Customers are empowered unlike ever before with multi-dimensional experiences to find, compare, purchase and checkout. And these multidimensional experiences generate data like never before and that makes the e-commerce player do an ample amount of research on the market to sell and engage their customers. E-commerce is highly dominated by big players like Flipkart, Amazon and Walmart; they are not dominating just because of their size but because of the ease and experiences they offer to their customer whether it is machine learning based product recommendation, discount offer or buying patterns, logistic experiences and knocking back again through their app notification. And as the standard bearer for commerce innovation, Amazon proves that companies must solve buyers’ problem in order to grow or build a base in a certain geographical area.
Like the retail industry, other sectors like services and manufacturing industry also now striving to simplify their sales processes. Majority of retail and wholesale global business are considering their customer experiences on top priority. Experience-led improvement programs take the centre-stage in the discussion when it comes to the e-commerce business. As the market dynamics changing for e-commerce success, a mantra of best practice continues to emerge. Here are three factors of an experience-led e-commerce strategy.
To reinvent the customer experiences, it is important to understand what are the building block behind engaging customer deeply. The answer is - Data. We need to leverage the data and footprints that every single click and transaction generate and make it actionable and insightful. Larger players like Flipkart, Amazon, Walmart invest heavily on machine learning to understand the patterns of data and drive an actionable roadmap. As per our experience, Amazon is the clear winner when it comes to leveraging machine learning. But when it comes to smaller and medium-size players, they are under heavy pressure of evolving to experience-based commerce due to heavy investment. At Nescode, we leverage world-class open source library based on Python and Django framework to deliver data-driven e-commerce experiences.
Creating a unified experience with cross-cloud capabilities
To deliver the unified experience to the customer, commerce company need to make their architecture as cross-capabilities across marketing, commerce, service and have a 360-degree view of customer information and history. And to experience the unified experience, need to ensure the data changes and updates are inherited across the solution. And built-in cloud solutions is the only way to achieve power, agility and scalability.
Go to the market in less time
It is important to have faster time-to-market because of various reasons and investment, especially for startups and SMEs.
Innovation and efficiency of a unified solution
The platform should offer an API to enable customized enhancement as per business requirement and scalability. E-commerce platform should be designed and developed in such a way that developer should be able to add new features and functionalities quickly with less code.
Cost of ownership
To minimize the investment, CTO and business owner should consider the total cost of ownership of technology stack and platform. And for ongoing support, there should be one company for the entire platform rather than multiple companies for distributed support model.
Signup on an e-commerce platform happens with a thought process where an individual carries a certain persona. Then search for a specific product starts, followed with checkout and delivery. We consider it a journey of a customer and every stage of it need to be analysed before you decorate the platform with the presentation layer. And the analysis of footprints should start with the classification of a customer, market segment and the required design experience.
We need to make customer’s journey beautiful using transactional and contextual data to identify key insights that impact engagement. To design an outcomes-driven, human-centred commerce experience requires a great amount of data to empathize with customers and align their motivation throughout the journey. At Nescode, we believe investing in user-centric data architecture is the foundation for driving customers experience.
Among all the technologies, AI has created the greatest technological revolution so far. Looking over the potential that AI brings out for commerce industry is something amazing. Players like Amazon heavily using machine learning and predictive analytics to optimize the customers. Small and medium industries should also start investing in AI to their platform and business to make it future proof.
Till 2018, worldwide e-commerce growing every year by 20% and by 2021, it is expected to reach 4.479 trillion dollars and that is because by 2020, over 80% of all customers interactions will be managed by Artificial Intelligence. Augmented and virtual reality are expected to play their role by increasing conversion rates and eliminating online shopping returns significantly.
From discovery to delivery, business needs to analyse the fundamentals of experience-led commerce and plan their roadmap for better experiences and transactions across web, mobile, social and other digital channels. To engage the customer, need to build memorable user experiences through data and machine learning touch.