According to a recent global survey by eMarketer, 2012 saw B2C ecommerce sales in the Asia-Pacific region grow more than 33% to $332.46 billion.

The same report predicts that this year, the region will see another sharp hike with sales increasing by more than 30% to over $433 billion—accounting for over one-third of all global B2C ecommerce sales. This will put the Asia-Pacific in pole position in global B2C ecommerce sales, for the first time, surpassing even North America. Read More »

Technological innovations are everywhere, and while we may hear about a number of fascinating new developments, few will actually truly define the future of retail. Considering the changing landscape, technology is irrelevant if you don’t first understand both the behaviours and motivations of consumers in a hyper-connected, multi-channel world.

The rise of ecommerce has made shopper marketing an increasingly complex field, particularly when it comes to measurement and subsequently, selecting the right technology to legitimately improve a proposition in a cost-effective way. Any new implementation is only useful if it solves a need; whether that is improving efficiency, fostering loyalty or reducing barriers to purchase. Read More »

Facebook clearly know that they are suffering in terms of driving people to purchase as a result of seeing a link/post on the site. They are looking at every angle which turns out to include using the button “want”.

“I want that” will replace “I like that”. Sounds like petulance will replace affection. Do we really want people to go around “wanting” rather than “liking” ? It’s a tactic employed by rival Pinterest and is a way to encourage shared “wanted” items to be bought for/by friends.

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Imagine the scenario: you’re a retailer and your latest marketing campaign to promote a new product drives thousands of people into your stores.  But when the customers arrive they cannot find the products on shelves, so most people leave empty-handed.

The analogy is just as true online as it is on the High Street – an optimised website that appears high in search engine rankings is of little use if, when the thousands  of online customer visit the site, they cannot find the product they want.

The solution is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO): realising the importance of usability, and how the journey the user takes from landing on the site, is vital to whether a customer makes a purchase or not. Read More »

While social media is booming one area that is not is social commerce. It is struggling to take off and this study and infographic from media agency MPG Media Contacts and Lightspeed Research points to the lack of social media included on ecommerce sites.

Why that is the case is pretty simple. Consumers use social media as both recommendations and inspiration when shopping online, but are reluctant to use links from social sites to buy.

What they want the study says is for brands to make their own sites more social and invest more in developing ways for their consumers to share photos, videos and product reviews. Read More »

Since Sainsbury’s Justin King made his comment in February, that smaller retailers should simply accept their fate and die gracefully, the ‘death of the high street’ has been the talk of the media.

E-Commerce has been identified as one of the culprits responsible for the troubles of bricks and mortar establishments, but this is not a fair judgement.  Read More »

Guided selling that takes online shoppers to the products they want quickly and effectively is the key to e-tail success. Here I want to talk about why online retailers need to look carefully at their data to tackle this challenge.

When companies first started selling products over the internet, it was a novelty. It was enough for people simply to be given the opportunity to make purchases virtually. How things have changed. E-commerce has exploded globally. Now, there’s very little you can’t buy online and a huge choice of outlets for every product in every sector. Read More »

You won’t need your wallet to go shopping on UK high streets in 2016, according to a new report by PayPal.

Yup, in four year’s time, UK shoppers will be able to use their mobile phones to pay for things with digital money rather than cash or cards.

If fact, it’s already being done. The report follows the launch of Pizza Express’s iPhone app, which allows diners in the UK to pay their bill at their table using their smartphone. Read More »

One of the biggest frustrations in social media is the inability to measure its value. There’s no standard metric which is consistently used, which makes it incredibly difficult to work out how well a campaign did. Do we measure based on impressions? Traffic driven to sites? Engagement? Advocacy? Net promoter score? Or simply the amount of fans/followers?

Without a consistent frame of reference, it makes measuring success incredibly difficult. At a recent WARC conference, Richard Pentin from TMW presented the audience with the picture you can see. Read More »