Ecommerce experts don’t need more data or better analytics; they need a way to rapidly translate data into actionable insights. They need to understand how their products perform relative to the market. This entails evaluating multiple competitors across various marketplaces and categories. They need to move beyond sales to achieve objective measures of success and overall company growth.
In an unusual move, Amazon and Shopify have formed a partnership that lets Shopify merchants integrate Buy With Prime at checkout through an Amazon app in Shopify’s store, with the latter quick to note that merchants still control their brand and customer data within its administrative dashboard. The app will be available to all U.S. merchants in September.
With more legacy software giants embracing cloud-based, composable commerce offerings, such as recent moves by SAP and Adobe, members of the MACH Alliance (microservices-based, API, cloud, headless) are seeking to differentiate themselves while also seeing it as validation of their model. The group says usage is growing faster in the U.S. than Europe, home to many early adopters.
The anytime/anywhere/anyhow expectations of consumers today is increasingly upending the traditional sales funnel for brands, forcing them to think outside the box to best serve their customers. Brands and their shoppers need open systems, ecommerce platforms and services that support these omnichannel demands.
CommerceIQ, a startup with a platform that allows major CPG brands to manage their ecommerce sales into retailers and marketplaces, has crossed the unicorn line with the closing of a $115 million Series D funding, bringing the company’s total valuation to more than $1 billion.
Change presents a challenging environment for ecommerce startups, especially in terms of stability. They operate at a bleeding edge of innovation, making it more challenging for them to accommodate change. Regardless of how prepared you are, it’s critical to understand how to go about change management in your business.
Headless ecommerce is driven by developers and appeals to developers. Despite years of effort and billions of dollars, the customers (CMOs, ecommerce executives) aren’t ready to abandon their existing functional solutions. For ecommerce, two factors hold back adoption — one pertaining to the platform and one to the mid-market.
A unified commerce strategy goes a step further than omnichannel, delivering increased agility, personalization and flexibility by integrating all aspects of commerce and connecting back-end and front-end operations into a single cohesive system. Everything is brought together to enable a personalized experience across touchpoints.
For the past decade, brands have scrambled to serve millennials, the first internet-obsessed generation that forced them to rethink ecommerce selling strategies. Now, they are reinventing as Gen Z gears up to enter the workforce and fast becomes a formidable force in the economy. Is your ecommerce platform ready?
Monolithic architecture is notoriously inflexible and difficult to scale, as any business that has tried to integrate it with other tech platforms and APIs can attest. Increasingly, brands are growing tired of big bills for relatively small changes, slowdowns and crashes and other disruptions, leading many to explore the option of microservices.