Unified Commerce for the Channel-Agnostic Consumer

Introduction

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the already fast growth of US retail e-commerce sales. As a result, brands are investing in, and expanding, their e-commerce businesses to better serve today’s increasingly channel-agnostic and demanding shopper.

Consumers are researching and purchasing products across several channels, from marketplaces to social media. Social media has quickly become an important avenue of commerce, as a medium for both research and purchasing. Social commerce sales in the US are expected to grow by $7.3 billion in 2020—33% year over year—and continue growing at a similar rate through 2024, according to TechNavio. Coresight Research’s late-2019 survey of 1,509 US Internet users found that 57% of US shoppers use social media as a part of their shopping process, even if they do not always make purchases directly through social platforms.

Small and medium-size brands often struggle to find cost-effective and efficient ways to fulfill online orders—an issue that is compounded by today’s complex ecosystem of digital shopping channels. Poor inventory management and high delivery costs can cause revenue-draining friction in the online consumer journey. Delivery-speed expectations are high, and cart abandonment rates due to shipping fees continue to rise. To fulfill the desires of consumers across multiple shopping avenues, brands must ensure that they can rely on a strong, smart inventory management and fulfillment system.

In this report, we examine the current pain points and areas of opportunity for brands to improve the reach and efficiency of their online businesses. We also discuss how Project Verte’s end-to-end e-commerce solutions can enable brands to optimize their digital presence and streamline their fulfillment

Challenges in the Shifting E-Commerce Landscape

Coresight Research projects that e-commerce will grow by 31% in 2020, making it more vital than ever for brands to ensure the quality of the online customer journey. We begin by outlining two areas in which brands face challenges when competing for the attention and dollars of today’s online shoppers:

• Reaching the channel-agnostic consumer across multiple devices and selling platforms
• Optimizing fulfillment to reduce costs and purchase friction

1. Reaching the Channel-Agnostic Consumer Across Platforms

Consumers are increasingly using a wider variety of sales platforms and environments to make purchases—and the distinctions between each have become more blurred, with consumers often using them together as part of their shopping journey. According to data from GE Capital Retail Bank, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before shopping in stores. Even in stores, consumers are merging their online and offline experiences: 65% of shoppers look up product information and prices on their smartphones while they are shopping at brick-and-mortar locations, according to data from KPMG.

We focus on three of the fastest-growing segments of e-commerce and how consumers interact with them:

• Social commerce
• Diversifying sales channels
• Retail drop shipping

Social Commerce

Social media has quickly become an important component of the e-commerce landscape, both as a research tool and as a selling platform. Coresight Research’s survey of US Internet users over the age of 18 indicates that 57% of shoppers use social media as a part of the shopping process. The US social commerce market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 31% between 2019 and 2024, according to data from TechNavio.

Brands are increasingly using social media as a method of driving consumer traffic to their owned online stores. Different social media sites drive sales in different ways. On Instagram, for instance, influencers can post sponsored photos or videos, including a brand’s link in the caption or tagging the brand in their content. Other social media sites, such as Reddit, enable users to create forums discussing certain topics, such as “Men’s Fashion Sales,” and post links to relevant webpages on these discussion boards. The combined influence of these social networks can drive a significant amount of a brand’s total website traffic. The US website of sustainable shoe brand Allbirds, for example, draws 6.2% of its traffic from social media, according to the website analytics provider SimilarWeb.

To fully capitalize on the growth of social commerce, brands must reduce friction in the purchase journey. According to our survey, 77.6% of US consumers who utilize social media platforms as part of the shopping process said that they would “occasionally” or “often” abandon a purchase because of a lack of built-in functionality. Streamlined social shopping experiences will likely become a necessity for all brands looking to compete in the increasingly diverse e-commerce space.

Diversifying Sales Channels…

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