E-Commerce Week #3

Business Week Online

“Time for E-Commerce 2.0”

Sarah Lacy

 http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2008/tc20081210_092729.htm

E-Commerce has been around since Web 1.0 and in ten years, not much has changed in the shopping experience. People are still getting bombarded with tons of email advertisements and discount offerings, yet all of these efforts haven’t really encouraged more people to become involved with online shopping. A statistic from ComScore shows that, “in the 12 months through October, e-commerce grew a meager 1% compared with 20% a year earlier.” Ten years ago, the internet made shopping revolutionary by making it available online, but has since been unable to advance much more from where it started, with the same old user interface, same home page promotions, same shopping cart, and the same long process of checking out. Currently, e-commerce is a point where it can wait for sales to increase when the economy starts to pick up again, or it needs to make some innovations to do it solely on its own.

 

For people that like to shop online, a list of five ways to get online shoppers to do more purchasing had been compiled. First, online retailers need to compose an easier form of checkout. Most checkout processes involve several pages of filling out information and take way longer than necessary. By this point, some customers don’t even want to buy what they picked out and therefore, “80% of shoppers abandon carts midway through the checkout process”.  Another point of focus, was to work on the tasks of returning items, and contacting customer service. While e-commerce was started during Web 1.0, the growth of Web 2.0 has made it possible for customers to share their dissatisfactions like wildfire through a variety of ways, and until improvements are made in these areas, customers will continue to make posts and in return, businesses will have to keep doing whatever possible to make their customers happy. A third point is that customers want some form of interaction like they get when they go out shopping. So, if retailers were to build feeds such as Twitter into their sites, then customers would be able to interact with one another just as if they were standing by each other in the checkout line. The fourth point of concentrating on concierges is just customers wanting retailers to go that extra step to make their shopping experience a positive one. Instead of just making a sale, focus on solving the shopper’s problem, make their experience a memorable one, and then they probably will return. Finally, discovery is important, done right, it’s able to “delight customers, foster loyalty, and get people to spend more”. In a sense, discovery is having the Web show you what it thinks you may like rather than you guessing and hoping you find something. If these five points are taken into consideration, E-Commerce may be able to get out of the slump it’s currently in.

 

What I found interesting about this topic was that someone actually pointed out some of the reasons that e-commerce may be struggling. With the downfall in the economy, retailers are already facing sales issues, but innovation makes many things possible, and a new way to shop online may be what it takes to get over those sales issues.