In today’s world, advancement in technology is resulting in customers expecting a very intuitive shopping experience. Digital eCommerce platforms and application leaders should focus on these key capabilities which will impact its future.
- Technology will help them differentiate from their competitors and attract new customers in the following ways:
A B2C experience has become ubiquitous, and today all B2B customers expect a B2C shopping experience. - Capabilities need to be prioritized based on “business value” and “ease of implementation”. Digital eCommerce capabilities that will not add significant business value to end customers and have higher implementation costs should be pushed back.
- A customer experience that incorporates interactive and conversational visual interface has a bigger impact on the conversion funnel.
- Unified commerce experience across all channels and throughout the customers’ shopping journey offers flexibility and consistency to deliver a superior customer experience.
- New business models such as IoT enabled eCommerce, enterprise marketplaces, subscription and replenishments can help companies move toward digital eBusiness from a completely new perspective, there are new digital technologies which can enable these capabilities with a faster time to market.
- AI (Artificial Intelligence), personalization engines, guided selling, API-oriented architecture, and product configurators are key technologies and architecture that enable compelling customer experience and digital business models.
- Persona and scenario-based customer experience coupled with new eBusiness models have a critical impact on the success of digital e-commerce. Persona-based customer experience not only differentiates digital e-commerce offerings but also results in increased conversion rates and repeat purchases.
- Digital e-commerce is getting more visual. People can find similar products using visual search. They can buy directly from streaming video with identifiable goods or from social media images using buy buttons, or view customizable products in 2D/3D using configurators. Leading organizations have tapped into immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) to create a more engaging experience by mixing digital images and the physical environment. Image and video have never taken such a prominent position in the customer shopping experience.
Digital eCommerce is becoming a starting point for digital business. Besides selling primary products and services, organizations are tapping into new business models such as IoT enabled eCommerce and enterprise marketplaces for new sources of revenue. They’re turning one-time product sales into ongoing service relations and becoming marketplace operators that facilitate transactions among customers and third-party sellers. These business models enable organizations to move toward digital business using digital commerce as the starting point.
B2B eCommerce – The great promise of B2B e-commerce is to simplify everything related to procurement. In business, this is often a complicated process going back and forth with constant negotiations. All this requires countless e-mails, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings: very time-consuming at the end of the day. By centralizing offers and demands on a single platform, it becomes easy to bring transparency in the process, making the exchanges flow more effectively. A company’s procurement department can thus search for and compare them more easily.
