Future Proof Your eCommerce Growth

Market Share Growth Structure Change

Predicted flattening of e-commerce market growth rates in US & EU over the next 10 years will mean that growing the market share locally wont't come from the growing total market and at the expense of the traditional brick-and-mortar retailers and customers switching online but from taking away market share from other e-commerce players. Competition will intensify even further, elevating the importance of total brand purchase experience.

Growth Prerequisites

Two crucial indicators and prerequisites for market share growth are positive customer brand relationship and repeat purchases - customer loyalty. Without a positively evaluated customer experience, first time customers won't become repeat customers, and they won't develop loyalty needed for revenue growth. Both are crucially developed at and defined by a brand value infused and market differentiating post-purchase phase of the e-commerce journey.

Commoditized (Pre)Purchase Experience

Retailers face a lot of competition, both online and offline. And in many cases the products they sell are very similar. While it’s easy to identify a bad customer experience, describing a great customer experience is trickier. How many of us, even when buying a branded item, will start our search on Google to find the cheapest price? We may compare and contrast seller reputation and potential shipping time, but ultimately we have created a “commoditized” shopping experience.

Key to Positive Brand Experience and Relationship

Out of three phases of purchase experience (pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase) it is the post-purchase that carries most weight when defining positive or negative evaluation of the total buying experience. The length of delivery time, how your product is packaged, the quality and variety of provided print materials, the ease of exchanges and returns—it all contributes to your brand perception and experience as a whole.

Differentiate and Future-proof Your Growth

To future proof your growth define and implement growth through differentiation strategies. To differentiate one needs to know against what exactly is one differentiating from - or better said what are the market averages along dimensions of differentiation. More importantly, what are the market implicit average customer expectations from post-purchase experience which you have to meet just to be eligible to compete.

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SO DIGITAL GLOBAL E-COMMERCE OPERATIONS EXCELLENCE PLATFORM enables brand & e- commerce professionals to define and implement growth-through-differentiation strategies by identifying the basis & dynamics of competition within a market. Our platform enables competitive cross industry performance benchmarking of best performing e-retailers across dimensions of online (post)purchase experience, including but not limited to, phases of delivery, tracking, packaging - out of box experience, and return & refunds.

Who is it for?

Business and e-commerce strategists and e-commerce team leaders who are in charge of designing, planning and executing competitive growth strategies. eCommerce leaders who oversee channel execution within a single or across multiple markets. Team leaders who have direct influence, control and responsibility for overall eCommerce performance and continuous sustainable revenue growth.

Marketing team, Supply Chain and eCommerce Operations team professionals are just some of the examples of those who can leverage insights from the market research and leverage them for tactical and strategic improvements which would create unique differentiators of the experience highly valued by customers.

Why is it needed?

In mature e-commerce markets, competition will intensify, digital acquisition costs will continue rising, squeezing profitability. As it is dominated by few large marketplaces whose market share will just keep expanding, finding pockets of growth will increasingly be dependant on your ability to create brand differentiating purchase experiences, turning first time consumers into loyalists.

Driven by huge investments by e-commerce leaders such as Amazon and CPG retailers customers expectations are being reshaped towards purchase fulfilment standards unattainable by majority of other brands. Brand driven and customer valued post-purchase experiences are the only antidote available.

How does it work?

Trained researches in target countries perform actual purchase of products from target e-commerce market players, recording their every step, while answering standardised scale based scorecard with average 200+ data points to provide insight into comparative performance on market competition defining elements of post-purchase experience : tracking, delivery, packaging (out-of-box), returns & refunds.

With yearly subscription, clients get access to benchmarked country data sets, while also being able to create reports on the platform itself to drive focused learning insights. Reporting module enables comparison of markets, retailers, data points and across completed benchmarks to discover trends.

How do you benefit?

To future proof your growth define and implement growth through differentiation strategies. To differentiate one needs to know against what exactly is one differentiating from - or better said what are the market averages along dimensions of differentiation. Uncover market implicit average customer expectations from post-purchase experience which you have to meet just to be eligible to compete.

Knowing along which dimension the market competes, how and which elements of eCommerce operations and (post)purchase experience leaders dominate will give you direction where and how you can differentiate. Having this insight you can create your own, customer valued, but market under-represented features, which will be unique to you.

How long does it take?

Depending on the number of countries researched and whether it is a standardized or individual client tailored benchmark research average duration of the project lasts up to 3 months. During this time client is able to actively participate and track research progress in the platform. In case markets of your interest have been benchmarked within last 6-12 months you can gain access to this right away.

Once you gain access to the platform through subscription packages, you can use it during the period of one calendar year, after which your subscription and access to the refreshed dataset will have to be renewed. During this period client designated users have an unlimited access to the data and are able to continuously create reports of their choosing.

How much does it cost?

Standard benchmarking contains research results of 20+ leading e-commerce players from a single market. Cross-industry sample usually contains all e-commerce models (marketplaces, pure-players, brands, e-retailers, omni-channel). Access to the standard country research that details into delivery, tracking, packaging, returns & refunds with omni-channel reporting starts at 5000 EUR / year.

In case a client wants to tailor the research so it is more focused on his particular industry and contain additional question sets, standard pricing will be augmented depending on the size and the scope of changes and markets that are researched just for this client. On average tailoring of research criteria (scorecard or industry) entails +30% per each segment.

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