Riding the ecommerce wave

How did brands and retail­ers respond to the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic?

It pushed every brand to adapt; ini­tial­ly they had to sur­vive but then it was about fig­ur­ing out how to thrive through new busi­ness mod­els and by spot­ting new oppor­tu­ni­ties. Every busi­ness was shift­ing, whether it was bricks-and-mor­tar retail­ers going online for the first time or online busi­ness­es adapt­ing their sup­ply chains, focus­ing on dif­fer­ent tar­get mar­kets or adjust­ing their sales chan­nels. Com­pa­nies that had only sold whole­sale or through retail­ers were sud­den­ly adopt­ing a direct-to-con­sumer approach.

More busi­ness­es sell­ing online, as well as more con­sumers shop­ping online, fueled hyper-growth for ecom­merce. In 2020, Wix users processed more than $5.4bn on the plat­form, while we expe­ri­enced 140% year-on-year growth in sales trans­ac­tions and 114% growth in sales rev­enue.

How are cus­tomer expec­ta­tions evolv­ing and what do brands need to do to adapt again?

The world is in a dif­fer­ent place now. Shop­pers expect brands to meet them where they are; that might be in a phys­i­cal store, but it could also be while on their lap­top at home or on their smart­phone on the go. They also expect a much more seam­less inter­ac­tion from the brands they buy from. While many peo­ple still want to shop in stores, they expect that brand to remem­ber them in terms of their loy­al­ty points and shop­ping his­to­ry. And remem­ber­ing them is impor­tant: data from the Smile.io app in the Wix app mar­ket shows that loy­al cus­tomers spend five times more than aver­age cus­tomers.

Last year, the chal­lenge was get­ting online and sell­ing there as fast as pos­si­ble. As we progress into more relaxed restric­tions and some coun­tries go back to a more nor­mal way of life, the biggest chal­lenge for com­pa­nies is fig­ur­ing out how this ecom­merce com­po­nent becomes an ongo­ing part of their busi­ness.

How can retail­ers inte­grate ecom­merce suc­cess­ful­ly?

First, they need to embrace omnichan­nel. Once they are sell­ing in mul­ti­ple ways, they need a plat­form that allows them to man­age all their inven­to­ry, sales and orders in one place, along with ship­ping, ful­fil­ment and deliv­ery. Cus­tomer data should be stored there as well, along­side finan­cial data and ana­lyt­ics.

Whether sell­ing on a web­site, an online mar­ket­place, social media or in per­son through a point-of-sale sys­tem, it is all inte­grat­ed.

The oth­er cru­cial piece is reten­tion and reen­gage­ment of con­sumers; real­ly think­ing about how to grow long-term val­ue from cus­tomers through loy­al­ty and repeat pur­chas­es. That requires great email mar­ket­ing and SMS mar­ket­ing infra­struc­ture, as well as tools for reach­ing shop­pers in a tar­get­ed way, such as auto­mat­ed aban­doned cart emails, which increase the sales of Wix stores by up to 29%. Retail­ers real­ly need to dig into the data and seg­ment cus­tomers to send out rel­e­vant offers and build rewards pro­grammes across all chan­nels.

How does Wix sup­port com­pa­nies on their ecom­merce jour­ney?

Our holis­tic ecom­merce plat­form allows retail­ers to not only build and man­age an online store, but man­age their prod­uct cat­a­logue, inven­to­ry, sales and ana­lyt­ics from a sin­gle dash­board. The plat­form syncs across all chan­nels, includ­ing offline sales via our ful­ly inte­grat­ed point of sale. We have more than 50 pay­ment providers on the plat­form, as well as our own native pay­ment provider; ana­lyt­ics across every­thing our users are able to do; ship­ping and ful­fil­ment, includ­ing sync­ing with third par­ties; and our own CRM plat­form, Wix Ascend, which pro­vides email mar­ket­ing, live chat, invoic­es, busi­ness automa­tion and more.

That is what the plat­form looks like now and we will keep grow­ing and mov­ing with our users as they grow in the years ahead.

For more infor­ma­tion vis­it wix.com/ecommerce

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