CEOs, Take Actions to Confront Changing E-Commerce Challenges

Online retail sales will grow from $225.5 billion in 2012 to $434.2 billion in 2017, according to eMarketer[1]. Challenges and competitions follow opportunities. As a graduate student at Northwestern University Integrated Marketing Communications program as well as product manager at H2O E-Cigs (h2ecig.com), I have been studying e-commerce industry trends, customer online shopping behavior patterns and how companies can catch the wave in such a transformative era. I found two articles that gave pretty good summaries and suggestions on future trends in e-commerce industry and how to deal with them.

In the article “Ecommerce Future Predictions That You Should Know”, it explains several practical suggestions on how to deal with upcoming marketing challenges in e-commerce industry.

On the other hand, the article “8 Emerging Trends in eCommerce Technology” talks about eight emerging trends in e-commerce and how to leverage them in an effective way.

Incorporating those two articles, as well as my experience and research done at Northwestern University and H2O E-Cigs, here are three things you should do right now to get ahead of the competition.

1. Images are important, but get more videos. As YouTube becoming the second most popular search engine, e-Marketers cannot overlook the importance of adding videos onto your product page. Product demonstration videos should be short and engaging for customers to get relevant information.
2. Multichannel is not a myth anymore. Integrate your website, mobile, tablets and social media. The biggest e-commerce trend in 2013 is singular experience, which means marketers should think about how to create a seamless shopping experience across platforms.
3. Get a big data analyst to understand customer behavior patterns. Transaction data and web metrics data are both very important in terms of finding customer behavior patterns and maximize marketing investment. 

Jeanine Jiang is pursuing her master’s degree at Northwestern University Integrated Marketing Communications program. She is a SAS certified base and advance programmer and also a storyteller. She is looking for career opportunities in e-commerce and marketing analytics. Follow her on Twitter @jeaninejiang .

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[1] Source: eMarketer, April 2013

Picture source: http://strategicsalesmarketingosmg.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/social-media-and-online-shopping/