A Nerd’s View on Ecommerce

In times when technology providers work on integrated solutions to get in-car purchasing working, i.e. buy more horses for 2h when you go on the Autobahn, many of our solutions still struggle with mechanics stuck in the 2000s. We talk about connected devices and AI but don’t even pay our barber through in-app available solutions. I am so obsessed with multichannel/ omni-channel technology I catch myself talking to waiters, receptionists and the cashier to understand how their company applies their point of sale strategy and how it integrates with current recourse planning-, or customer relationship systems.

I often get a: “Yeah, we apply a point of sale cloud solution. However, we don’t integrate it with social nor do we integrate with our suppliers to replenish stock and I don’t think our iPad integrates with our payment gateway”. My barbers CRM solution is used by the receptionist but she does treat occasional customers manually and looses this contact if he/she doesn’t come back. I had to tell her to put me into the system. If their CRM would integrate with their register they wouldn’t need to type in my name and the purchase I made.

We aren’t fully where WeChat is. Over one billion clients trust their bank accounts with Alipay and make most of their purchases through their app. Imagine a tiny restaurant without a cash register. How do you pay you ask? You pay in-app applying QR codes. The restaurant is registered with WeChat and is able to send all sorts of offers location based. This all sounds good unless you go to Germany and notice lack of credit card usage. Imagine this, Germany doesn’t apply tap on their cards, yet. Germans don’t trust app payments nor do we like it when someone could just read our debit card, randomly on a bus. Well, this will change if we like it or not. By the way I tap everywhere I can.

Much of the start-up planning for e-Commerce ventures apply old models to new enterprises. It assumes, for example, the existence of a brick-and-mortar support infrastructure for the fulfillment or the spontaneous development of that infrastructure. We don’t yet fully grasp the amount of data we lose in every transaction.

So what is e-commerce and what do we need to do in order to manage the leap into multi-/ omni-channel retailing. Many blogs and v-logs do not discriminate between e-commerce and e-business. However, if you ask a professional within the e-commerce economy you will get the answer that it is about online shops and direct sales over the internet.

The online shop is a platform or a framework operated by you, however, it can also happen on Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, Shopify, Otto.de or Zalando. Those are the platforms where you can add products without having to own your own online shop.

Release Cycle Comparison of E-commerce Technologies_There are several enterprise e-commerce technologies in the market. Each one promises to be the most advanced and…_tech.spryker.com

Online shops come in various forms. In fact, the variety of those platforms is vast and you as a shop owner have to specify your long term goals. Meaning, do you want to sell only one product and you have no plans to extend on it, or do you want a shop with a larger span to choose from. A larger shop might require interfaces such as, enterprise resource planning customer relationship management, logistics, other marketplaces, or payment gateways.

The cost of being unprepared might eat into your marketing budget. For instance, if you sell one product you might do pretty well with a simple landing page. You can handle product attributes on one page, you can sell through a simple form and you can send invoices based on static PDFs. Most hosting services have an entrance solutions which works on a small investment.

Do you have the recourses to build it yourself or are you depend on developer teams. Do you want to start out with a free version or do you want to go pro. I categorize this into three levels. The entry version which comes with your provider, the lighter budget versions like osCommerce. If you manage to pull through the average you can use Shopware for your projects. Those middle class projects range up to $30k. The next step and quite frankly my favourite level is when owners want to grow with SAP Hybris, or InterShop with 6 digit project budgets.

A question I get some times, can I have a B2B and B2C within the same shop platform. The question you have to ask yourself who is my target group. Well, from a technical point of view yes. When it comes to B2B or B2C, the question remains does it make sense. B2C software heavily concentrates on marketing and customer interaction whereas B2B is focused on process digitisation and or process optimisation.

Your prices will be different for B2C and B2B, your payment gateway is another one, your invoicing will be different, your terms and conditions are different. Not to mention security standards or marketing strategies. There are always workarounds but those have to be stated in your terms and conditions plus your clients and or business have to agree to this.

Payment gateways. Every shop has to have some sort of payment gateway. Credit card and PayPal are some of the most favourite ones. If you want to implement your own Credit Card system you will need to satisfy all regulations/security measures in several provinces or states. Most business go with a third party payment system which satisfies security to actually save and process credit cards. However, when you need to account for it during your development phase.

