How eCommerce Will Ride the Wave of Digital Transformation

According to a report, a CAGR of 11.1% from 2018 to 2025 has been projected for the ecommerce global market, and this is expected to hit a market cap of more than $24 billion by 2025. While ecommerce isn’t a new phenomenon, factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic gave its growth and rapid assimilation a big boost.

However, the biggest enabler of ecommerce is digital transformation. As more customers turn to online shopping, it became expedient that businesses, especially those in retail, B2C and B2B sectors, must do something quickly about the situation.

Since marketing has become consumer-centric, you must go to the customer. However, the correct position isn’t just to go to the customer, but to also ensure a good customer experience.

eCommerce stores saw the need to leverage digital transformation to increase the provision of great international accessibility, enhance efficiency, ensure survival and remain relevant in the face of the increasing global competition.

What is digital transformation?

A lot of people have defined digital transformation in various ways, but an in-depth look at the different definitions shows they’re saying virtually the same thing. For instance, Salesforce defines digital transformation as the process of using digital technologies to create new business processes, culture and customer experience or modify the existing one to become relevant to business changes and market requirements.

WalkMe on the other hand says digital transformation is the reimagining of a business by applying new technologies and honing legacy systems to ensure better ways of conducting operations. As can be seen in the case of ecommerce, when migrating to digital transformation, the customer is driven by changing customer expectations.

Every organization has seen the need to improve customer experience as the only way to survive the stiff competition, and the best way to do this is to digitally transform.

Digital transformation allows you to re-evaluate how your organization utilizes technology, people and processes to achieve business goals and enhance customers’ satisfaction. Aside from that, you can create new business models and revenue streams for your ecommerce brand.

So how can ecommerce brands leverage digital transformation for better performances?

1. Ability to identify lag and map out new goals

You can’t embark on digital transformation without a strategy. To come up with a detailed plan, you must know the areas where you’re lagging and the new goals you want to achieve. This is one tenet of digital transformation that ecommerce brands can capitalize on.

You can use a digital transformation strategy to refocus your ecommerce business on how to increase profits and the eventual outcomes. This will, however, depend largely on your ability to improve customer experience. These are some areas you may want to focus on when you set out to re-design your entire business models:

• Improve your end-user experience to increase productivity and eliminate churn
• Identify digital transformation processes that will enable you to reduce operations costs and differentiate services
• Infrastructure and operations you need to improve to ensure cost-effectiveness and flexibility
• Deploying analytics to gain valuable insights for the improvement of business efficiencies and enhancing competitive advantage

2. Refocusing your customer experience strategy

The customer experience (CX) is the result of all your efforts to ensure your customers are satisfied. It determines the entire lifetime relationship of your customers with your ecommerce brand, every aspect of the customer journey such as customer service, social connection, addressing pain points and sentiments, product quality and post-purchase feedback services, contribute to customer experience.

What you must know is that your customers are only interested in how memorable these experiences are for them. It’s therefore important for you as an ecommerce brand to implement digital transformation projects that will ensure the best customer experience. This you can enhance by deploying customer experience management (CEM) tools for tracking and organizing all consumer interactions.

Such tools as part of your digital transformation initiatives will go a long way to ensure that you achieve improved customer experience. Some other technological advancements you can rely on include personalization tools and A/B testing tools, content management systems, recommendation tools, customer data platforms and usability tools.

This will help ecommerce brands to properly focus on customers’ needs. What your customer experience strategy must aim at is to bridge the gap between the desired customer experience and what your customers are actually experiencing.

3. Adopting new technology solutions

Digital transformation is about new ways of doing things to ensure better customer experience and revenue generation. One principal factor of digital transformation is adopting new technology solutions.

The success of your ecommerce business depends on customer satisfaction and with the present situation of the global market, you must think along the line of new technology solutions. You have indeed been utilizing some technology, but this is the time to integrate AI for sentiment and predictive analysis.

For human-machine collaboration and automation, you can deploy machine learning, IoT comes in for connected devices and blockchain for secured transactions. As you’re deploying new technology solutions, you must ensure that your cybersecurity measures are in full effect - you’ll be handling large volumes of data and that’s always a point of attraction for cybercriminals.

As part of digital transformation initiatives that can greatly enhance your ecommerce performance, cloud is evolving rapidly; you need this new technology solution for storage of data-at-rest and data-in-transit.

Conclusion

The different points explored above are ways digital transformation can positively impact ecommerce businesses. However, it depends on the leadership of any organization to determine what their customers need, what the competition is doing and what is applicable.

Whichever way you look at it, the survival of ecommerce platforms largely depends on a highly virtualized and technology-enabled ecosystem of services, which is what digital transformation is all about. 

The set of technology you choose depends on what attributes your brand holds strongly and on the digital culture of the entire company. Making the right decision means that your ecommerce brand will remain competitive.