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Online shoppers face myriad basic obstacles, including not being able to complete a purchase transaction.
A survey by customer engagement firm goMoxie shows that consumers struggle to complete basic tasks on retail websites. Most are more likely to abandon the experience or switch to a competitor rather than seek assistance.
The research, based on 1,063 adult consumers across all ages, genders, and regions in the United States, is especially concerning given the challenges many retailers already face as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to eMarketer, e-commerce sales will climb by 18 percent in 2020 to reach $709.78 billion. That represents 14.5 percent of total U.S. retail sales.
This increased volume suggests expanded opportunities for online retailers. But high levels of shopper-struggle and abandonment indicate that many of these businesses are failing to realize their full sales potential. Droves of retailers are not digitally prepped for holiday shoppers online and need to act fast to change course if they are to succeed.
As a critical holiday shopping season approaches, the goMoxie survey signals a need for a more proactive approach for online sellers to ensure ease-of-use for customers and maximize revenue. GoMoxie researchers compiled an action plan based on the study, aimed to combat missteps retailers make with their e-commerce platforms.
The study revealed that retailers need to do a better job of guiding customers with proactive and relevant information throughout the entire shopping journey, according to Tara Sporrer, senior vice president of marketing at goMoxie.
“Findings showed that despite the effort companies have made to improve the customer experience, 40 percent of retail consumers still struggle to complete basic tasks when transacting online,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
Online merchants should not just wait out consumers’ learning curve to catch up. Digital shoppers will learn their needed skills elsewhere.
Taking that route, retailers would be waiting a long time — and lose potential revenue by remaining stagnant to the innovations competitors are rapidly adopting, Sporrer retorted.
“Smart retailers are meeting customer expectations and focusing on guiding customers through the shopping experience with interaction channels they prefer,” she said.
Instead, Internet retailers need to design their digital store experience to meet shoppers’ deficiencies. Forcing them to adapt does not work.
“Just like a helpful associate would in a store, online shoppers still need an element of expert guidance through checkout,” noted Sporrer.
The well-designed website provides the needed information at the point of struggle, without requiring the involvement of an agent.
The appearance of a shopper’s low “digital IQ” may be less a question of consumer ineptness and more an issue with newcomer confusion. Either way, retailers have little time to put together a quick fix in time for this holiday shopping season.
Many shoppers, especially older adults, are looking at online shopping this year due to the pandemic. These people have traditionally been in-store shoppers, either due to familiarity or fondness of the so-called “shopping experience,” according to Sridhar Jayaraman, vice president of engineering at Qentelli.
“Now, they are faced with the challenge of navigating the digital world, which in many cases has been optimized for the millennial persona. Product search, size charts, color options, recommendation engines, loyalty usage, and even basic navigation can seem complex to those who do not always shop online,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Retailers can do a few things to look more approachable to those who are new to online shopping, Jayaraman offered. One is to provide a simplified shopping experience site, sort of a “lite” version, on both Web and mobile channels. This also reduces the chance of unfamiliar shopper failing in the software ecosystem.
Another quick fix is to implement web overlays based on shopping behaviors. For example, provide easy access for an agent to call them if they are spending too much time scrolling on a page, etc.
Retailers have tried over the years to improve the customer experience while using company websites. Still, consumers struggle to complete basic tasks with online transactions, noted Sporrer.
Consumers have seen little-to-no improvement. E-commerce conversion rates have stayed stubbornly low for the last 20-plus years as a result, she said.
“Based on our findings, we recommend retailers guide customers throughout their entire purchasing journey — as soon as they arrive on the site, all the way to when they check out, as well as when they return back for service and support,” advised Sporrer.
Companies can avoid the consumer struggles while improving the customer experience without compromising efficiency. How? By doing two basic things: meet customer expectations and focus on the action channels customers prefer.
Doing these two things can help businesses recover some of the $18 billion in yearly sales revenue lost to shopping cart abandonment, added Sporrer.
Start by focusing on the channels your customers prefer. Retailers who want to keep customers in the digital channel should focus on interacting via email and live chat. Text messaging and bots are the least preferred interaction channels, according to goMoxie’s report on the customer survey.
Online shoppers will have struggles with your website. That is guaranteed. Retailers need to anticipate and read customers’ online behavior to reduce or fully avoid customer difficulties.
Online customers tell you where they are and often what they need by their behavior. Do not expect them to ask for help. Most won’t. Guide them instead, the goMoxie report urges retailers.
All generations struggle with website shopping issues in varying degrees. Surprisingly, the generation totally raised with the Internet, Generation Z, had the highest percentage of respondents report that they have recently struggled to make a purchase from a retailer online at the rate of 46 percent.
GoMoxie also recommends solving customers’ online troubles by optimizing their interaction channels. Retailers need to be proactive when detecting customer struggles by offering live chat or email assistance based on website visitors’ urgency and needs. Do not ignore their obstacles. Remove them.
Before marketers invest in technology to support online customers, they should make sure those shoppers will use it. You might expect the solution is to beef up online help. Wrong thinking. GoMoxie’s research shows that only one in four sought help online.
When encountering struggles online, 62 percent of consumers abandoned the shopping experience. That drove 52 percent of digital consumers to complete their online shopping at a competitor’s website.
Quentelli’s Jayaraman suggests offering online shoppers a guided experience based on questions. For example, before products are shown, display just one question to start.
That could look like the question, “What can we help you with today?” Then offer a few response options such as, “Buying a gift,” “Check for a specific product,” etc.
Based on the individual shopper’s response, the retailer can ask additional questions. This process can lead to more narrow displays of products.
The report concludes that the significant shift to online in such a short period of time presents an opportunity for many retailers. Jayaraman agrees.
“This is an opportunity for retailers not only to sell more but also to increase stickiness of the new population of consumers who are going to be shopping online for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Merchants must realize that there are distinct personas who are buying online who do not want any human interactions. There are more online consumers now than the typical savvy shoppers, he added.
Retailers also need to offer innovative shopping channels such as WhatsApp, live chat, and human-assisted chatbots. While there is pressure to reduce call center investments, retailers have to recognize that this season is fundamentally different from previous years, according to Jayaraman.
For example, price matching, returns, and product questions are areas where customer support may see increased volume. Investments in resilience, modernization of legacy back-office systems, and a well-educated customer service team are critical for retail leaders, he explained.
“In fact, customer service is one of the key battlegrounds in the near future,” Jayaraman maintained.
Sure, the information consumers need is no doubt somewhere on the website. Rattled shoppers finding what they need, when they need it, is the problem they face. That is especially true when shopping on mobile devices.
Retailers need to guide consumers to complete basic tasks online. They can best do this by presenting snippets of contextual and relevant information.
“A nudge may be all that is needed to keep the customer engaged in completing the purchase,” noted goMoxie’s Sporrer.
For instance, tell website visitors how to enter a coupon or gift card before they receive an error. Guide customers to reset their password to avoid lockout. That will avoid frustration and difficulty that needs a call or email exchange.
Prime the convenience pump to keep a new online customer. Do not make them contact the retailer for basic information. Those two points are critical for retailers to achieve better online shopping success for both consumers and retailers.
Guide them to the “Where Is My Order?” page or offer up the return policy before they contact the business. The goal is to save live agents for valuable interactions. More importantly, online retailers need to save their customers valuable time, according to the goMoxie report.
“Many companies have built a service model around failure. Put up a website, offer a phone number, and assume that consumers will either figure it out or ask for help,” said Sporrer.
That model is flawed. Studies show that only reacting to consumer failure leads to low conversion rates and customer frustration, she explained.
Instead, retailers need to shift the sales model to one based on guidance and ease. Removing friction and anticipating struggle will reap success for both businesses and consumers.
Consumers should not have to struggle to do business online, urges Sporrer. Unfortunately, many do, and they end up leaving.
“We have already seen retail customer interaction volumes more than double year-over-year leading into the holiday shopping season. Retailers should be taking steps now to guide every customer to success in order to increase transactions, strengthen satisfaction and make the most of the sales opportunities for the 2020 holiday season and beyond,” she advised.
Apple pulled the wraps off its first computer models based on its new Apple Silicon chip at an online event aired Tuesday.
The Mac Air, Mac Mini and 13-inch MacBook Pro are all being refreshed with the company’s new ARM-based M1 chip. The move is the beginning of a transition, expected to take two years, away from Intel chips and to Apple Silicon.
“One thing Apple likes to do is control their own destiny,” explained Tim Bajarin,president or Creative Strategies, a technology advisory firm in Campbell, Calif.
“This is the last big piece of the puzzle for Apple,” he told TechNewsWorld. “They finally have a CPU that they created and they control.”
He noted that Apple has always coveted having their own chipset, rather than depending on companies like Motorola or Intel for processors.
“One big sticking point was they were always relying on Intel’s next generation processors to drive the next generation Mac,” Bajarin commented. “That was always frustrating.”
“Now,” he continued, “by having their own CPU for the Mac, they can make it more power efficient, more secure, and they can tie it to their own operating systems in ways that they could never do with processors made by other companies.”
Apple’s M1 silicon jams on a single chip an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU and 16-core neural engine.
According to Apple, the CPU is 3.5 times faster than previous generation processors, the GPU produces up to five times faster graphics; and the neural engine is nine times faster than those in Intel Macs.
Those claims, though, haven’t been independently verified yet.
“We should see a bunch of independent, third-party benchmark test results next week, which should tell us what works well and what does not,” observed Kevin Krewell, a principal analyst with Tirias Research.
“Apple made some bold claims about performance, but until people get their hands on the machines and do independent tests we won’t know for sure about those claims,” he told TechNewsWorld. “That’s why it’s always good to wait for third parties to validate Apple’s claims before we drink the Kool-Aid.”
Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, maintained that M1’s performance is nearly impossible to gauge because Apple didn’t provide any detailed substantiation around any of the performance claims it made.
“I think these should be scrutinized extensively as I believe the CPU benchmarks are likely measured using very synthetic benchmarks like GeekBench,” he said in a statement.
ARM processors, which are primarily used in mobile devices, are known for prolonging battery life. That seems to be the case with the M1, with battery life in the 15 to 20 hour range for the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.
“The battery life promises are astounding,” observed another analyst with Moor Insights, Mark N. Vena.
“Apple can do that by not only using its own silicon, but by optimizing integration with the Big Sur operating system,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Before the Apple event, there was speculation that Apple might pass on the savings from making its own silicon to consumers in the form of lower prices.
For the Air and Pro, that wasn’t the case. They’re selling at their current prices of $999 and $1,299 respectively. However, the Mini’s price tag dipped to $699.
“They seem to be wanting to expand the addressable market for the Mini in places like server farms and specialty applications,” noted Ross Rubin, the principal analyst at Reticle Research.
“If you pair it with a cheap keyboard and monitor, it’s the least expensive way to get into the Apple Silicon market,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“I think the Mini could be surprise hit of all this,” added Bob O’Donnell, founder and chief analyst with Technalysis Research.
“If I’m curious about ARM-based Macs,” he told TechNewsWorld, “the Mini is the perfect way to experiment.”
Rubin explained that launching Apple Silicon in some of the more affordable products in the Mac line should get more products with the M1 chip in them into the market faster and speed along the migration from Intel chips.
“One way to get developers to support the new chip is to show them the transition is happening quickly,” he said.
Rubin added that the pricing of the Air and Pro is value-driven. “Why should you be paying less when you’re getting all the benefits of the previous architecture and far better performance and battery life? And in the case of the MacBook Air, no fan,” he reasoned.
