E-Commerce Trends
According to the experts, the seeds of the trends now taking hold in e-commerce were planted in the industry's early days. But only now, as the dust settles, are those trends starting to point the way clearly toward the future of e-commerce.
What we have is the continuation of a lot of trends that began a while back, and most of them are good for e-commerce.
The trends of E-Commerce are: Multichannel Retailing Arrives
Shoppers are hopping back and forth freely among catalogs, retail stores and Internet sites. Shoppers also expect a seamless transition.
Companies that spun off their Web operations are bringing them back in, because they realize they are better off presenting the customer with a seamless experience.
More Satisfied Customers
It has been researched that e-commerce companies made consumers happier than offline retailers during the do-or-die fourth quarter. Consumers know what to expect from e-commerce now. A year or two ago, companies didn't know what they were doing online, and so you had a lot of failures for that reason.
But today, people are feeling a lot more positive about the whole online experience.
Consumers Do Their Own Thing
Retailers and their marketing departments, can know where customers came from and went online, what prompted them to buy, and what made them abandon a shopping cart and leave the store. But consumers are still almost impossible to predict. Shoppers are going to do what they are going to do. The rush by online retailers to collect consumer data for its own sake may be slowing, as offline retailers took a more measured approach, begin to show success on the Web.
In the earlier days, mostly the retailers were bombarded with data and did not know which metric to focus on as they tried to improve performance.
Of course, companies probably will never stop cajoling shoppers to buy with sales, shipping deals and other promotions.
Death of the Mid-Size E-Tailer
While the number of large e-commerce companies shrinks rapidly through consolidation and shakeout, there is a growing legion of niche firms operating on shoestring budgets.The top sites continue to take a disproportionate share of the income, yet there is still room for specialists and very small sites.
Indeed, many small companies that have checked out through bankruptcy or acquisition fit the mid-market mold.
More Profits
The number of profitable e-commerce companies continues to grow and has almost, reached the point at which a profitable dot-com is no longer a major news story. A year ago, e-commerce landscape was surveyed and it is found that about one-third of the top 40 sites in terms of sales volume were profitable.
The level of profitability is probably much closer to 60 or 70 percent now.
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