a successful search. Then there’s the shift from out-of-town fulfillment centres to a 90-minute delivery expectation in major cities.
EXPERT TIP Gathering real-time data will give you the microscopiclevel detail you need to understand customer expectations and set up your business to respond quickly and accurately.
Darryl Adie Ampersand You need the right software to keep data in a controlled way – it is the software part that is responsible for creating a centralised experience and retailers need to have the extra capability to run this.
A New Age of eCommerce
5. PLAN CAPACITY TO MEET CUSTOMER SPIKES
The obsession with “the purchase” has led to weaknesses in basic ecommerce infrastructures. There are many investments – from video to virtualisation – that seem to trump the art of keeping the business running efficiently. Your site going down at busy times is the digital equivalent of locking your door and raising a closed sign at 3pm on a Saturday.
Many sites have been choosing between big data capabilities and offering personalisation because they can’t handle both. It’s a bleak choice. You want to make your best offers when traffic is peaking. That’s the big opportunity.
EXPERT TIP Predict your traffic spikes in advance and look to the cloud to provide additional capacity so you can make the most of your busiest times.
Iain Devine Salmon Annual capacity planning is critical; thinking ahead to those busy times or where additional agility would be needed. Have a dynamic environment and an equally agile support system underpinning it.
A New Age of eCommerce
SECTION 4 A CUSTOMER MANIFESTO, A RESPONSE FROM RETAILERS The Third Age of Ecommerce is about rising to the new demands of a new customer. Here’s a snapshot:
A New Age of eCommerce
THIRD AGE OF ECOMMERCE MATRIX
A MANIFESTO FOR CUSTOMERS
A RESPONSE FROM RETAILERS
Know who I am – and prove it by not treating me like everyone else
It’s time to listen – and to enrich customer profiles with insight from every channel
Make it easy for me – with clear and intuitive service
Put customer experience at the heart of everything we do
Help me – make comparisons and decisions, I might not know what I want yet
Provide like-for-like comparison tools and fast search capability, with great UX
Be where I am – and be the same brand wherever I choose to shop
Use Big Data anaylsis to suggest likely alternatives and useful complementary products
Don’t let me down – with websites that crash, or by losing my data as I switch between devices
It’s omnichannel time – one brand; one experience; everywhere. Ensure that we’re robust and reliable, and can scale as required without compromising the service
A New Age of eCommerce
SUMMING UP The new age of ecommerce is upon us. SMART SYSTEMS, NEW TECHNOLOGY AND CLOUD PLATFORMS ARE READILY AVAILABLE, AND IT’S EASIER THAN EVER TO BUILD THE INFRASTRUCTURE AND CAPACITY YOU NEED TO MAKE THE MOST OF THE NEW TOOLS OUT THERE TO: –Scale technology to meet customer omnichannel demands –Integrate relationships across customer touchpoints –Simplify user interface for easy-to-buy customer experiences –Use real-time data for better customer services –Add capacity planning to best-fit customer demand
A New Age of eCommerce
FURTHER RESOURCES
Bringing these technologies together can be hard. That’s why Rackspace partners with allthe contributors to this book to help you come to meet these challenges quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively. Conexus +44 (0) 1256 813700
[email protected] ampersand +44 161 236 5504
[email protected] salmon +44 (0) 1923 320000
[email protected]
More Cloud Resources eBook: The Disruptive Cloud: How cloud platforms change innovation dynamics SlideShare: Spikes: Why scaling platforms with cloud is the secret to customer success
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eBook: Web Experts: Learn why cloud remains the technology for 2014 SlideShare: The Power of the Hybrid Cloud: A cautionary tale for IT folks and innovators
A New Age of eCommerce