Still, O’Donnell said there is some disappointment about the pricing. “Some people were hoping they would hit some more mainstream pricing, like $799.”
For consumers who can’t wait to get their hands on one of the new models, Apple is being very accommodating. They can order a unit this week and have it by next week.
“Usually you have to wait three or four days or a week to order after an announcement and then 10 days after that to get delivery,” Vena observed. “It looks like they have their supply chain in gear.”
As Apple did when it transitioned from Motorola to Intel chips, it will include software, Rosetta 2, that enables legacy applications to run on the new Macs.
“We’re following a familiar playbook from Apple in terms of how it handled that last transition, which worked out very well for them,” Rubin said.
However, Moorhead felt Apple didn’t mention enough about legacy apps at its event. “The company didn’t talk a lot about compatibility either,” he said, “but did make some giant claims that Rosetta 2 could play your favorite games.”
“I find that nearly impossible,” he continued, “as the new GPU doesn’t have the higher-end quality features found in AMD, Intel and NVIDIA’s new GPUs.”
Although 5G connectivity wasn’t mentioned at the event, David McQueen, a research director at ABI Research, believes that’s in the future for Apple Silicon.
“This move could also signal a significant step for Apple toward 5G integration and ‘always-on’ connectivity in its notebooks,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“The shift could pave the way to making it easier for all of Apple’s devices to enable 5G connectivity, potentially providing tight integration with its own 5G modems in the future,” he said.
“If such a move were to come to fruition,” he continued, “it would boost the drive to create a 5G always-on notebook market.”
The rise in consumer adoption of e-commerce in the wake of the pandemic is pushing the rebirth of brick-and-mortar stores as potential bastions of interactionless in-store shopping that resembles an e-commerce experience. But these redesigns are not for all shoppers. Some prefer no brick-and-mortar shopping at all.
That consumer reaction is pushing retailers to redesign physical stores. Harris Poll research recently found that 70 percent of people want zero interaction with store personnel while shopping. Plus, 35 percent are totally fine never shopping in person again.
An online survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults ages 18+ conducted by 3D vision system company Sense Photonics further drives home this sharp directional turn by consumers. The survey disclosed that shoppers willing to return to physical storefronts want a completely human-free, contactless, shopping experience.
Those two surveys and other marketing research loudly suggests that big-box retailers need to follow through with what consumers want in order to return to in-person shopping. More automation is on their demand list. Implementing systems that let stores meet consumer standards for convenience and safety from COVID-19 infections arguably help them stand out in a hyper-competitive brick-and-mortar marketplace.
These findings recommend big-box retailers restructure their traditional physical stores into warehouses and fulfillment centers. Those that do not take the lead and heed consumer wishes may not succeed in the new retail normal. Those retailers that do buy into the redesign will position their stores to accommodate radically altered consumer preferences without alienating those who prefer conventional shopping methods.
“Consumer shopping preferences are shifting, and retailers are starting to adapt to a frictionless experience,” said Sense Photonics CEO Shauna McIntyre.
“The retailers that embrace automation and introduce high-performance 3D vision systems and other sensors into their industrial and commercial workflows are more likely to stay ahead of consumer preferences, according to McIntyre.
“This new era of technology is essential to scaling time-sensitive processes like order fulfillment,” she said.
A physical store redesign movement was already underway with some big box namesakes in 2019. Customers relying more on Internet shopping did not go unnoticed by marketers. But most retailers viewed format redesign as risky, time-consuming, and too costly. They looked for a better way.
That better way needed to position brick-and-mortar stores is something more than just a transactional venue. It needed to build brands with in-person experiences not possible in digital channels. Physical stores should offer built-in sensory advantages over e-commerce or customers would not step inside. Then, COVID-19 happened.
With the reopening of brick-and-mortar shops not already permanently shuttered by the pandemic, marketers still face interior redesigns. But the focus is less on a sensory experience that draws customers away from digital storefronts.
Instead, the need is for duplicating the digital experience with contactless pay stations and human-free interaction. The overall new redesign must address customers’ fears of COVID-19 and their desire to maintain social distancing.
“Users have shifted away from visits to B&M stores to online, and many retailers look for a quick hit with store redesigns. The goal is to achieve zero-touch alternatives,” Bilal Soylu, founder of XcooBee, told the E-Commerce Times.
This is a good first step. But shopping models developed in the industrial revolution should be rethought. The old floor plans may not be able to bring back shoppers, he added.
Catalog shopping has made a comeback forced by the need for social distancing in physical stores. Its 360-degree return comes with a few twists and turns, according to retail expert Adele Harrington, chief development officer of United National Consumer Suppliers (UNCS).
Older consumers probably remember tales of parents thumbing through the huge Macy’s holiday gift catalog and picking up their purchases at the service counter. Retailers are bringing back the catalog shopping mentality but delivering it online and even “online in-store,” observed Harrington.
“Most stores are emulating an e-commerce experience by allowing their consumers to browse online and pick up in-store or curbside. They are also making returns and refunds easier than ever so that consumers can get the safety net feeling that e-commerce gives them if they have a change of heart,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
Some non-traditional retailers are even taking it a step further and offering products “online in-store,” she added.
For example, Off Lease Only, an omnichannel car dealership in Florida, sells its inventory online and at their retail location. However, when shopping for a car at the retail level, you do not walk into a showroom or wander around a car lot.
Instead, you walk in, sit down at a computer catalog, select the vehicles you would like to see, and then a salesperson brings you the merchandise. This is an extreme example of online shopping in-store, Harrington explained.
“Still, it has been very successful based not only on COVID-19 shopping limitations but also based on shifting consumer shopping habits and expectations,” she said.
In 2018-2019, every retailer was thinking about and using e-commerce/mobile for sales and marketing. So it is not “new,” noted Harrington.
“But COVID-19 was the tidal wave that pushed everyone to the digital shore in a hurry,” She said.
The COVID crisis has accelerated the interest and adoption of contactless payment technologies. Biometric fingerprint technology allows users to make touchless payments via a personal fingerprint stored on a credit card that is safe, secure, and unique to each individual customer, according to Vince Graziani, CEO of IDEX Biometrics.
“The global demand for biometric technology in the payments industry is robust and will accelerate during the busy end-of-year shopping season and as business returns to a new normal in 2021 and beyond,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Retailers need to make shoppers feel safe and secure in a brick-and-mortar setting. Plus, the checkout experience needs to be automated with technology that removes direct physical contact of signing and punching in PIN numbers, Graziani added.
Amazon’s experiments with automating in-person shopping at a small number of grocery stores in Seattle could help retailers elsewhere create touchless in-store experiences consumers are demanding, offered Jack Choros, CMO of Little Dragon Media.
You can take things off the shelves, and you do not need to check out. Motion, weight, and infrared sensors track when you take something off the shelf, according to Choros. Those tools can track data and figure out exactly what you took, how much of it you took, and what it costs. Your credit card is billed without the shoppers needing to see a grocery cashier or bagger.
“The fact is, the average retailer cannot do this yet, especially when it comes to groceries. Can this happen with other things? Absolutely, but what I would say is that you would have to convince your customers to be okay with providing you with credit card information and having them be automatically billed,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Otherwise, how would you serve them? Theoretically, you can include self-checkout terminals in your stores, but Choros has yet to see those outside of the grocery store business.
Retailers have no option but to redesign stores to keep up with the safety needs. Simple things such as sanitizing stations and making masks mandatory is the first step, advised Mohammed Ali, founder and CEO of Primaseller.
“There will be some level of trial and error, but after the initial phase, there should be some semblance of a contactless or interactionless retail model that works,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Stores will need to have more open floor spaces to maintain social distancing protocols. They will have to be reconfigured for space and speed, he said. He also sees other avenues of bringing safer in-store shopping to stores.
The next step would be to think about contactless payment solutions via mobile and digital wallets, tap and pay. Cash as a payment option will have to be dissuaded, he added.
Self-checkouts, QR-based shopping, and curbside pickups will be crucial in providing an interactionless and, considering the times, safe shopping experiences.
“The other aspect of is the viability of doing this, which can only be guessed. As long as the implementation strategy is broken down into multiple parts, then each part can be independently tweaked for customer satisfaction, as well as growth,” he concluded.
George Pitchkhadze, CMO at Thrive Cuisine, has a quick checklist of things store operators can do to make their floorspace more in line with what hesitant shoppers want for their in-store shopping experience.
Automated retail or A-retail has been a steadily growing trend in the U.S and has been the norm in many places around the world for some time, noted Haris Bacic, co-founder of PriceListo.
Anyone who has ever used a self-checkout option or a smartphone app to pay while actually in the physical store has already had a taste of the A-retail trend at work.
“It is perfectly reasonable to see retail choosing to double down on the technology in the form of more self-check options that will help reduce checkout lines,” he told the E-Commerce Times. Consumers listed waiting on lines as the most painful and stressful part of the in-store buying experience, he added.
Other amenities for redesigning in-store floor space include low- or no-contact kiosks that offer circulars and coupons. Having robot greeters and sales assistants to help maintain social distance safety measures would also be well received.
More consumers are shopping via phones and other mobile devices, and companies that use chat with commerce are reaping rewards while improving the customer experience.
New commerce research reveals that at least two-thirds of firms using chat apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat see greater commerce gains than competitors that do not. These gains include year-over-year revenue growth of 75 percent, greater annual growth in cross-sell/upsell revenue of 89 percent, a YoY bump in customer retention rates of 48 percent, and an almost two times greater YoY increase in marketing ROI.
Research IT firm Aberdeen recently surveyed top global IT executives across a range of business verticals to help quantify the impacts of chat deployments on their business. The research shows significant benefits to customer experience metrics and other top key performance indicators of businesses utilizing chat for customer service and commerce activities.
The digitalization of commerce activities continues to grow with increasing speed and diversity. This is the result of growing numbers of consumers utilizing mobile devices — smartphones, tablets, and wearables.
Buyers are using these devices to interact with businesses trending across almost all consumer-related industries. This new marketing strategy is impacting the retail, CPG, hospitality, transportation, banking, and telecommunications markets.
Think of chat commerce as a method by which businesses can set up rich and engaging information exchanges with consumers. According to Pieter de Villiers, CEO and co-founder of Clickatell, this enables them to move from inquiry to a commercial transaction without ever needing to leave the chat app.
“Thousands of businesses are now using chat to onboard, offer, and cross-sell to customers,” he told CRM Buyer.
According to Jen Snell, vice president for product marketing for Verint, Aberdeen’s research supports the results Verint’s Intelligent Self-Service enterprise customers have recognized in recent years.
“One surprisingly simple reason that we found chat works so well for the cross-sell and upsell situations is that the assistants actually ask the questions,” she told CRM Buyer.
Moreover, with chatbots, customers are less likely to feel that they are being sold to with upsell offers. Instead, customers feel they are simply hearing about available options, Snell added.
“That makes a dramatic difference in the effectiveness of the cross-sell and upsell,” she said.
Culturally, Verint sees consumers becoming more comfortable and familiar with chat technology for business. Its use is at a point where customers expect quality chat experiences and know-how to navigate them effectively.
“We also have to remember that for a growing number of customers this technology is not new. It is something that has always been there. Members of Generation Z were born into a culture of advanced technology,” said Snell.
