Emerging Trends in Ecommerce

INTRODUCTION
Online retailers have risen to the economic challenges of the last three years, reporting substantial year-over-year improvements in 2011 over solid 2010 results. And although they continue to face the challenges of navigating the changing world of commerce in a fragile economy, online retailers appear to have a better grasp of managing multiple touchpoints, the latest crazes, and demanding consumer expectations. Consumer sentiment is lukewarm at best, and with more shoppers dipping into their savings to make purchases, they are mindful of their spending choices.
A 2011 survey of e-commerce professionals in consumer-facing industries shows that online retailers are overcoming these challenges by focusing on their customers, building Websites around them, investing heavily in the customer experience, and promising new areas for engaging shoppers and growing the company’s base. Initiatives such as mobile that were a blip on the radar in previous years have taken center stage. This compounds a key frustration online retailers face: the integration of multiple technologies, few of which were built for today’s evolved use cases. This paper explains the emerging trends in e-commerce in greater detail.
DETAILS ABOUT THE SURVEY
In November 2011, Endeca conducted the Trends for 2012 in Business to Consumer (B2C) Commerce survey to help businesses gain actionable insight into the evolving nature of e-commerce. The survey captured business results from the last calendar year and provides visibility into areas of investment in 2011.
Responses were gathered from 221 e-commerce professionals from leading retail, travel, and consumer manufacturing organizations. Among the respondents, 53 percent identified themselves as business-oriented professionals, 37 percent indicated a technical role, and the remainder had an executive role. Of those surveyed, representing primarily companies among the top 500 internet retailers, most were from apparel, travel and hospitality, consumer electronics, general merchandisers and specialty brands.
REVIEW OF 2011
The survey gave an insight into the trends, changes, and challenges e-commerce faced in 2011.
The year 2011 delivered substantial improvements over an already strong 2010 in all key business metrics. Among the survey respondents, 60 percent reported that online revenue was up over the previous year. Furthermore, 69 percent reported higher total traffic, with 47 percent seeing more natural traffic and 43 percent reporting higher traffic from paid search programs or Search Engine Marketing (SEM), suggesting that search remains a main artery for most online business and that investment in a sophisticated strategy remains a focus. Online retailers appear to be more effectively guiding shoppers to their desired goal - with 46 percent reporting higher conversion rates and are delivering more-targeted merchandising, as evidenced by larger reported average order values. Shopping cart abandonment remains a major issue, with half of the respondents citing stagnant drop-off rates from those of the previous two years, with little insight into how to improve conversions.
Not knowing the basic metrics was consistently indicated by 13 to 33 percent of the respondents to each question, indicating that despite investment in analytics, there is limited visibility throughout the organization into basic metrics or what’s working. Results are growing exponentially year over year. In 2011, according to 60 percent of the respondents, revenue was up; 69 percent reported higher traffic volume; 38 percent noted higher average order values; and 54 percent saw greater mobile traffic.