WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY IT MATTERS: useful to see the growth of marketplaces in recent years. The list is interesting but the analysis provides insights into what's now become an essential component of eCommerce. And let me tell you from experience, building a marketplace is difficult... ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: application performance management solutions like newRelic can go beyond monitoring server performance and deliver insights into business related metrics, which is essential in eCommerce operations.

WHY IT MATTERS: always good to go back to basics, here for eCommerce dashboards.

WHY IT MATTERS: quadrants, marketscopes, waves and other market landscape analysis often provide information more important than a rating of solutions. Buried in most are very useful market analysis and visions that can help you understand the solutions out there and define your own priority matrix. Here I highlight IDC eCommerce framework, which you can find in the 2020 solution landscape report.

WHY IT MATTERS: read the report to get insights on the eCommerce market landscape back in 2020. Beware, this is an excerpt for VTEX only.

WHY IT MATTERS: interesting reference of key eCommerce metrics. Moreover if you are a shopify store the solution appears to be free (to be validated).

WHY IT MATTERS: essential metrics for anyone with an eCommerce website.

WHY IT MATTERS: a must read article that summarizes very well the state of ecommerce marketplaces.

WHY IT MATTERS: NPS is widely known and used in eCommerce and retail in general. The new version based on earned growth is described here as NPS 3.0. It is interesting to see how it is calculated and should make a lot of readers wary that their internal legacy systems (from POS and ERPs to their newer eCommerce websites and mobile apps) lack the information to compute the new NPS metric... 

WHY IT MATTERS: book on retail suggested by HBR

- Retail Recovery: How Creative Retailers Are Winning in Their Post-Apocalyptic World. 

-  Resurrecting Retail: The Future of Business in a Post-Pandemic World

- The Brains and Brawn Company: How Leading Organizations Blend the Best of Digital and Physical

-  Remarkable Retail: How to Win and Keep Customers in the Age of Disruption

- Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door

WHY IT MATTERS: eCommerce growth continues, especially regarding B2B (see market overview, as usual it contains good insights). I always question the tool selection (17 over 140 solution gartner says it tracks) so read with huge grain of salt. Legacy solutions with serious technical limitations show up in leader quadrant (sap, salesforce), and niche solutions are positioned because I assume they have market penetration. So use other sources when selecting eCommerce solution but questions vendors in the quadrant on the PROs and CONs gartner highlights.

WHY IT MATTERS: interesting to see that software solutions that reach maturity - such as ERPs - have a tendency to specialize. This quadrant highlights leaders in a specific market (product centric enterprises). I wonder when we will start to see the same with eCommerce... Not that specialized solutions don't exist but that the industry remains so immature that companies are in their first or second versions of eCommerce and thus gravitate to generalist solutions like shopify, magento, etc.

WHY IT MATTERS: interesting the information you can find in an IPO prospectus about the costs, the margins and the other realities of running and retail business. 20% acquisition costs + 20% sales & service costs appear to be very good benchmarks for retailers doing back of the envelope cost calculations. So you need at least 40% gross margin to expect to turn a profit when selling online and in-store.

WHY IT MATTERS: seems you can get away asking for very personal info if it is perceived as useful in the shopping process.

WHY IT MATTERS: membership programs are popular and this report provides a number of good reference numbers.

WHY IT MATTERS: everything in this article rings true, from the high cost of omnichannel and especially returns, to the opportunities that remain of having a physical store. The conclusion: you have to change processes, resource allocation and technology to make omnichannel work.

WHY IT MATTERS: as marketplaces become popular, finding a specific product in a catalog of millions of products will become harder and harder. The holy grail is visual search: snap a picture of something and get some AI to help you find something similar, or that matches well with that. eBay has made tests, Google lens has returned amazing results in my recent experience. Not sure what Amazon is doing but I assume it is top of their list.

Facebook is a major player in this game as it wants to make marketplace the shopping destination (don't forget it owns instagram as well). So the investment in grokNet is critical and recent results appear promising, though not yet perfect. 

So if you build a marketplace, as we are for panier bleu, then this is an area of innovation we cannot afford to bypass.

WHY IT MATTERS: the future of ecommerce lies in marketplaces it seems - I know as we are knee deep in this for Le Panier Bleu. Retailers face the challenging task of creating their eCommerce presence by being present where customers are. This means your product catalog has to be visible on *multiple* marketplaces, from your ecom store to Panier bleu, to Amazon to Google shopping, etc. Thus you need to manage your product information - descriptions, prices, inventory, etc. - in a central location. This is what a PIM is all about.

WHY IT MATTERS: the end of 3rd party cookies will impact advertising the most. This chart highlights the 50% of revenues that go to different players (including 15% unknown!). What irritates me most is the 7% to agencies that, unfortunately, seem to do very little to earn that amount in my experience...

WHY IT MATTERS: very useful reference of different technologies that power smart stores

WHY IT MATTERS: stores are changing and this guide reviews the different technologies, and solutions out there.

WHY IT MATTERS: very interesting DOs and DONTs about dynamic pricing. I see few retailers yet doing this at scale but with the growth of eCommerce one can expect this to become table stakes in few years. The operational requirements may be daunting if not done properly, so beware. A few good links in there but especially this one: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/how-retailers-can-drive-profitable-growth-through-dynamic-pricing

WHY IT MATTERS: this is a useful overview of solutions but also of the complexities that running a marketplace imply. Pretty much my daily headaches for the past few months... ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: the scores and the ranking is not important. This list is meaningful because it shows just how broad and deep the automation has become in retail stores. Expect to see a lot of those in your local shopping destination.