The oldest Gen Zers were 10 years old when the iPhone was launched. They had 3G and 4G cellular access before they even reached high school, and on-demand content has, for them, always been the rule and not the exception. It makes sense that they would expect to — and likely even prefer — to engage in commerce over chat, she observed.
At the same time, technology has also improved significantly. Today’s chat technology has better natural language processing and intent-understanding capabilities that make these experiences more effective for users.
“So what we are seeing is not an unexpected trend, but rather a solidification and proof of a move to chat interactions for business,” Snell remarked.
Chat commerce pioneer Clickatell sees digital transformation succeeding as chat moves from self-service to actual commerce. To date, companies outside the U.S. are leading in this arena, but Apple and Google, as well as others, are making advancements.
Aberdeen’s March 2020 survey shows firms in the Asia-Pacific (APAC), Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) regions currently have the lead in chat adoption, with 77 percent and 76 percent using it. These regions are followed by firms in North America and Latin America (LATAM), with 67 percent and 63 percent, respectively, using one or more of the chat capabilities.
According to de Villiers, the push in those regions was largely due to a lack of smartphone penetration and the use of mobile apps. Add to that the high cost of mobile data combined with poor reach in terms of broadband WiFi.
Chat commerce has blossomed outside of the U.S. because text messaging is expensive. Consumers opted to use the less expensive, IP-based chat apps to communicate with each other, he explained.
Chat adoption across all regions has been steadily increasing, with companies continuously enriching and fine-tuning their chat capabilities. Consumer expectations are the driving force behind modern-day commerce activities, added Aberdeen’s report.
“It, however, soon became evident that chat is not a second-class alternative but a first-class customer experience in terms of convenience,” de Villiers told CRM Buyer.
Now, with AI-powered bots and advanced assisted chat desks, chat commerce is poised to go mainstream in the US. de Villiers already sees increased inquiries as brands in the U.S. look to reach their customers where they are most comfortable in a more convenient manner.
“Frankly, that is in chat,” he noted.
WhatsApp has over 2 billion users worldwide, while other chat apps such as WeChat and Telegram have 2 to 3 billion users.
“These applications are more interactive and feature-rich than SMS text messaging, and businesses have come to understand that these apps can be go-to platforms for commerce as well,” de Villiers said.
Chat commerce has been slower to catch on due to consumers being well-served through mobile apps. However, app downloads are declining, and consumers spend less time on branded apps and more time on chat, according to de Villiers.
In addition, the chat commerce experience has only recently become very compelling and more convenient. That credit goes to the advances made in robotic process automation (RPA) and AI.
De Villiers noted that the Aberdeen report outlines several key building blocks chat-enabled commerce users should establish to maximize performance.
Firms do not think of chat-enabled commerce as a purely technology-driven initiative. To get the most return from chat investments, firms must support their activities with the capabilities categorized across these three points:
Using chat platforms for business requires firms to determine which activities across the three building blocks are not working well. Once they figure that out, fix them by implementing the missing capabilities, de Villiers directed.
The trend toward a chat economy has already started. A strong pipeline of innovative brands looking to launch chat commerce capability is now waiting, de Villiers observed.
“We believe the market will be moving from a current chat commerce innovator phase to an early majority phase during the next 18 to 24 months,” he said.
However, de Villiers does not think chat should or will become the primary channel for marketing. In fact, he prefers it if chat platforms refrained from such a goal.
As consumers, chat platforms are very important messaging and engagement channels to get things done. Organizing and turning it into a marketing-focused channel will not serve consumers well.
“However, we do believe chat commerce will happen everywhere and that being able to pay bills, upgrade travel, and resolve customer queries via our favorite chat platform are powerful things,” he insisted.
Partly as a result of the continuing pandemic’s hit on retail sales, email is proving to be a vital marketing tool — with social media a close second.
The “2020 State of Email, Fall Edition” report from email marketing firm Litmus found that 77 percent of marketers said email is one of their two most effective marketing channels. Additionally, 78 percent of marketing executives indicated email marketing is vital to the overall success of their company, a seven percent increase since last year.
The report, based on responses from more than 2,000 marketers, noted that ROI must be properly measured and reported in order to capitalize on the potential of email. That is a problem area for many organizations.
Just 16 percent of respondents said their company measures email marketing’s ROI well or very well. Zeroing in on that point, 45 percent of respondents cited the ROI measurement of email marketing efforts as poor, very poor, or non-existent.
“The report showcases why email should be front and center in every single marketing mix,” said Litmus CMO Melissa Sargeant. “In today’s marketing environment, with brands working to break through the clutter of digital advertisements in an efficient and timely manner, personalization and targeted messaging needs to take priority.”
Many companies also fail to adequately personalize email campaigns based on subscriber data and ensure that email lists are current, ignoring one of marketing’s best practices. More than one-third of the respondents said they do not remove inactive subscribers from their mailing lists unless they opt-out.
Outdated email lists can hurt ROI, defeating the purpose of personalizing emails and also contributing to security issues. More than half of respondents indicated they seldom run emails through a spam filter test to identify possible deliverability problems before sending.
The report points to marketers’ preference for taking an email-first approach for overall marketing effectiveness. Four out of five respondents said they would give up their brand’s social media for 12 months rather than give up email marketing for the same period of time.
Email is an effective marketing tool to create unparalleled ROI and maximize customer engagement, according to Sargeant.
“What makes email the most dependable channel available is the ability to garner subscriber engagement data and information to inform overall brand messaging, and, additionally, the capability to personalize content,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
Nearly all of the marketing respondents (94 percent) noted that email is one of their three most effective marketing channels. Fifty-four percent expect to send more emails this year than they did in 2019.
Sixty percent of marketing executives said they also planned to send more emails in 2020. Nearly 90 percent of respondents are conducting A/B tests on their emails. More than one-quarter do so “often” or “always.”
Building in better personalization is becoming more prevalent in email campaigns. Brands are getting smarter about personalization, Sargeant observed.
“They have realized that it is much more than just inserting the recipient’s first name, as other behavioral statistics are more utilized than in the past, like previous product and email interactions and past purchases,” she said.
The Litmus report focused on polling marketing professionals with survey questions primarily about how their organizations managed email marketing campaigns. That makes sense when you consider Litmus has its own email marketing platform.
But Litmus officials recognized that social media can be an effective platform to supplement email campaigns. Brands are using email more and thus have experienced a subsequent increase in reliance on email marketing. That approach breaks through the clutter of digital advertisements in an efficient and timely manner, Sargeant explained.
“Personalization and targeted messages created through [customer] data have become a priority for everyone. Email gives marketers the ability to personalize brand experiences and even influence an entire mix with post-send and performance analytics,” she said.
That, in turn, drives organization-wide messaging and multichannel marketing strategy. Email is sexy again with continued innovation in areas like dark mode, graphics, and personalization, she added.
Still, email marketing and social media can work together to drive engagement for both channels and improve overall marketing strategy. Content or topics that are relevant in social can drive email content and vice versa.
“The more you leverage insights from both channels, the more lift you achieve. Social is instantaneous and allows marketing teams to get up to the second insights into what prospects are interested in. And, just as important, you can quickly see how that changes over time. Like email, social can drive personalized engagement and create human-to-human connections if utilized properly,” Sargeant said.
Marketers have a solid toolset using both email and social media for ad campaigns, according to Healy Jones, managing director at Fitness Masterly.
“I have seen huge success with brands that use the targeting/remarketing features on social [media] in conjunction with email campaigns. Specifically, platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn let marketers upload email lists to target those individuals in campaigns,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
A strategy that Jones has seen work is delivering the same message through both email and social media. Starting with priming the pump via targeted social media a week or so before the email promotion can increase the email campaign’s performance significantly.
“I’ve seen up to a 30 percent boost, he offered.
However, social media is often the better option for an ad platform. Its worldwide reach is compelling, countered Chelsea Hunt-Riveram, co-founder of Honest Paws.
“There is nothing you cannot see on the Internet. With just a couple of clicks, your audience can already interact with you. That means more chances of recognition await,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
But it is also risky since you are dealing with people from around the world in the most convenient way possible. One wrong move can ruin your reputation, warned Hunt-Riveram.
“But if we are talking about accessibility and efficiency, social media opens bigger opportunities for your business. In social media, creativity is not limited. There is so much to do with it, like marketing through text, surveys, photos, videos, posts, vlogs, blogs, tweets, and others. Unlike with email, you’re already limited to an HD video or two,” she said.
Marketers relying on the email-first doctrine must overcome the glut of spam filters. Spam filters can be tricky as the process of labeling emails as such is often somewhat random, suggested Michael Anderson, marketing & SEO specialist at GeoJango Maps.
“However, you can decrease your chances of having your emails labeled as spam by specifying a real reply-to email address and entering in your full business name as the sender,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Applying a few insider tips can help to better handle spam filter interference, according to Kent Lewis, president & founder of Anvil Media. For instance, the best way to combat spam filters is to develop a multifaceted approach.
“First, I recommend double opt-in to reduce recipient confusion and maximize commitment. Second, I suggest reminding recipients to add the emails to Safe Senders. Lastly, pay a premium as necessary to ensure you have a whitelisted and bonded ESP to minimize loss to filters,” Lewis told the E-Commerce Times.
The Activ5 fitness system by Activbody could be a perfect solution for digital-based exercising. This Bluetooth-enabled portable workout and strength training device for men and women coaches users through five-minute full body workouts and measures data such as strength, precision, and other personal metrics.
No sweat and no gym required. That phrase piqued my interest to try this new approach to strength building.
Much of my daily work routine is sedentary. I sit or stand behind a computer screen hunched over a keyboard. I live in a four-season locale that often restricts access to strenuous outdoor activity due to ever-changing weather.
Perhaps those factors make me a prime candidate for using Activ5’s approach to getting more fit. It even offers me an alternative to being a couch potato on inclement weather days. It’s also a handy addition to using my motorized indoor exercise bike.
Still, I was a bit skeptical about making any real progress in strength building from pressing my palms together against this electronic device. I have to admit, however, that the burn of my muscles became a welcome sensation the more I put the Activ5 regime through its paces.
The brown and orange Activ5 exercise module is roughly teardrop shaped and palm sized. On the side bottom edge is an on/off button and the LED. The device has no other controls on it.
You hold it between your palms and adjust its position by where you place your arms and body, bent or standing, and whatever other position the exercises tell you to take.
Activ5 is lightweight with an ergonomic shape that makes it easy to press. It easily accommodates exercising while standing, sitting, or even laying on your back or side.
The device is easy to use while sitting or standing in your office or work cubicle; and is convenient to use while riding as a passenger in a car, on an airplane, or public transportation.
Prone position is used in some of the exercises when you have space and privacy to stretch out on a couch or floor mat. Exercising with Activ5 from a prone position lets you add your knee for pressing the device pads together. Another combination is to use one knee and a hand to apply pressure.
Included in the package is an adjustable, sturdy plastic mobile phone holder. This is supposed to let you see the exercise displays while you power through your workout. But my phone with its protective case was a tad bit too bulky to fit in the overly thin holding curve at the base of the stand. The tall size of my phone also contributed to the apparent top-heavy tumbling.
The Activ5 device is designed for use with apps and games running on Bluetooth-enabled smartphones, tablets, or an Apple Watch. It is also designed for charging-free use. Activ5 ships with a AAA battery that lasts up to a year, according to the manufacturer. Replacing it requires just prying off the side pressure panel.
The first step after unboxing is to download the Activ5 app from either Apple’s App Store or Google Play.