Enterprise resource planning systems. Do you need one? Do you know what it means to implement one? Those systems are different ranging based on the size of the company. The can include but aren’t limited to people and products. ERPs include payment and logistic modules to handle larger amounts of products throughout a large range of different types. Meaning, if you interface with an ERP you might manage your products through it and not within your shop system. This can help to lower cost for your database and you might not have to train your staff on another system.

Direct access to your suppliers will help to keep your content fresh and up to date. Systems like Magento or Shopware provide access to those ERP interfaces. ERP systems are vast and range from simple to SAP. Lot’s of companies choose Microsoft Dynamics for SMEs.

Do you want to interface with Google Merchant Centre, Amazon, or Ebay? Google is probably the most stringent when it comes to the format and the amount of metadata that you have to provide for a product. But it is a huge boost if you get into their system.

So, what type of shops are out there? Let’s talk about an example. Assume you sell t-shirts with several dimensions of variations. You can order different sizes, colours, and v-neck or round. This is a multidimensional problem which can be reduced to a bundle/box deal. If your system supports bundles but you are still selling shirts as an item how should your system know to decrement a shirt vs a bundle where this shirt was included? This can exhaust a shop system quit fast.

Pricing. An online shop has to look like an online shop because that is what we are used to. Are you within a price war or are you in a niche. A shop who is fighting for its price and customer has to have lot’s of different variations in how to display prices and discounts. A niche product does not have to look like Best Buy, for instance.

Order process. 70% of your customers seem to stop during an order process. Users are used to a specific experience and shop systems need to be able to handle this. Imagine how much money is actually lost just during the time a user decides to check out and actually checks out. The same goes for anonymous checkouts. Does your system support signups without passwords? Does your system allow anonymous checkouts? You need to understand if it is really necessary to register to buy your product. Think about it, when was the last time you bought flight tickets or flowers and actually registered to use the system.

How up to date is the shop? Let’s go back to checkout. The most current trend is to erase all distractions during the checkout process. There aren’t any other sales and or featured products. Assume you still want to place candies during your checkout, and this would be a legit thing to do, make sure your customer can’t jump out of the process and make sure your systems specs are in sync with this. Lets say you sell shoes and want to offer socks which are on sale. Or you want to sell shoe product to keep it shiny. You can do that but be careful not to let your customer drift off.

Another interesting feature for checkout processes is to provide products during your checkout until your customer has reached a certain average rice in your cart that you as a owner calculate with. Those features aren’t included in any shop systems but you need to make sure it can be implemented if you so require. Those are dynamics features original emerged out of super markets. Those products are to be found as checkout counter candy. Nowadays, there is also “smartphone candy” — products obtrusively offered by your phone.

Logistics and returns, one of the big players in Europe, “Zalando” has included 70–80% returns into their business model. This is huge but a self made problem within the fashion industry. Other shops have 2–6% or 10–15%. It really depends on your business model, your marketing and your industry. There are intelligent systems that can distinguish between the same product twice in your cart or if you sell to a woman or a man. Statistics say that men have less return than women. So if you want to make different prices for woman than men, you need a system which understands that. There are endless possibilities.

To make shipping an effective process, regardless of volume and shape you will need sophisticated solutions. Solutions that might include route optimised collective shipping and picking. Solutions that include a package locator with independent cross-channel orders and live inventory tracking.

Maybe your system can handle return sizes. If your system handles bundles or weight depending returns you can reduce the amount of work at scale. Do you want a common return process interface to your customer or are you planning on customizing your return methods based on your customer needs.

After sales and story telling. Are you interested to keep your customer warm? Do you want to customise stories for your customers based on what they bought? Are you interested in systems that understand if your customer had a special life event based on a post on Facebook? Say he got a baby and you want to sell him/her diapers. Make no mistake, these modules do exist.

I could go on and talk about marketing and branding of products in store but I assume you understand how expensive actual customer acquisition has become.

The long-term strategy for omni-channel e-commerce will integrate various workflows based on your channels. It will force us to innovate within our companies. Enterprises and leaders must remaster themselves to succeed. Leaders must identify the key macro forces then lead their organizations at three distinct levels: industry, enterprise, and self.

As Jeff Bezos puts it: “We are still at the beginning of e-commerce” and I hope to be a part of the journey!