How Has Ecommerce Evolved over a Decade?

If you read Mitch Kramer’s detailed product review of IBM’s WebSphere Commerce solution this week, you’ll get a good feel for how much is involved in delivering a mature, full-featured e-commerce platform. This is part of a series of B2C e-commerce evaluations against Mitch’s equally mature and complete B2C ecommerce solutions’ evaluation framework. The framework itself provides a good snapshot of all the capabilities you’d expect to find in a modern ecommerce platform.

IBM has been in the ecommerce business for 12 years, and its ecommerce platform has evolved with its merchants’ and customers’ requirements. This year, IBM has introduced a Software as a Service (SaaS) version of its ecommerce platform, which it makes available to smaller businesses through a myriad of partners. The pricing for the SaaS offering is based on your sales volume. So, if you’re a smaller business or if you don’t want to run an in-house ecommerce operation (or have IBM host it for you), you may still be able to afford a full-featured and very mature ecommerce platform.

What are the things that online merchants value now in their selection of an ecommerce platform or service? For example, many of today’s offerings now include modern “Web 2.0” features, including rich interactive GUIs that enable customers to interact and iterate without clicking through a lot of pages. Today’s online merchants want to reduce costs by ensuring that online customers can serve themselves throughout their buying lifecycle (explore, select, purchase, manage, maintain) without needing to pick up the phone in order to complete a transaction or to unscramble a problem.

What Are the Most Important Factor(s) in Your Selection of an Ecommerce Solution? Click here to take our quick poll:

a) The solution provides packaged functionality/services to support my customers’ key activities.

b) It supports a Web 2.0 User Interface.

c) It provides great product search and findability with easy fine-tuning.

d) It offers flexible merchandising and marketing capabilities.

e) The online catalog is easy to update and maintain.

f) It’s easy (low overhead) for us to provide a personalized experience.

g) It’s easy to integrate with our back-end applications.

h) There are plenty of knowledgeable implementation personnel available for this platform.

i) We can deploy this solution using an SaaS model.

j) It provides support for multiple languages and currencies.

k) Other?


In the more than 10 years since we’ve all started transacting over the Web, online consumer shopping has grown to $204 billion in 2008 according to Shop.org and Forrester. Many consumer businesses now receive over 50% of their annual revenues via online shopping. The biggest shift that I have personally witnessed is that online shopping has now become a unisex activity. In the very early days, early online shoppers were predominantly male and very tech-savvy. Busy working women soon overtook men as the major online power shoppers. Now the scales have balanced out again. Men and women are equally comfortable and active purchasing online. As we baby boomers age, the reluctance of older people to shop online is also decreasing dramatically. As more and more people manage their finances online, more and more people shop online as well. With fuel costs on the rise, many people prefer to shop from home. Moving merchandise consumes fuel as well, but savvy merchants are offering incentives of low-cost or free shipping to customers who spend a lot with them. Online commerce, once a small part of our economy, has become a true economic flywheel.

Comments

[Betty]

Brilliant post..! Great information about Ecommerce.