Step two is turning on the Activ5 device, making sure that your mobile device has Bluetooth turned on and visible for pairing. When the LED on Activ5 blinks green, you are good to go.
Step three is to follow the prompts on the device running the Activ5 app to complete the device’s setup.
Set up was quick and simple. It nearly automatically paired with my Android phone. That is significant because both my Samsung and Motorola phones do not usually play nice with sharing on Bluetooth.
The Activ5 app setup uses a game method that involves pressing the Activ5 hand unit to complete strength and alignment assessments. The only glitch I encountered was entering my birth date. The app preselected the year and would not let me correct it despite clicking the edit icon on the app screen. This date display is a minor problem. I could not see any relevance to the adjustment made in assessing my physical strength based on my age.
The setup, like using the device for exercising, involved pressing the two sides of the device between my hands. The sensors measured the sustained strength of my arm muscles.
A few other quick games measured my durability and dexterity. The assessments are based on the ability to keep pressure on the hand device raising arms to direct a drone-like icon along a jagged flight path on the app’s display.
The entire setup process took less than five minutes. My calculated results displayed on the app screen.
Activ5 training is based on isometric exercising. Each exercise is tailored to your assessed muscle strength. It is important to apply your best effort in the initial setup game.
That establishes your max power as a baseline. The Activ5 training app dynamically creates your personalized coaching curve for each exercise.
Follow the directions the app displays for each training program and exercise you do. Depending on the exercise at play, the screen encourages you to use more pressure or adjust your position.
Some of the displays have you navigate the device to keep the cursor-like icon steady on the line. You speed it up by applying more pressure, or ease off the pressure to slow down the progress and direction along the prescribed path as you hold the described pose.
Isometric exercises pit half your muscles — the ones the exercise has you flex — against the other half that are at rest. The dynamic pressing and holding in place for varying lengths of time strengthen the muscles.
The proprietary device measures your applied force in pounds and tracks your performance gains. The Activ5 training regimen includes over 100 games delivered as part of the updates to the app as your training progresses.
What sold me on this device is it efficiency. The computer game-like workout and progress screen have no learning curve. Plus, it does not take much time to complete the exercises.
Ideally, use Activ5 for a complete workout in five minutes, three times a day. The app coaches you through each exercise and program to build your strength and endurance.
Your success results from your grip. How you hold the Activ5 device is reflected in what the app calculates as you exercise. It is a two-step process.
One, apply pressure from the heel of your hand, not the palm. Two, to properly engage the targeted muscles, keep your fingers separated, not intertwined.
The user interface is clean and simple. It has tabs to access training programs, workouts, and exercises. Touch a displayed activity to launch your guided workout session.
To accurately track your increased strength over time, the developer recommends resetting your max power every 7 to 10 days.
Activ5 normally sells for $149.99. When I received the review unit, the website was offering the unit for purchase on sale for $109.90.
The package includes a free download code for the Activ5 app. This offer is a bit confusing because I never had to enter the device name or the serial number labeled on the box. The download was already free.
I have yet to encounter an exercise through the app that required purchase. Of course, I am still working my way through the programs after a few days of use. So in-app purchases may still show up.
Given the price of the unit, I would not look kindly on having to shell out too much money for advanced level exercises.
A Cloud Guru (ACG) in September released the “State of Cloud Learning” report which shows that cloud expertise, measured via certifications and hands-on proficiency, is growing in value for both companies and the individuals who work for them.
ACG analyzed cloud learning priorities among enterprise teams and individual learners. The report found widespread intent to accelerate cloud adoption and a surge in demand for Azure-related content.
More than 90 percent of IT leaders surveyed expect to expand their cloud services in the next one to three years. Despite this testament to the benefits of cloud adoption, enterprises may find a lack of qualified IT workers to fill those positions.
A related story focusing on ACG’s corporate actions to help fill that growing gap in trained Linux technicians details the company’s recent launch of its new flagship cloud training platform this summer. That platform addresses the shortage of tech workers needing Linux-based cloud training. It offers a comprehensive, hands-on solution through a cloud-based learning platform.
ACG’s research for the report incorporated analysis of more than three million hours of its usage data and surveyed 26,000 cloud learners — including IT leaders, engineers, and developers. It uncovers how the industry is thinking about the most popular cloud learning platforms, the barriers to growth in cloud expertise, and the future of cloud skills development.
Findings show a solid agreement among business leaders of the growing value of cloud technology to their operations. The survey results also demonstrate a strong majority of workers and hiring managers favor company-provided training support for gaining cloud expertise.
Cloud adoption has become critical to a company’s growth trajectory and durability, making acquiring and retaining cloud-skilled talent a top priority for IT teams, according to Sam Kroonenburg, A Cloud Guru CEO and co-founder.
“To ensure our platform best meets current needs, we turned to IT leaders and practitioners to identify the focus areas and prominent challenges associated with ongoing cloud learning in today’s complex environment,” he said.
Almost three-quarters (71 percent) of enterprise leaders are already seeing cloud adoption speed up their time-to-value for new products and features.
Nearly all (97 percent) of cloud leaders believe their organizations would function more effectively with a uniform shared basis of cloud knowledge.
Almost the same number (94 percent) of employees are more likely to stay long-term with an employer who invests in their career through skills development
A number of IT-related areas have organizations that are struggling to find enough qualified or experienced staff, offered Paul Holland, principal research analyst at the Information Security Forum.
“Cross training within an organization is a good method of closing the skills gap by picking individuals who already work for and understand the organization you have people who are bought into company ethos and values,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Slightly more than half (52 percent) of workers acknowledged that cloud certifications expanded their career opportunities.
More than 80 percent of those respondents indicated that they gained a higher salary as a direct result of cloud certification.
A slightly higher percentage (82 percent) of hiring managers said cloud certifications make a candidate more attractive. Even more hiring managers (87 percent) valued cloud expertise over a university degree.
The lack of time IT workers have to keep up with new technologies creates a shortage of expertise for said technologies. It also highlights that we expect IT pros to have much broader knowledge than in the past, according to Thomas Hatch, CTO and co-founder at SaltStack.
“It used to be that they just needed to know Linux, but now they need to know Linux, DevOps, multiple cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, etc. While new automation capabilities for IT and cloud operations have improved the speed of development, it has introduced a vast array of unique tools that are hard to learn and keep up on,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“This means that training MUST be carved out in a forceful way within companies today.”
Corporation leaders and IT workers should not settle for complacency with only one cloud platform. The future of skills development is multi-cloud, according to the report’s findings.
Nearly 70 percent of respondents confirmed their organization is currently utilizing multiple cloud platforms. As cloud adoption continues and IT leaders attempt to build and execute this transition, the demand for cloud professionals is heightened across all three major cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, according to the report.
Of those three leading cloud providers, AWS expertise was cited in the survey as the most commonly used platform. More than 80 percent trained on it. A wide gap separated the other two major platforms, with Azure at 35 percent, and GCP at 30 percent.
Similarly, more than 70 percent of administrators identified AWS as the primary cloud platform used within their organization, while Azure and GCP were identified as the primary cloud platform less than 10 percent of the time.
But the top popularity spot the survey indicated for AWS might soon be challenged for closely by Azure. In June, Azure training time was up nearly 800 percent year-over-year compared to between 50-100 percent for AWS and Google Cloud.
Respondents indicated that Azure was their intended training platform in the future, at least by a slight margin of 54 percent. But AWS and GCP followed close behind.
The report clearly shows that some roadblocks are in the way of executing on-cloud learning programs. Only 10 percent of respondents reported low buy-in from leadership. The problem is at the worker end with not enough technically trained workers to fill existing IT-cloud job vacancies.
Tech teams face a lack of skilled talent and struggle to find the time to improve their skills, according to the report. Over 80 percent of cloud leaders identified a lack of internal skills and knowledge as a top barrier to cloud success.
Despite a near-universal expectation of expanding cloud services in the near future, only 56 percent of cloud leaders reported having an actionable plan to provide advanced training to their workforce. Over three-quarters of cloud learning administrators said that the hardest part about guiding employees through cloud training is balancing competing priorities with day-to-day work.
That sentiment was echoed by more than 76 percent of learners. They identified finding time to study as the biggest barrier to expanding their cloud knowledge.
To combat that challenge, almost three-quarters (70 percent) of learning administrators identified online training and certification incentives as their most effective strategies for overcoming the time problem and advancing learning throughout the organization.
One of the most significant revelations in the report is the gap between knowing that an unskilled workforce is the biggest barrier to cloud success and physically taking the proper steps to implement a solution, noted Katie Bullard, president of the e-learning platform at ACG.
“Per the report, 80 percent of cloud leaders point to an unskilled workforce as the biggest hurdle to overcome, yet only 56 percent of them report having an actionable plan to train their employees on cloud skills. This contrast highlights the growing industry need for an easy-to-execute, comprehensive, and cost-effective solution that efficiently trains employees,” she told TechNewsWorld.
Artificial intelligence has made noticeable changes to technologies around the world. Perhaps AI’s most notable potential, however, is its role in the supply chain industry.
AI has changed the supply chain process from reactive to proactive, which creates a larger change in how data-driven processes will operate in the future. The true role of AI in the supply chain is to enhance and augment human intelligence and decision making. That is much different than what some people view as making human intelligence obsolete, according to experts at Supplyframe.
AI has a twofold role in supply chains. The first is automating repetitive tasks and processes across supply chain functions. The second is realizing new forms of strategic decision making and collaboration.
As technologies like AI and ML (machine learning) become more commonly used in supply chains, Kinaxis, a supply chain management software provider, believes that these tools can help, but only when companies identify the root of the business issues. Otherwise, investments in AI will not pay off.
The pandemic has forced companies in almost every industry to rethink their supply chains. That push has moved industries away from reliance on other nations to a new goal of improving their own capabilities to produce materials.
Because of this, the value of shrinking and localizing the supply chain process through the use of AI is more apparent than ever. That positions AI to be a vital tool.
AI has tremendous potential to impact the global supply chain. It can do this by taking over time-consuming and error-prone manual work. This can involve AI more efficiently predicting demand, improving delivery times, reducing costs, and taking over customer support roles, according to Ryan Abbott, professor of law and health sciences at the University of Surrey School of Law and adjunct assistant professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
“The complexity of global logistics networks involving hundreds of sourcing, production, and distribution systems makes the use of AI critical to ensuring smart and agile decisions,” he told TechNewsWorld.
AI seems to be a mixed bag of solutions in dealing with supply chain issues. AI is sometimes used to predict logistics patterns, and even customer behavior — but is hardly ever used to bring the true value of achieving better yields, having faster product iterations, and a sense of safety and security. It is very possible though, according to Matthew Putman, cofounder and CEO of Nanotronics.
“[The supply chain] is an old system where bottlenecks exist in so many places,” he told TechNewsWorld.
In the context of supply chain, “IA” may be a better nomenclature for artificial intelligence, noted Suresh Acharaya, professor of practice at the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business. He has started to refer to AI as IA or “intelligent automation” instead.
“There is some value in streamlining predictably repetitive actions — if this happens execute plan A, else execute plan B,” he told TechNewsWorld.
For instance, if there is not enough inventory, make sure it gets shipped to the highest priority order. These kinds of actions have been automated for some time and continue to be automated even more, he explained.
“However, the power of AI is in predicting (or sensing) a possible outcome, long before it even happens, and recommending a proactive action,” Archarava noted.
