Magazine : 
The Next Generation of Purchasing - eCommerce 3.0
Although eCommerce has been buzzing for a long time now, it was in 2020, the entire world was left with no option other than switching to online shopping. All thanks to the novel coronavirus that has induced a growth that otherwise could be achieved in 10 long years within a short period of just three months. But, with this progression it is certainly hard to go back to the regular shopping mode even after the normalization of the pandemic. With this, we can say that this decade has revolutionised the eCommerce that could be termed as eCommerce3.0. This has paved the way for various prized technology firms that would be established here on.
eCommerce: Phase One & Phase Two
eCommerce 1.0 had just brought the good to the online platform. Yet, it was the ecommerce giants namely Amazon (launched in 1995), Flipkart, eBay (1998), Alibaba (1999) that revolutionized the eCommerce sector.
However, the eCommerce 2.0 brought in two major shifts. Firstly, it enable the smaller merchants who do not have the resources to develop an online footprint to set up their own online platform such as Shopify established in 2004 and Etsy developed in 2005. The BigCommerce report reveals that the cost estimated to build an online store back in 1999 eliminating inventory, warehousing, and shipping costs was $100,000 but at present building an online shop could cost a minimum of $30 and would be established within a day. Secondly, the talk paused just at the online-only or brick and mortar. Furthermore, Amazon procured Whole Foods for a deal of $13.7B and several companies that had gone online-only namely Casper, Everlane, Outdoor Voices, Warby Parker, and Allbirds all had set up physical storefronts. Likewise, traditional brands like Walmart, BestBuy, Target, Home Depot, Kroger, and Costco had a transformation to evolve as eCommerce giants in their own right.
eCommerce: Phase Three
Presently, we are totally engulfed with the fundamental shift in the world of commerce. From the consumer’s perspective, the most innovative retailers have understood that they could provide a purchasing experience wherever the consumer is either on a mobile app, website, social feed, text thread, live video shopping, email or in-store. Moreover, it is not just about integrating a website or mobile app or building some demo store. The total number of channels where a consumer could make a buying decision has developed significantly.
Towards the end of 2020, roughly 49M consumers’ preferred SMS communications from their favourite brands. As of May 2020, Facebook and Instagram had set up a ‘Shop’ enabling businesses to create online stores for free with live shopping functionality. Alongside, Walmart and TikTok declared a partnership in December to check a shoppable product experience. On the other hand, TikTok users were also enabled to shop Walmart fashion items without ever leaving the app.
However, in order to offer a unified experience to consumers across so many channels, retailers should prefer an integrated view across clienteling and loyalty, order management, stock inventory, pricing and promotions, customer support and returns management. Also, the interactions on Instagram are preferred to be reflected in email marketing or the request for a return on a WhatsApp thread be depended to the physical store where the item would be dropped. The main challenge is that only a handful of retailers now have clear understanding of their customer and many struggle with separate data silos and systems that are not unified.
The global retail expense is expected to touch $6.3 Tn by 2024, thus there is a huge opportunity for a number of valuable technology companies to develop that will aid the retailers cross this rift. eCommerce 3.0 is all set to be all about composable commerce.
Most of the erudite merchants are shifting for ‘headless architectures’. This structure would enable the front-end developers to include or transform front-end experiences at ease without disturbing the backend. On the backend, the developers could leverage best of breed tools and microservices of their choice without needing to re-configure their entire platform. The stack is in contrast with a monolithic architecture where the backend and frontend of a website were closely coupled together limiting the layout, system, and designs to whatever was permitted by the content management system. It is significantly easier for developers to adopt a microservices-based approach where a developer could choose ‘best of breed’ players across every part of their commerce stack like payments, checkout, marketing, order management to create a commerce experience apt to their requirements.
Also, even if a retailer does not prefer to go ‘headless,’ there is an emerging trend towards using microservices in commerce. Older software platforms such as Magento are reconfiguring their solution to allow it to work with products and solutions outside the Magento ecosystem. Large commerce firms such as Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce have made massive investments in growing their partner ecosystem.
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