Monthly Archives: December 2016

What’s coming up: Ecommerce Trends in 2017

Global retail ecommerce sales are pegged to cross $4 trillion in 2020. Before your jaw drops at this whopping figure, pause to consider this: we‘re hovering about the $1 trillion mark this year itself.

But ecommerce has been through a long journey before reaching the stage of exponential growth, and it keeps up this pace thanks to the innovation and dynamism shown by key players. Online retail businesses need to be on their toes to stay ahead of the game.

2017 will bring its share of changes in the industry—some brainwaves from ecommerce businesses and technology vendors, and some in anticipation of the needs of buyers. Embitel’s head of digital commerce Arun Kumar shares his insights on ecommerce trends to watch out for in 2017.

1. With increasing use of smartphones to access digital commerce, whether in mature or nascent markets, omnichannel commerce is set to grow at a ‘never before’ rate. Options such as ‘buy online, pick up in store’ don’t just offer convenience—they offer an opportunity to use sales strategies such as personalization and cross-selling to acquire customers and build long-lasting relationships. In 2017, gadget and technology habits of buyers will coax retailers to utilize the omnichannel opportunity much more.
2. Beacon technology—we’ll see retailers using this much more, and with good reason. Beacons can help retailers beat competition in a crowded market. They take targeted and personalized marketing a step ahead by tracking customer behavior and offering relevant prompts and alerts at the right time. With this kind of seamless shopping experience, they don’t just attract new customers, but also bring back old ones.
3. We’ll see increasing use of biometrics in ecommerce to combat the security issues that arise from so much connectivity. Besides creating trust with customers, biometrics will also be used to understand customer demographics and generate analytics that can be applied online and in store.
4. Customers are loathe to give up the benefits of brick and mortars, but they still want the convenience of ecommerce. To become the preferred choice of buyers, more and more retailers will invest in same-day delivery. So while it may not be as immediate as choosing, purchasing and walking out of the store with the item, it’s as close as it can get.
5. Starbucks has kickstarted a trend that’s only set to grow—employing artificial intelligence through chatbots and virtual sales assistants.
6. B2B ecommerce in particular will see a huge upswing—the convenience and efficiency that B2C offers is now expected of B2B too. In fact, it is estimated that the B2B market will grow to double the size of the B2C ecommerce market. As we see B2C ecommerce best practices applied to B2B ecommerce, buyers and sellers will experience the benefits, namely account-based targeting, greater personalization, self-service, predictive analysis, and so on. This will only contribute to further growth of B2B ecommerce, in India and outside too.

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Looking back @ 2016: Our year in ecommerce

Arun Kumar, Head of Ecommerce at Embitel, recounts noteworthy happenings at Embitel in the last 12 months.

1. “As the year started, we were certified as one of the few early Magento 2 Trained Solution Partners in India. We’ve successfully implemented projects on Magento for clients from various parts of the world, and we were excited to offer a new, more agile and scalable version of the platform.
2. “In 2016, we established our proficiency in implementation for the food & beverage industry. Besides our mobile and web projects for clients in India as well as the Middle East, I’m proud to share news of Embitel’s rapid deployment solution (RDS) for the sector.
   We’ve spent months drawing on our work experience in the sector and developed a hybris-based RDS that supports the distinctive needs of the F&B industry. It’s a win-win scenario: we can implement efficiently and quickly, the client saves on time and cost.
   The interest and enquiries generated by this solution have most certainly been encouraging!
3. “A new milestone for us this year has been our first project for a financial services company. With the large number of products and services on offer, implementation for a financial services company presents unique challenges, and I take pride in our team’s success!
4. “We’ve recently expanded our repertoire by becoming an SAP Value Added Reseller (VAR). As a VAR, we now offer our clients the convenience of purchasing SAP licenses directly from us, instead of having to coordinate with the licenser and the service integrator.
5. “Our success comes from our clients’ satisfaction, so we’re constantly working to better ourselves and our offerings. Our teams are continuously pushing their limits, and have had some fine accomplishments this year, such as implementation of omnichannel retail through apps and webstores, integration of large database into apps etc.
   To better our processes, we’ve introduced an automation framework to automate testing and deployment. Efficiency in our processes translates to better outcomes for our clients, and we’re always striving towards that.

And now, we’re ready to set our sights higher and do better than ever in 2017!”