In the inventory example, it is about sensing the likelihood of a shortage and finding ways of mitigating it by finding viable supply alternatives; and yes, in that sense the power of AI is in being proactive rather than reactive, he quipped, adding that all aspects of the supply chain lend themselves to intelligent automation.
Looking at the planning space, for instance, machine learning can vastly improve the forecast of consumer demand. But forecasting is not an end in itself. Intelligent automation can then execute the optimal production or replenishment strategies.
That same technology can be applied to transportation, warehouse, and store supply management. For example, in transportation planning, AI can understand the uncertainties associated with the movement of goods from delivery time variabilities to product perishability.
In the warehouse and in the store, AI can help improve labor efficiencies. Likewise, in the space of reverse logistics, AI can significantly improve the prediction and management of returned items, a growing area fueled by the growth of ecommerce, said Acharaya.
“So, one does not have to view AI strictly with the lens of gadgets such as drones or robots or driverless vehicles. There are algorithmic advances brought about by machine learning that can drive tremendous efficiencies in the supply chain,” he said.
AI plays a role in supply chain management in ways that may not be obvious to the casual observer. For example, effective supply chains require cash optimization for both customers and their suppliers, added Shan Haq, vice president of corporate strategy and development at Transcepta.
“Many customers deploy discount management strategies that balance a supplier’s need for flexible, predictable, timely payments. The most advanced strategies incorporate accounts payable solutions that leverage AI in their platforms,” he told TechNewsWorld.
The technology is also helping the smallest suppliers behind the scenes. The process of sending invoices and receiving payments has leveraged AI to extract data automatically from invoices, verify and match approved orders, and resolve issues. The result is dramatically reduced manual effort in accounts payable and suppliers who are paid timely, he observed.
“AI is a learning technology. Ultimately, if AI can mature to the point that the learning translates to predictive technology in a meaningful way, we will see massive positive change to supply chain operations,” said Haq.
A tendency exists for consumers and businesses to place the blame for product shortages on somebody else’s poor planning. The causes of supply chain interruptions are more deeply rooted and are only made worse by the pandemic.
The reason for the current supply chain operations struggling to meet the needs of vendors and consumers is very simple, Haq believes. Behavior has changed.
Take the frequently mentioned example of paper products. Consumers have increased the need for these products as much as they have changed where they need them.
The pandemic has kept people at home. So distribution to restaurants and offices needs to shift to the supermarket and consumer delivery services. That dynamic was not predicted, and supply chains needed time to adjust, explained Haq.
Another reason is the pressure to please pre-pandemic consumer expectations, according to Harish Iyer, vice president of industry and solutions at Kinaxis.
“Today’s consumers have become accustomed to the Amazon effect — placing their orders and expecting deliveries in one or two days. In turn, this expectation transmits itself up the supply chain and places more pressure on companies to deliver items almost instantaneously,” he told TechNewsWorld. “However, many companies are still operating with siloed, sequential processes that are too slow to keep pace with the speed of today’s businesses and consumer expectations.”
AI can break down these siloes to make end-to-end visibility into the whole supply chain operation. That gives companies a better positioning to meet both vendor and consumer expectations. Their supply chains can operate more efficiently and are resilient enough to meet consumer and vendor expectations, even amidst day to day variability or unforeseen volatility, Iyer explained.
AI is a buzzword popular among many companies. But business leaders simply cannot invest in an AI solution without first consulting supply chain planners to understand the root issue and what needs to be solved, cautioned Kinaxis’ Iyer. Otherwise, they will find that the solution may not solve the issues that are most important to their company.
“By starting with the problem and focusing on the business value, business leaders can apply the right technique to the right problem and gain ROI from their AI investment more quickly,” he said. “When business leaders select the right AI solution for their company’s specific needs, the supply chain planner is empowered to make fast, more confident decisions.”
AI is still relatively nascent. In the supply chain world, the use cases currently that benefit the most from AI are transaction related, offered Transcepta’s Haq.
“Managing supplier data, receiving a digital invoice, and paying suppliers are all areas where AI has already taken hold. Look for advances in the not-too-distant future that focus not only on transactions but collaboration,” he said.
The biggest hurdle in overcoming supply chain issues is the hype. Non-AI professionals tout this as magic, and it isn’t, argued University of Maryland’s Archaraya. These are intelligent algorithms that sense and detect patterns in a faster and better way.
These are sensors and devices that communicate with each other transmitting and receiving information at incredible speed. They are mechanisms, mostly cloud based, that process and crunch through tremendous amounts of data.
“So, it is important to understand what the underlying components are that form the AI ecosystem and not to be carried away by the hype,” he concluded.
Political moves or other world events that change conditions so quickly can prevent rapid enough responses. Add to such unanticipated events the “just in time” manufacturing strategy used for decades. It has enormous value in reducing inventory waste, according to Nanotronics’ Putman.
The key to what AI might address is that the supply chain itself is optimizing for the same goal, not just every member of the chain. The point would be not to blame a supplier, or a node in a production line, but have an AI agent work towards corrective action that fixes any errors, he explained.
The world of fitness and exercise has been fundamentally changed by the pandemic. People are doing more workouts at home, purchasing home gym equipment, and relying more than ever on remote fitness coaching.
The E-Commerce Times caught up with insiders from the health and wellness industry for perspective on how the population is staying active at home.
“The pandemic has greatly affected the way people are exercising,” Brent Hartman, president of B3 Personal Training, explained to the E-Commerce Times. “In the beginning, when gyms were shut down, everyone was rushing to purchase equipment for their home gym. It’s almost as if everyone has a home gym set up at home.
“The pandemic also forced a switch to virtual or online workout options. Classes were all done online. Personal training was done with Zoom or Skype. Peloton and Mirror sales skyrocketed. All of these options were able to be done with everyone’s home gyms.”
Designing a home gym space is a kind of art involving both a sense of interior design and an understanding of what space and equipment will best serve one’s needs.
“A home gym should never appear sterile or static,” Bryan Green, founder and CEO of Aktiv Solutions, explained to the E-Commerce Times. “It’s important to integrate functional fitness equipment and the aesthetic fundamentals of interior design during your planning for optimal motivation.
“Consider for the designated area or room conversion the following: lighting, wall colors, floor coverings, and other environmental embellishments for an inspirational and aesthetically pleasing space that compliments your home. Consider how your home gym space will evolve and change as your exercise preferences may grow or modify over time.”
Creating a home gym is, after all, a kind of interior design.
“In designing a great home gym, the problem to solve is not in finding equipment, but rather in creating functional space,” said Green. “Just as with your kitchen, there are no shortages of appliances. How those appliances come together to accommodate the wide range of choices within the confines of more limited space is the value of smart planning and design.
“Foundationally, we focus on reverse engineering the environment around how our clients and their families want to train and move in the space. This begins with recognizing the footprint.”
It’s important, as well, to consider storage space when designing a home gym.
“Home gyms require smart storage solutions and need to accommodate smaller footprints,” said Green. “The last thing you want is to find yourself tripping over equipment. Smart use of space and storage is critical.”
Ultimately, creating a home gym space can lead to thinking more broadly about designing for a sense of wellness and overall health.
“Beyond just buying up equipment, we’ve experienced a massive uptick in clients who are interested in taking a holistic approach to creating permanent wellness space within their homes,” said Green. “Our home gym design division has been inundated with helping plan a next generation of really special spaces.”
It’s vital, when designing home gym and wellness spaces that people consider both what they want and what they will actually use — and then set aside a space that will satisfy those criteria.
“Regardless of the modality of exercise someone chooses, the key piece of advice is to be consistent with your activity,” explained Hartman. “The space that you designate for your home-based workout routine should be conducive for someone actually to be consistent with the routine. A lot of people do not designate the space, and then it doesn’t work for them.”
People creating their home fitness spaces are also discovering that exercise equipment doesn’t need to be big and bulky. In fact, there’s been increased interest in small, compact, and portable pieces that serve multiple functions.
“Equipment that facilitates functional training and is portable and versatile for use inside, in the backyard, [and] at the park are all in demand,” explained Green.
Resistance bands, for instance, have become a central part of many peoples’ fitness routines, as well as other portable and small-footprint items.
“A good set of resistance bands is one of the first pieces of equipment,” noted Hartman. “The bands should have a door anchor attachment. The ones that use carabiner clips for easy switching of resistance levels is ideal. A stability ball and mat are also great entry-level pieces of equipment. The next tier from there would be dumbbells or kettlebells and a bench. Your space would help determine if you would need adjustable or solid weights. You can get a lot down with just this equipment and your own body.”
How people think about the kind of equipment and space they need to stay in shape is, in short, changing.
“The real difference between now and before the pandemic is the fact that we no longer have access to glamorous machines and heavy weights, but the foundation of staying in shape hasn’t changed,” Melanie Machado, owner of Designer Body Fit, explained to the E-Commerce Times.
“The pandemic forced us to get creative with the forms of resistance we use to challenge our bodies. Instead of machines and heavy dumbbells, we now challenge ourselves using bodyweight exercises, resistance bands and some light dumbbells.
“The real change was having clients change their mindset. Having them understand that there are millions of different forms of exercising and staying in shape that doesn’t all include lifting heavy and sweating until you’re fatigued,” explained Machado.
In addition to creating home gyms and workout spaces, people are increasingly turning to services like remote fitness coaching to help them develop and maintain their exercise routines. Zoom calls with coaches and trainers are, these days, often replacing in-person fitness classes.
“The advice I would you give to someone who wants to develop and maintain a remote fitness routine is to find a coach whose goals and aspirations align with yours and trust the plan that is given,” said Machado.
“At the end of the day, you are the deciding factor. How much time, dedication, and devotion you apply to your plan will ultimately determine your results.”
Remote fitness routines also involve considering space, equipment, and design.
“The first key to a successful virtual personal training program is you need to find a spot to place the camera, phone or tablet so that the trainer can see what you are doing,” B3’s Hartman stated.
“Too many people don’t realize my point of view from the device. The second key is to treat any virtual sessions exactly like you would if you were going to them in person. Have your water, towel, etc., ready for the session, and dress as you would exactly for an in-person workout. Mindset is important. The third key would be to eliminate any disruptions. This may prove to be very difficult if there are other people in the home. We can only do the best we can,” he added.
The evolution of home exercise is, ultimately, affecting a variety of fitness and fitness-adjacent brands and products.
“Fitness brands are in the middle of a major shift toward becoming lifestyle brands, meaning not only do they provide clothing and fitness gear, but they also promote an overall active and sustainable lifestyle,” Len Covello, CTO of Engage People, explained to the E-Commerce Times.
“With the growing demand for wellness products and services that people can use, a brand’s offering should focus on how it is meeting their customer’s needs better than a competitor is. Then, home in on their various marketing strategies to play up those offerings.”
Ultimately, with the evolution of home gym design and the move toward virtual coaching, the fitness world is experiencing a transformation that will likely continue even long the pandemic’s over.
“The future is now,” said Machado. “With today’s technology, coaches are no further away than your back pocket. With a click of a button, we are here to guide you through virtual demonstrations, which allow you, as the consumer, to be more flexible with your time. As for the future, we will just have to wait and see.”
For all the ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our online shopping behavior in 2020, add to the list: holiday gift giving.
This year, far fewer gifts will be exchanged in person as many of us cancel our normal family travel during the holiday season. Airlines are predicting less than 50 percent of normal holiday travelers, as many of us are choosing to stay home out of caution, as well as cities and states imposing quarantine rules on out-of-towners.
