Ecommerce is growing at a record pace. Bart Mroz, the founder and CEO of digital commerce consultancy SUMO Heavy looks at some underrated tactics that achieve online retail success.
Every year, millions of Americans make purchases online from thousands and thousands of retailers. E-commerce is growing at a record pace.
2016 saw unprecedented growth in online sales. Non-store sales (the vast majority of which are online sales) in the fourth quarter of 2016 amounted to $145.49 billion, according to data from the U.S. Department of Commerce — a 12.8 percent increase compared to the fourth quarter of 2016.
There are a number of driving forces behind this growth: the overall economy has improved steadily for the past several years, people young and old have become increasingly comfortable and familiar with making purchases online, and there is a cadre of professionals who have worked with retailers for well over a decade to expand their offerings into the online realm.
These professionals occupy a variety of roles and perform important functions that are often overlooked. Their work helps ensure that customers can enjoy a seamless shopping experience — and that retailers are able to maximize their revenue stream and ROI. Here are a few of the functions that are going on behind the scenes and ensuring the continued success of e-commerce.
Streamlined Design
Teams of visual and UX designers are among the first people to approach e-commerce projects. They first gather insights about everything: What’s the challenge? Who are the customers? What are the constraints? How can an experience be made more streamlined?
Design teams think about challenges from 30,000 feet, and create user experiences from the ground up. It’s easy to know when good design wasn’t a part of the process because interfaces are cluttered, confusing and ugly.
On the other hand, good design “disappears,” and all components of the interface work together as part of a unified, delightful experience. Ironically, most users take the experience for granted. But if the user experience of a retail website — from product search all the way through payment confirmation — is simple and easy, consumers will quickly grow to prefer it over other retailers.
Unseen Development
Working alongside the design teams are developers and software engineers who bring well-designed experiences to life. They spend their days (and often nights too) writing thousands of lines of code in the back end of the website. It often requires mastery of multiple coding languages, like Javascript, HTML, Ruby, PHP and Python.
Like their design counterparts, developers must find creative ways to solve the challenges that are introduced by a website’s or app’s design, and their work is akin to building highly complex and sophisticated “mechanics” that a user relies on when searching for products, making payments or interacting with customer support. It requires attention to detail and a highly logical approach to multi-layered challenges.
To create a retail experience that enables users to shop an extensive product selection and make a purchase effortlessly, talented developers are key.
Strategic Analysis
When a retail platform is being used, business leaders need to have visibility into how users are interacting with the site and the reasons behind why they are or aren’t making purchases. Data analysts are the ones who make this possible, and their work informs the strategy of entire businesses and, often, the revenue bottom lines.
For example, a data team might work with developers to add more attributes about shirts — things like what material is it made of, sleeve length, shape of the neckline. When that info gets entered into the system, then in a day, data analysts can build a report that shows, for example, what sales by neckline look like over the past year. Maybe there’s a decline in v-neck style because it’s losing popularity. By investing two days of data and development work, suddenly business leaders have a valuable insight. They can adjust the product offering, market it accordingly, and bring in an extra million dollars of revenue the next year.
E-commerce, and the lift it provides the U.S. economy, is dependent on the people who work behind the scenes every day. If not for them, e-commerce would never have grown to serve the hundreds of millions of people who benefit from having faster access to more products at better prices.
By Bart Mroz
Founder and CEO