Uncovering the Drivers of eCommerce Leadership

Hyper Competitive Environment

While it is true that, today more then ever, there are numerous solutions and models for bringing your business online and becoming an online retail business, it is even more true that these low entry barriers or easy market entry has made e-commerce a hyper-competitive channel. Determined by dynamic pricing algorithms and scale of logistic operations which coupled together mean razor thin margins where only biggest and fittest can expect continuously sizeable profits.

Few Are Writing The Rules of The Game

Due large market shares and outsized customer influence, the rules of the e-commerce competition are increasingly written by a handful of large e-commerce players. Driven by global scale advantages, large marketplaces such as Amazon and Alibaba are (re)shaping the market expectations, effectively making all other e-commerce brands join in a game where they're the ones pulling the strings.

Strategic Ambiguity

Fast paced, multi-dimensional and multi-directional changes in the market structure and type of participants makes the e-commerce market's rules of competition highly ambiguous. Inability to discern what are the lines and drivers of competitive performance in e-commerce market is amplified by its underlying rapidly evolving technological ecosystem.

Understanding Sucess Strategies

Long-term business planning and successful strategic decision making is impossible without tracking the industry behaviour. As e-commerce industry is shaped by handful of market leaders, keeping track of biggest influencers and observing competition will help you identify future trends and consumers expectations. Understanding their success strategies will give you not only competitive edge and differentiation opportunity, but also an ability to quickly replicate most relevant elements of it.

Uncovering Drivers of Leadership

Best practice benchmarking is a process of comparing one's business processes and performance metrics to industry bests or best practices from other companies. In this way, they learn how well the targets perform and, more importantly, the business processes that explain why these firms are successful. Strategic benchmarking focuses on how companies compete, identifying strategies the organisations are using to make them successful.

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Strategic benchmarking of post-purchase performance of leading e-retailers is at the heart of the SO DIGITAL GLOBAL E-COMMERCE OPERATIONS EXCELLENCE PLATFORM. 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. Market benchmarking results can be compiled into user made customisable reports - per dimension of shopping experience, data point, retailer, country etc. to enable market (average) performance comparison and learning insights.

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 improvements, performance gaps identification and/or general market trends tracking.

When is it needed?

Continuously evolving marketplace requires continuous identification and understanding of trends. Even though e-commerce market is dominated by few large players, there is enough room to grow for those who will make focused investments into differentiating competitive strategies. Avoiding over-investment into elements which are already dominated by larger players conserves valuable resources.

Given the market development towards e-commerce oligopoly, creating differentiating value propositions for consumers will increasingly be only way to grow direct business. Avoiding battles where you can't win your consumers over other is most important strategic decision you can make.

How is it done?

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?

As few major players are writing the rules of the competitive game, understanding their moves and success strategies means understanding the market, where it is and more importantly where is it going. Leaders exert an outsized influence on e-commerce consumers, shaping their expectations from you too. Understanding the elements of their success strategies enables you to quickly replicate most relevant ones.

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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