As e-commerce retailers, we should prepare for a surge in online gift purchases and also an increase in gifts delivered directly to the recipient. Here are ten ideas that e-tailers can use to rethink the gift-giving experience this holiday season.
1. Be prepared earlier than normal for gift shoppers (like in October). Many customers will be shopping early this year, especially with Amazon Prime Day being in mid-October and many other retailers kicking off early holiday marketing in response. Expect early, intense competition and a common refrain of “beat the rush” sort of messaging.
2. Encourage customers to shop early. If they aren’t already, then you should tell them to. The surge in online shopping will likely put tremendous strain on our own distribution centers and shipping carriers, like FedEx, UPS, USPS, etc. Customers need to understand that shipping times may be lengthened this year, and they should not assume or wait until the last minute.
3. Focus customers on what is in stock. As we all continue to experience inventory limitations and supply chain challenges, make sure you are encouraging customers toward items that are confidently in stock. De-emphasize special order items and items likely to stock out. There will not be as many chances for heroics this year.
4. Encourage electronic gift cards. Gift cards are a convenient and predictable choice for customers. They bypass the shipping & inventory challenges, and they probably save you labor costs as you staff for the holidays. Review your online experience – are they obvious to find & easy to order? Will you offer an incentive to purchase gift cards, like a bonus amount?
5. Review your promotional calendar. Especially promotions running in December, will you be able to confidently fulfill those orders? If you normally do a campaign for “still time to get it delivered by Christmas” — will that even work this year?
6. Help protect the secret. If customers are delivering straight to the recipient this year, help them understand the experience. Will there be prices on the packing slip? What emails are sent? Will the outside of the box give away the contents? Can the customer indicate it is a gift order and suppress these things?
7. Encourage hold-at-locations. An interesting solution for keeping gifts secret — if your website already offers “hold at locations” (like Kroger, Walgreens, etc.), encourage customers to send them to a nearby location to the recipient instead of showing up at their house and ruining the surprise.
8. Be prepared to adjust shipping promises. Most retailers are normally very bold with delivery promises but consider softening that language as needed. Decide if you need to adjust or pad the promises as the season goes on. Maybe promise ranges instead of specific dates. Monitor your shipping reports closely and adjust promises if carriers are missing consistently.
9. Adjust your fraud rules. Remember that gift orders often have the same fingerprint as fraud orders (gift cards, expedited shipping, mismatched shipping & billing addresses, etc.). Make sure your systems and processes are prepared to differentiate and move good orders through quickly.
10. Consider value-added services. Some retailers are choosing to offer extra services like gift messaging, gift wrapping, handwritten cards, etc. It’s a great way to add real value this year and differentiate yourself if you are able to commit to the idea.
Hopefully, these tips are useful to spark ideas for the gift-giving experience on your website. Don’t forget to also go through your web experience personally. Place an order and experience it end-to-end, just as a customer would. That is always the best way to understand and fine-tune the nuance of your own business.
I wish you great success in your holiday sales this year, and I also wish you a great holiday season with your loved ones, no matter how disrupted we all are this year.
The BizOps Coalition hopes to bridge the gap between technology investments and business outcomes through an effort called the BizOps Manifesto, which offers numerous guiding principles to help organizations achieve business outcomes based on trust, confidence, and collaboration.
The group published the document on its website Oct. 13 as a framework to address its key issues: to scale and accelerate the advancement of the BizOps movement.
The BizOps Coalition advocates for fundamental change in the way business and IT collaborate in modern software development by using this new framework designed to connect technology investments to business outcomes. The BizOps movement has gained traction with leading organizations, helping them reduce waste and inefficiencies, break down silos, and improve collaboration to better align IT with business outcomes.
But more needs to be done. That led to the Manifesto’s creation.
Agile and DevOps approaches have enabled rapid development and continual improvement of software quality. But these approaches fail to connect the development to business outcomes. That causes wasted productivity and money.
Project Management Institute reported a million dollars is wasted every 20 seconds on IT investments that do not align to business value, according to the coalition.
The scale of digital business is growing very rapidly. This mandates continual changes to how organizations view automation and collaboration. Today’s digital transformation mandates the concepts of this manifesto, noted Thomas Hatch, CTO and co-founder at SaltStack.
“I think that the need for a BizOps coalition is real. The challenges that companies face in the growing world of digital business can be very difficult to keep up with. The BizOps coalition is helping to simplify the core points of digital transformation and digital business in a way that can be leveraged more easily by companies today,” he told TechNewsWorld.
BizOps is a logical extension of the core ideas of DevOps, noted Hatch. Both communities share several common goals.
“This is about the convergence of communication in companies and watching as the ideas of DevOps push business change as they accelerate the business to be able to push more product and garner greater revenue,” he said.
DevOps is focused on improving the speed of software delivery, added Serge Lucio, vice president and general manager for enterprise software at Broadcom. He is one of the manifesto’s authors and a founding member of the coalition.
“That does not necessarily translate to delivering the right software to meet business needs. BizOps helps put business outcomes at the center of everything, from value management to development to IT operations,” Lucio told TechNewsWorld.
This approach enables DevOps teams to build on established concepts like continuous feedback loops. It also enables their expansion to incorporate strategic planning and enterprise business context, he explained.
Is a new business group really needed? After all, enterprise and technology groups already working together.
Yes, and no, according to Lucio. A recent Forrester survey found CEOs and IT leaders are at odds when it comes to the importance of speeding software delivery to meet business requirements.
“CEOs viewed this as 2.3 times more important than software leaders. That is obviously a big challenge. At the same time, software and business leaders focus on different success metrics,” he remarked.
Development teams track and report on metrics related to speed and quality. Business leaders track business performance metrics such as revenue growth, customer retention, and profit margins.
“BizOps can help bridge the gap between these two groups and their metrics. In this way, Bizops can help unify dev and ops,” Lucio clarified.
Today’s harsher, new normal reality requires a significant focus on connecting business metrics and outcomes to every IT product and project, said Stephen Elliot, program vice president of management software and DevOps at IDC in the coalition’s written announcement.
“To accomplish these objectives, IT leadership teams require pragmatic operating models and frameworks that reduce business risks and increase operational and team efficiencies.
“IT and business leaders who adopt BizOps have a great opportunity to win now, drive more team collaboration, deliver business outcomes, and thrive in the future,” Elliot added.
The BizOps Manifesto outlines 12 guiding principles to help organizations achieve business outcomes. This framework celebrates trust, confidence, and collaboration.
The Manifesto includes these key ideas:
The complete list contained in the manifesto is available here . The coalition encourages supporters to sign the manifesto.
The manifesto brings to the table several factors that are not provided by other business and software communities. The BizOps Manifesto builds on the work of the Agile and DevOps manifestos. But it focuses on the cultural transformation necessary to bridge the gap between software development and business, Lucio said.
“It is less about the process of developing software and more about aligning software development with the broader needs of the business,” he added.
A series of recent events have forced rapid changes or influences on BizOps. Business transformation has exploded during this pandemic. Organizations of all types and sizes are adapting and pivoting their business focus and operations to best meet the needs of their customer base and continue to drive business value.
It appears the effects of the pandemic will continue well into 2021. Therefore, it is imperative organizations streamline the efforts of their IT departments and ensure all spending and activities are supporting the organization’s overall goals, according to Lucio.
“There are three main drivers that have come together that make now the time for BizOps. The first, as we just discussed, is the rapid transformation brought about by COVID-19,” he said.
The second event driver is the new generation of CIOs. Their experiences have been shaped in a culture focused on delivering business value.
The third driver is the data explosion resulting from this transformation. That data explosion is vast and is accelerating the use of AI and machine learning to make sense of it all.
“This trifecta is driving both the need and opportunity for BizOps,” Lucio insisted.
The manifesto will help align IT investments with business processes and outcomes. It was developed to better define BizOps and the values and principles needed to successfully implement BizOps in the enterprise.
The BizOps framework leverages AI and ML to help business and software leaders break down silos, improve collaboration, and work toward the same objectives. Agile and DevOps have taken software development forward in huge ways, Lucio observed.
“But ultimately, we have to ask if we are delivering on the business outcomes the CEO cares about. That is really what has been missing — that true business context and alignment between IT and business. The BizOps movement is focused on helping drive the cultural transformation required to actually deliver on that,” he concluded.
The U.S. government’s policy to restrict federal agency exposure to products and services associated with Huawei Technologies and other China-based companies has gained the support of the U.S. information technology industry.
However, a wide swath of U.S. companies, including those in the IT sector, registered significant concerns about federal regulations designed to control the employment of China-sourced products by federal agencies and government contractors.
Government restrictions that prohibited the federal purchase of certain products from China were put into effect in 2019. Then, in August 2020, a whole set of new regulations went into effect to control or restrict the use of certain China-sourced technologies by federal contractors. The restrictions were adopted on an “interim” basis, and contractors were allowed to submit comments through mid-September. All comments will be considered in promulgating final regulations. But for now, companies must comply with rules that were issued in August.
In general, contractor groups contend that the security regulations will not only be costly to implement but also could cost some companies the ability to compete for federal business.
The regulations implement provisions of the recent National Defense Authorization Act, addressing security risks associated with technologies sourced from the People’s Republic of China. A PRC requirement that Huawei and other Chinese companies cooperate with Chinese intelligence agencies poses a “complex and growing threat to strategically important U.S. economic sectors and critical infrastructure,” according to the regulations.
Since the PRC “possesses advanced cyber capabilities that it actively uses against the United States, a proactive cyber approach is needed to degrade or deny these threats before they reach our nation’s networks, including those of the federal government and its contractors,” the regulations said.
The contracting community, however, is troubled by the lack of clarity in the regulations. Two major issues appeared in the multiple comments submitted to the General Services Administration (GSA) and other federal acquisition authorities.
The first point of concern was the reference in the regulations to contractor operations associated with the use of the China-sourced technologies. Since the term “use” was not clearly defined, the regulations could affect virtually every aspect of a contractor’s operations, resulting from the interconnectivity of technology.
“Based on a plain reading of the language, and without further clarification or guidance on what ‘use’ means, I think we have to assume that broader IT and Internet service is included,” in the scope of operations subject to regulation, said Townsend Bourne, a partner at Sheppard Mullin.
Additionally, the term “use” is not limited to a contractor’s defense or government business but “is any telecom use by a contractor that holds a prime contract with the federal government,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
Compliance could get “quite complicated,” especially during the pandemic with more remote working and the use of personal Internet connections, which “vastly expands the universe of potentially covered telecom,” Bourne said.
To ferret out, modify, or even replace the components of the China-sourced products throughout a company’s operations could be an overwhelming task. By referencing “any” use of prohibited items, the interim rule actually goes beyond the scope of the underlying law to such a degree that it “prompts practical concerns whether it can be implemented by the government’s industrial base,” according to a blog posting by the Coalition for Government Procurement.
“Specifically, it is not clear how vendors can be expected to run to ground the vast number of attenuated connections to covered equipment or services that could constitute any use,” the group said.
The second troublesome provision, according to contractors, is that the interim rule fails to adequately specify what the government means by “covered” products and services from China. In general, the regulations reference certain telecommunications equipment and services emanating from Huawei or ZTE Corporation, as well as video surveillance products or telecom equipment from Hytera Communications, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, Dahua Technology, and their subsidiaries or affiliates.
