The ease of searching for and buying products on Amazon has raised expectations of online shoppers and sellers alike. Even “business buyers demand a purchasing experience on par with popular B2C brands with customized ordering capabilities, personalized product recommendations, rich content, peer reviews and user-friendly sites,” according to the 2016 State of Digital Commerce Report from CloudCraze.
Despite investing significant time and money in e-commerce solutions, however, many marketers and IT professionals believe their platforms still aren’t making the most of the opportunities.
“Companies looking to grow digital revenue must meet these specific customer needs, while implementing back-end capabilities essential to success, or risk losing business to
more nimble competitors,” claims CloudCraze, a software as a service business that enables mobile storefronts.
The company surveyed 340 marketing and IT professionals at B2B and B2C organizations. Nearly half of respondents said their platform is not helping their business be as profitable as it could be.
Among the key findings of the survey:
- eCommerce implementations are costly: 31 percent of brands spent more than $2 million for their current eCommerce site
- Speed to launch for eCommerce technology is an issue for many brands: 44 percent say it took longer than a year to implement their current site
- Cost and speed-to-market issues are magnified with the largest companies: It took 73 percent of the largest companies (more than $25 billion in revenue) longer than a year to implement their current eCommerce sites and over one-third of these organizations paid more than $3 million to build them
- Companies face problems with scalability and flexibility: Quickly updating to the customer and company’s evolving needs, scaling to the changing market, and getting a holistic view of the customer are the top three pain points for eCommerce brands
CloudCraze reports that these challenges are prevalent for larger companies. Nearly 60 percent of brands that generate more than $25 million in revenue cited “scaling quickly to meet the changing needs of the market” as their top challenge and about 80 percent said they would benefit from increasing the level of engagement with their customers online, according to the report.
CloudCraze predicts major opportunities for revenue growth for brands that invest in a cost-effective commerce solution with a fast implementation. “More than 40 percent of cloud-based system users report over half of their total sales are already happening online, as opposed to only 13 percent of on-premise system users,” the company said.
CloudCraze CEO Chris Dalton says the challenges speak to the need for flexible, agile and robust commerce solutions. “A cloud-based solution that lies on top of a companies’ front office CRM system is the best way to gain customer visibility, increase revenue, and empower sales and marketing teams to provide the most personalized customer experience possible.”
- Type article
- Author Adrienne Burke
- Image https://56.media.tumblr.com/dea8713b0bac514d7b4f6111ead32367/tumblr_inline_o3jd1eChDK1si4p7w_540.jpg
- Provider Yahoo Small Business Advisor