Noting the huge multiplicity of Hauwei products, and the thousands of patents held by the company, any comprehensive listing of products could be “very long,” noted Bourne. The primary products “to be on the lookout for” are those that incorporate cellular, 5G, WiFi, and Bluetooth communications technology, she said.
David Berteau, president and CEO of the Professional Services Council (PSC), said that the organization “supports efforts to protect national security interests, critical technologies, and contractor supply chains from potential threats.” Still, PSC has “serious reservations” about the rules, he said.
“Further clarifications are necessary for the government and the contractor community to implement the provision as intended. For example, there is no definition for what constitutes ‘use,’ nor is there any definitive list of both covered affiliates and subsidiaries and covered prohibited equipment and services,” Berteau said.
While the regulations permit waivers related to implementing the restrictions, the process for obtaining them also lacks clarity, according to contractors. To “minimize disruption, the final rule must clearly lay out what is expected of both contractors and agency representatives in the waiver process,” said the Council of Defense and Space Industry Associations (CODSIA).
“If a contractor identifies any use of banned equipment, the law allows the company to seek a waiver from its customer agencies in the short term while it works to remove the problematic technology. However, the waiver process outlined in the interim rule is muddled, time-consuming, and seems designed to discourage companies and government contracting officials from seeking a waiver altogether,” said Kelsey Kober, manager of policy, public sector, at the Information Technology Industry Council, in a blog posting.
The expense of compliance with the regulations will be significant. Government estimates peg the cost to federal contractors at US$12 billion in just the first year of implementation and $2.2 billion annually in subsequent years. Those estimates, however, failed to include several conditions of expense due to data limitations, with the result that the regulations constitute “one of the most expensive acquisition regulations ever enacted,” said CODSIA in its comments.
“Every company that does business with the federal government has to meet standards and comply with rules that are more extensive and more expensive than those in the commercial marketplace,” said the Professional Services Council’s Berteau.
“Those costs may lead companies to exit the federal contract marketplace, particularly small or mid-sized businesses, though we cannot predict how many would do so or when that might happen,” he told the E-Commerce Times. Under the interim rules, “if companies cease to bid because they cannot meet the requirements for a contract award, it could lead to less competition, less innovation, and higher prices.”
Amazon reported recently that online grocery sales tripled during the pandemic. The company also saw a 160 percent increase in delivery capacity and tripled the number of Whole Foods pickup spots.
This is all great news if you live in a city with Whole Foods or where grocery delivery services are easily accessible. But if your food and home supplies depend on local pickup and delivery, and you live in rural strongholds, you might be in for some shortages. E-commerce is not every rural community’s Holy Grail for shopping.
Many local rural retailers are strangers to e-commerce. If stores in rural America want to keep customers happy and healthy, transitioning to e-commerce is key, according to Mark William Lewis, CTO of Netalico Commerce.
Rural grocery stores need to offer ordering and delivery comparable to companies like Amazon/Whole Foods and Instacart. That can be difficult because delivery is often more expensive the more spread out the customers are, he observed.
“Grocery stores can start by offering an easy pickup option to get customers used to ordering groceries online, and then it is only a small extra step to get them to switch to delivery. Small retailers can even use off-the-shelf platforms like Shopify, where they can offer a standard e-commerce experience that most customers expect from the larger retailers,” Lewis told the E-Commerce Times.
The home delivery routine for rural customers is often very different compared to the opportunities enjoyed by suburban and city consumers, agreed Chris Dessi, vice president of Americas at Productsup.
“Delivery services, like Uber Eats, are oftentimes not available in rural areas. If local retailers want to offer home delivery, it is something they will most likely have to organize themselves,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
For example, a local grocery store might hire extra employees as drivers to deliver items from the store to the customer. Of course, that solution has limits, such as a delivery radius and workforce availability, he noted.
In the wake of the continuing pandemic, some of those refinements are starting to come to rural consumers. The majority of large, widely-known grocery stores offer curbside pickup now as a result of the pandemic. The smart rural store owners have also adopted this option.
“Small and local grocers in rural areas should adjust their budget to prioritize curbside pickup over in-store experiences, as they are getting less foot traffic through their doors,” Dessi advised.
Third-party parcel delivery in rural areas is particularly viable now, and Dessi suggested that it is a great option for local retailers to consider.
“For local retailers considering involving a third-party service, I would suggest hiring a point-person to serve as the liaison between the retailer and third-party vendor. That is an extra step, but managing delivery is a beast of its own and requires dedicated attention in order to run smoothly,” he said.
Another option would be mimicking grocery delivery services like Home Chef or Hello Fresh, using products sold in-store. Again, local retailers run into the issue of being understaffed and delivery radius restrictions, but it is becoming a necessary option, he explained.
E-commerce is the way of the world now, so rural businesses need to know how to overcome delivery and other barriers. According to Dessi, the easiest way for retailers to ensure they are getting started on the right foot is to set up product data online and ensure it is consistent and up-to-date across channels.
“Once retailers establish their online presence and introduce e-commerce, consumers will surely take advantage,” he offered.
Rural areas provide many logistical challenges for e-commerce. Grocery delivery is even more complex, agreed Meaghan Brophy, retail analyst at Fit Small Business.
“Because residents are more spaced out, e-commerce delivery is significantly more expensive in rural areas. Many e-commerce retailers, even Amazon, rely on the USPS for last-mile delivery in rural areas,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
It is simply not cost-effective for for-profit companies to organize their delivery services in spaced-out neighborhoods, she continued. Grocery is even more expensive and challenging than regular e-commerce because of the temperature regulations required to keep food from spoiling.
Brophy added that independent grocers could serve their customers by offering delivery with in-house staff. However, this would likely need to look different from a Whole Foods-type operation that offers groceries on-demand.
“To make the process more efficient, independent grocers would likely need to organize orders by location and offer specific delivery days for each area,” she said.
Aside from independent grocery stores, many rural areas depend on Walmart and dollar stores for groceries. Walmart does offer grocery delivery in many (though not all) rural locations, Brophy added.
“It will never make sense for dollar stores to offer grocery delivery (unless a third-party platform takes it on independently) simply because of the low price points,” she said.
Rural America is seeing e-commerce growth, agreed Robb Hecht, an adjunct professor of marketing at Baruch College. To date, it has been sketchy, as WiFi and broadband are not universal as they are in the cities.
“To offset the cost, UPS and FedEx charge an extra US$4 per package for remote residential deliveries. The prevalence of free shipping to consumers and the need to price items the same online and in stores typically leaves retailers bearing this additional cost,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
For retailers, that adds to already steep costs. Shipping a container of Tide Pods laundry detergent from Atlanta to urban Oklahoma City is estimated to cost a retailer $11.44 — already more than the approximately $11 price of the item itself, according to an analysis by Spend Management Experts. Shipping the pods to Mangum, Okla. costs $15.65, he explained.
Also, consider that Amazon and its Whole Foods will soon have drones delivering e-commerce purchases. Once that ramps in scale, the delivery costs should decline, reasoned Hecht.
Rural population differences also factor into the delivery mechanisms for rural consumers, suggested William Schumacher, CEO and founder of Uprising Food.
“Grocery delivery is a bit harder to obtain in rural areas as there are fewer people to offer the service and to deliver groceries,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “In order for e-commerce to be as productive in rural towns as it is in the city, grocery stores would need to take charge of delivery in order to ensure customer satisfaction.”
By its geographical nature, serving the rural consumer is a persistent challenge. To some extent, e-commerce in rural areas suffers.
For obvious reasons, most businesses will address market segments that are easy to reach and serve. According to Jim Salas, a professor of marketing and economics at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, the rural consumer is often subject to what economists call a “rural penalty” or a lack of services, resources, employment, and consumption opportunities that give this population unequal social outcomes.
“From a business perspective, rural areas suffer from gaps in human capital, distance, low population challenges, and lower socioeconomic differences overall, which often do not represent the “low hanging” fruit that most businesses go after,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
The delivery routine for rural customers is typically the same as postal rates are the same for everyone. That is true even when USPS has to drive hundreds of miles, he added.
Salas suggested that the math indicates rural e-commerce is not lagging behind more populated areas, though. Rural America is increasingly digital, and more and more rural communities are connected to the Internet—with Internet access rates for rural communities approximating those of households across the country, 85 percent versus 94 percent, he said.
With 12.4 percent of all retail sales projected to be online by the end of this year, 73 percent of those sales will come from rural consumers. However, some studies have found that rural consumers with access to the Internet choose to not go online, let alone conduct purchase transactions.
Other reports show that online grocery shopping is a challenge. While 55 percent of shoppers are very satisfied with their local grocery stores, 65 percent have never purchased groceries online. These results do not change much when distinguishing between rural and urban consumers. The unanswered question is whether those results are caused by demand or supply issues, he asked.
“I think it is a bit of both. Rural consumers may have digital access, but the cost is much higher for them compared to their urban counterparts. They are also demographically older, not as educated, and of lower socioeconomic status so these factors place them on the low end of tech adoption in general, said Salas.
He also focused on a behavioral component of this debate over rural versus urban e-commerce. The appeal of rural communities for many who reside here is in being an intimate part of the community. This often plays out in visiting your local store and socializing in person, he noted.
“In fact, these communities often have a negative view of big-box retailers who are encroaching on their local shops, run by their friends and neighbors. They are far too familiar with the Walmart effect,” he said.
While rural e-commerce is a challenge, Salas does not think that it is out of reach of rural consumers. If anything, they are about to see more competition in this space for their business, he predicts.
As online shopping becomes increasingly common for all consumers, including rural shoppers, Walmart, eBay, and Amazon have all announced renewed interest in this market.
In fact, Walmart is defending its in-store sales by moving to an omnichannel strategy. Amazon and eBay see the 37 million working-age adults in rural communities as an attractive market. Walmart has launched free two-day deliveries through Walmart.com for orders over $35 and introduced its Pickup Today program, which allows customers to order online and pick up in stores.
“This fits their announced strategy of investing more in their online channels than building new brick and mortar stores and allows them to leverage their rural footprint strategically against competitors like Amazon,” Salas said.
Consider one SMB entrepreneur’s experience with rural e-commerce as an example of changing times. Meaghan Thomas, owner of Pinch Spice Market, delivers organic spices to many rural areas.
“We are seeing a 400 percent year-over-year growth as people turn to shop online for pantry items like they never have before,” she told the E-Commerce Times. “E-commerce shopping levels the playing field for rural consumers, especially when it comes to shopping for food and pantry items.”
Thomas often gets messages from customers in small towns or remote areas who cannot find high-quality organic spices or international blends at local stores. When they discover her online spice shop, they are excited about the variety they have at their fingertips. Plus, since she uses USPS for deliveries, she is able to keep shipping costs low for customers.
“We eat most of the shipping cost to make the idea of shipping a little less painful, charging only a portion of the real shipping cost. While we eat that cost, we easily make up for it in the increased volume. We also offer free shipping when they spend over a certain threshold — $45 in our case,” Thomas said. “More than 60 percent of our rural customers become repeat buyers.”
Google found itself in the crosshairs of government regulators Tuesday as the U.S. Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against the tech giant for unlawfully maintaining a monopoly in online search services and in search advertising.
“This is a monumental case for the Department of Justice and, more importantly, for the American consumer,” U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr said in a statement.
He explained that over the last 16 months, his agency’s Antitrust Division has collected convincing evidence that Google no longer competes only on merit but instead uses its monopoly power — and billions in monopoly profits — to lock up key pathways to search on mobile phones, browsers, and next-generation devices, depriving rivals of distribution and scale.
The end result, Barr continued, is that no one can feasibly challenge Google’s dominance in search and search advertising.
“Twenty-five years ago, the Department of Justice sued Microsoft, paving the way for a new wave of innovative tech companies — including Google,” he said. “The increased competition following the Microsoft case enabled Google to grow from a small startup to an Internet behemoth.”
“Unfortunately, once Google itself gained dominance, it resorted to the same anticompetitive playbook,” he observed.
“If we let Google continue its anti-competitive ways, we will lose the next wave of innovators, and Americans may never get to benefit from the ‘next Google,’ Barr added. “The time has come to restore competition to this vital industry.”
One industry that has complained loudly about Google’s advertising hegemony is newspapers. “Google has abused its market power at the expense of the journalism industry for years,” Laura Bassett, cofounder of the Save Journalism Project, said in a statement.
“It’s long past time that Google’s anticompetitive practices land the company in court,” she maintained.
“Concern and anger about Google’s multiple monopolies is bipartisan and is a major focus of Congress, the Executive Branch, and state governments,” she continued. “We are encouraged by this broad support for action to reign in the excesses of Google that have decimated journalism and many other businesses.”
“This is just the first step in what we believe will be a defining moment for our economy and our democracy,” she added.
The Save Journalism Project explained that Google’s monopoly on search means it is the top external referrer to news websites, making news outlets utterly dependent on Google for readers.
Google then uses that reliance to require news publishers to conform to its demands. One of those demands was forcing news websites to use Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages format in order to rank higher on search results.
AMP is a stripped-down format that has less advertising space, produces less revenue for news publishers, and gives Google access to more data on news websites’ readers, the project noted.
Google Senior Vice President of Global Affairs Kent Walker, writing in a company blog, called the DoJ’s lawsuit “deeply flawed.”
“[P]eople don’t use Google because they have to, they use it because they choose to,” he wrote.
“This isn’t the dial-up 1990s when changing services was slow and difficult and often required you to buy and install software with a CD-ROM,” he noted. “Today, you can easily download your choice of apps or change your default settings in a matter of seconds — faster than you can walk to another aisle in the grocery store.”
“This lawsuit claims that Americans aren’t sophisticated enough to do this,” he continued. “But we know that’s not true.”
Walker noted that people downloaded a record 204 billion apps in 2019. Many of the world’s most popular apps aren’t preloaded, he wrote, such as Spotify, Instagram, Snapchat, Amazon and Facebook.
“We understand that with our success comes scrutiny, but we stand by our position,” he asserted. “American antitrust law is designed to promote innovation and help consumers, not tilt the playing field in favor of particular competitors or make it harder for people to get the services they want.”
“We’re confident that a court will conclude that this suit doesn’t square with either the facts or the law,” he added.
Other tech experts share Google’s view.
“It’s a tough case to win,” said Joe Kennedy, a senior fellow at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a public policy and technology innovation organization in Washington, D.C.
“If the DoJ wants to break up Google or impose significant structural remedies, that would be extremely difficult for them to accomplish,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Asheesh Agarwal, deputy general counsel at TechFreedom, a technology advocacy group in Washington, D.C., also believes the DoJ has a rocky case against Google.
“It’s going to be an uphill climb,” he told TechNewsWorld. “There hasn’t been a successful monopolization case in several decades.”
He explained that the traditional marketplace metrics used in an antitrust case using the consumer welfare standard don’t support the DoJ’s case. Advertising prices are falling. Output is increasing. New entry is happening. Consumers have multiple choices.
Moreover, Google is no longer number one in product searches. “That mantle has been passed to Amazon,” Agarwal said. “That’s where the big money in advertising is made and where Google has fallen behind.”
While antitrust actions are supposed to benefit consumers, that may not be the case in DoJ v. Google. “Consumers could actually be harmed,” Agarwal maintained.
He explained that the reason Google can continue offering its Android mobile operating system for free is because it requires phone makers to install a suite of apps on their devices.
“That’s how Google makes money,” he said. “If it’s prevented from doing that, it’s entirely possible it will start charging manufacturers for Android, and the manufacturers will pass on that cost to consumers.”
Even if the DoJ doesn’t win its case against Google, it could still have an impact on the high-tech industry. “It sends a clear warning to companies that have used their scope or cash assets to effectively dominate and control specific markets and industries,” said Charles King, the principal analyst at Pund-IT, a technology advisory firm in Hayward, Calif.
“If the DoJ is willing to take on a company as large and impactful as Google, it isn’t difficult to imagine them pursuing Apple, Facebook and Twitter,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Sending a message appears to be a big part of why the lawsuit was filed. “This has always been about political theater,” maintained TechFreedom’s President Berin Szoka.
“The administration is trying to turn up the pressure on all the tech companies through every tool they have available,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“The administration has been having a collective temper tantrum about technology firms for years,” he added. “There is no reason to expect that they wouldn’t use every tool in their arsenal against their perceived enemies.”
The upcoming holiday season is looking a lot different than anyone would have suspected this time last year, as a result of the continuing pandemic. Holiday shoppers are forced to shift their buying habits, and merchants continue to struggle to find new processes to meet consumer whims.
Much is up in the air, from the fate of USPS, to travel plans, to the economy. Marketing reports show that more than 75 percent of consumers are avoiding shopping malls. Even traditional advertising approaches no longer work as other industry surveys show that consumers view social media outlets as a new way to find gift ideas as well as purchase them.
All of these changes make it critical for marketers to adapt in an effort to recover lost sales and attract new customers for their products. Staple sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, traditional beacons for grabbing shoppers’ attention, are in doubt.
Instead, many major retailers are now extending deals throughout the entire holiday season. Retailers are offering incentives to keep shoppers engaged, like giving the best deals via loyalty apps and highlighting sales of the day on social media and through months-long sales events.
2020 has definitely been a year for the history books for online stores, with COVID-19 and social distancing requirements impacting many aspects of people’s lives and hugely influencing consumers’ buying behaviors, causing hypergrowth in e-commerce sales, according to Liat Karpel Gurwicz, head of strategic marketing at Wix.
“The biggest change in the 2020 holiday season will be for in-store sales. This year will see the end of one of the holiday season’s biggest marketing events as we know it: Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when retailers normally launch holiday season shopping with huge discounts in their stores,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
Forget about the customary long lines to buy gifts for loved ones and friends this upcoming holiday season — and that is if you can even find a store that is open.
“The impact of COVID-19 on the retail industry has been massive. Many retailers and brands saw incredibly high e-commerce demand in 2020 but were not prepared to offset that demand and scale with professional e-commerce and fulfillment solutions,” noted Gurwicz.
Some businesses were forced to shut physical locations permanently. Many retailers had to quickly start their online stores for the first time. Even those who already had e-commerce stores had to make significant adjustments to their online business to manage their inventory, logistics, e-commerce shipping, and more, she explained.
For instance, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Walmart, Sam’s Club, and Target, among others, announced in recent weeks their intention to limit in-store hours. They will be closed on Thanksgiving, too.
A new phenomenon this year is the growing adoption of contactless gifting. This allows customers to digitally gift a retailer’s merchandise and gift cards online.
While we are on the topic of contactless stuff, throw into the mix contactless payment systems and contactless in-store shopping. Brick-and-mortar stores are starting to emulate the do-it-yourself approach that comes with online shopping.
The supply and delivery chains are also a growing concern that impacts both marketers and consumers. Shipping companies have already announced holiday surcharges and are moving up shipping deadlines by weeks at a time.
Merchants are starting to separate shipping from delivery by utilizing instant digital gift delivery. This is a strange new approach to e-commerce.
Retailers make the sale. Gift givers send the gift via email or text. The recipients receive a delightful digital gifting experience on their devices.
The actual product is physically shipped and arrives whenever it gets there. This process offers convenience to both the gift receiver and the merchant. Gift recipients can customize their gift by selecting a color, size, shipping address, and such before it ships, thus preventing returns.
Among the biggest challenges confronting retailers in terms of website marketing and consumer transactions as we head into the 2020 holiday shopping season is the supply chain. Supply chains were also badly compromised during the pandemic. Many factories and suppliers closed for weeks or even months, Gurwicz said.
She highlighted three key issues for retailers and e-tailers this holiday season. Despite these potential challenges though, with the proper preparations and considerations, businesses can turn this holiday season into a huge success.
“The pandemic has forced companies in almost every industry to rethink their supply chain — moving away from reliance on other nations and improving their own capabilities to produce materials. Because of this, the value of shrinking and localizing the supply chain process through the use of AI is more apparent than ever,” said Gurwicz.
The best customers are returning customers. They are less expensive to engage among other things are more willing to interact directly with immersive buying experiences and promotions, according to Melissa Sargeant, CMO of Litmus. But, in order to garner a loyal customer base, brands need to create intentional moments of engagement and inspiration. These experiences then drive brand love and advocacy.
“That is why, this upcoming holiday season, we will see more retailers and brands implement or upscale their loyalty programs to entice returning customers and to target those most attracted by personalized experiences. Brands want loyalty, and this particular holiday season they must give customers a reason to come back,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
As retailers begin gearing up for the holiday season, the brands that create authentic, personal customer experiences will emerge from the economic crisis faster and better positioned than before, suggested Sargeant. If a brand’s marketing efforts are not sustainable — and only authenticity and personalization maintain sustainability — they are creating a void in the market where another competitor can take their place.
“Or, even worse, they disappear completely, as brands can be very easily forgotten and left behind,” she observed.
Numerous market reports leading up to the 2020 holiday shopping season show signs of renewed interest by consumers to adapt to the new shopping conditions. An overwhelming majority of U.S. consumers will not let uncertain market conditions stop them from spending this holiday season.
Two factors stand out to give e-commerce retailers hope for this holiday season. One updates earlier predictions that the shuttered economy would shut down gifting purchases this holiday season. Reports now indicate that consumers are spending on gifting the same as or more than last year.
The second factor is consumers are spending earlier and are much more focused on buying products online. Price and customer reviews are the two most critical factors driving their purchase decisions, followed by ease and speed of shipping.
As they have been all year, e-commerce volumes will be higher than they have ever been this holiday shopping season, according to Carol Krakowski, director of insights at PowerReviews. A much more significant proportion of spending than usual will take place online. Brands and retailers need to expect and be ready for this.
“Almost three-quarters of consumers (74 percent) said their overall holiday spend will either stay the same or increase this year. This is perhaps surprising given the shape of the overall economy. However, it proves there are significant opportunities for brands and retailers to generate revenue this holiday season,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
More shopping is taking place online this year. Customer ratings and reviews will be vital to driving sales this holiday season, she explained.
Online retailers should know that those online reviews offer exceptional validation and credibility, regardless of whether a brand or product is well known or not.
“Particularly this year, when shoppers are less inclined to visit a store to physically interact with products,” said Krakowski said.
Managing inventory and deliveries this holiday season will require a strong e-commerce and fulfillment strategy. Wix’s Gurwicz offers these tips to prepare your online business for the holiday season:
The 2020 holiday season offers opportunities for digital merchants and online stores as nearly everyone will shop online this year, Gurwicz noted. But, at the same time, more businesses are clamoring for a piece of the pie than ever before. Online retailers must find creative ways to stand out.
“In the shadow of COVID-19, online stores who bring speed, value, and convenience to customers will be the 2020 holiday season winners. With careful planning and creative problem solving, this holiday season could be your store’s best sales season yet,” she predicted.
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